Why are kids shooting other kids at school?

[MineralMan]

38. Because they're angry and have access to firearms.

However, how many kids are doing this? How often does this happen? Has it happened at a school in your community? This kind of school shooting is very rare. If you think about just how many schools there are in this country, and then take school shootings by students, you can find the percentage of schools where such a thing has happened in, say, the past five years. I haven't calculated it, but it's very, very small.

What has changed since the availability of a 24/7 news system, along with the Internet, is that we hear about each one as a national event. School shootings happened before we had such instant access, too, but they were local news stories, maybe making it to statewide status. Today, it seems like they're more frequent, because we hear about every one of them. The reality is that there are actually fewer such school shootings and the numbers are going down.

Each such shooting is a terrible tragedy, and we should be doing everything we can to prevent them from happening. But, they're still rare events, unpredictable, and generally one-time acts of rage by kids with some issue that causes that rage. Firearms have always been available to kids. My father had quite a number of them, which he used for hunting. I could have gotten one at any time after the age of about 12. That was the cases in many, households when I grew up in the 50s and 60s. There were school shootings then, too, but you only heard about the ones that happened somewhere nearby, not ones that happened on the other side of the country.