Irish Examiner view: US students have witnessed 404 school shootings since Columbine

370,000 young Americans experienced school shootings in the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre

Grief-stricken students praying in Littleton, Colorado on Wednesday, April 21, 1999, after the mass shooting at Columbine High School. Picture: Patrick Davison/Rocky Mountain News/AP

How many people have been shot on school premises in the US since the massacre in Columbine, Colorado, 25 years ago this weekend? According to the Washington Post, there have been 404 school shootings and 370,000 students have experienced gun violence since April 20, 1999. On that day, then US president Bill Clinton and Nato had just initiated a bombing campaign on Yugoslavia because of the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.

Incredibly, the US government does not track school shootings, so the Post figure is drawn from news articles, open-source databases, law-enforcement reports, and calls to schools and police departments. For this reason, a variety of figures might be headlined in the retrospectives of that terrible day.