Page 21 - Campus Security & Life Safety, September/October 2022

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them, gunshots pierced the air, and an ordinary Friday plunged instantly into a horrific nightmare. Without hesitating, the young students ran as fast as they could, straight for the stairs. When they got to the exit, a staff member screamed, “Get back inside, there’s a shooter!” They sprinted back up the stairs to a classroom, where they huddled together on the floor for hours, fearing for their lives.
Those students crossing the elevated bridge at that moment had no idea of the crosshairs of a rifle traced across them as they walked. A man hidden in a fifth-floor apartment across the street had them lined up in his sights. We know this because the shooter posted a video from his rifle scope on the Internet immediately after the shoot- ing. While he squeezed the trigger, his auto- matic rifle jumped wildly as he fired 60 shots indiscriminately in just 18 seconds. Win- dows on both sides of the bridge were shat- tered, yet by some miracle, only one student on the bridge was wounded. A former police officer working school security, a parent, and a bystander were also hit. Nobody died, and without four deaths, this heinous attack was not a “mass shooting.”
The shooter had six weapons, including three “AR-style” rifles, in his darkened fifth-
floor apartment. It remains unclear why he stopped shooting and committed suicide. As he waited for police to arrive, he updated the Edmund Burke School’s Wikipedia page to make an entry for his attack. The shooter had no known relation to the school; thus, the Secret Service will not study this case as a “school shooting” for their next report.
Sniper attacks are a rarely practiced sce- nario, yet Edmund Burke is one of just six times a long-distance shooter has targeted school children since Brenda Spender shot 11 people at Cleveland Elementary in San Diego in 1979. Ten years later, 37 students and staff were shot by a sniper at a different Cleveland Elementary in Stockton, Calif.
Without a comprehensive database using a broad definition of “school shootings,” attacks like this wouldn’t be recorded and analyzed. Arbitrarily ignoring a significant share of gun violence, both the harrowing and mundane, is a costly mistake for our stu- dents and our future.
David Riedman is the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database, a Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida, and a national advocate for using data-driven solutions to make schools safer in every community.
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