Kids in Crosshairs: Sniper Attacks on Schools

On a Friday afternoon, a group of teens crossed a glass sky-bridge connecting buildings at the Edmund Burke School, an elite prep school in Washington, DC. Students walk across this bridge hundreds of times daily, but suddenly, an explosion of glass plunged their ordinary Friday headlong into a panicked 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.

The students crossing the elevated bridge at that moment had no idea the crosshairs of a rifle traced across them as they walked. A man hidden in a 5th 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 to the teeming primordial cesspool of the internet, 4Chan, immediately after the shooting. While he squeezed the trigger, his automatic rifle jumped wildly as he fired 60 shots indiscriminately in just 18 seconds. Windows on both sides of the bridge were shattered, yet by some miracle, no students were hit.

A sniper is a gunman who fires from a hidden position at unsuspecting targets in the distance. Our training to run, hide, or fight during a shooting is useless in this scenario. One cannot outrun a sniper. Pedestrians on an open street don’t have anywhere to hide. We can’t fight an attacker firing from the window of a high-rise apartment. A sniper attack on a school, like we saw in Washington, DC on Friday, is a worst-case scenario.

The shooter had 6 weapons, including three “AR-style” rifles, in his darkened 5th floor apartment. After shooting at the school, he fired downwards at the street, wounding four pedestrians. It remains unclear why he stopped shooting. As he waited for police to arrive, he updated the Edmund Burke School’s Wikipedia page to make an entry for his attack. In the days prior to the shooting, he’d edited Wikipedia pages for the NYC Subway attack that happened a week prior, the Parkland school shooting in 2018, and biography page of David Hogg (a Parkland survivor). He also made edits to the page for Wheaton High School (located on the Maryland side of the DC suburbs), his alma mater. While text of these edits has not been released, on his Wikipedia profile, he described himself as an “AR-15 aficionado”.

When police arrived at his door, he killed himself. Most mass shooters are suicidal and plan to die during their attack. No details have been released to explain why he targeted a school that he didn’t attend and had no clear connection to.

As horrific as this situation is, it’s probably even more shocking that this unprovoked rampage was not the first sniper attack on a K-12 school in the United States. Here’s a concise chronology for anyone making the mistake of thinking something like this could only happen once.

January 29th, 1979: Cleveland Elementary School, San Diego, CA

An adult woman fired from her bedroom window at children outside the school across the street. She killed 2 and wounded 9 others before a standoff ensued with police. Mentally ill and delusional, her twisted justification for shooting the students was because “she didn’t like Mondays” and wanted to “liven up the day”. She abused alcohol and drugs, as well as being both depressed and suicidal. Her parole has been denied twice and she remains in prison.

February 24th, 1984: 49th Street Elementary School, Los Angeles, CA

An adult man fired a rifle from the second story window of his house at children on the playground of a school across the street. A student and staff member died, 10 were wounded, and 100 required formal psychiatric treatment after the attack. The shooter committed suicide during a standoff with police. His violent tendencies and struggle with mental illness were well known to his family and police. He’d been recently arrested, and his gun was seized following a shooting during a domestic dispute, but the gun had been returned when charges were dropped. Police had also been called when he’d fired shots at airplanes flying overhead, yet charges were never filed.

January 17th, 1989: (A different) Cleveland Elementary School, Stockton, CA

A homeless man with a history of mental illness set a car jammed with fireworks ablaze next to a school. As students evacuated, he fired 106 shots at them with a semi-automatic rifle, killing 5 and injuring 32. After 3 minutes, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol.

March 25th, 1998: Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, AR

Two male students, 13 and 11, pulled the fire alarm and took aim at their fellow students as they evacuated the school. The two boys were hidden in the bushes along a wooded area adjacent to the school. They killed 5 and injured 10 others. Students and teachers heard the gunshots and thought they were firecrackers that were part of the drill. The boys had 9 weapons and 2,000 rounds of ammunition that were stolen from their grandparent’s house. They also had a stolen getaway car packed with camping gear, but they got stuck in the mud near the school and were arrested. Both were sentenced to juvenile detention until age 21, the maximum penalty available.

October 7th, 2002: Benjamin Tasker Middle School, Bowie, MD

A 13 year old student was shot in the chest while walking into the school building. The young man was critically injured but survived. The student was a victim of the serial “DC sniper” attacks around the Washington, DC area that killed 17 people and wounded 9 others.

So What?

Each shooting, mass shooting or instance of the nihilistic oxymoron of “everyday gun violence” is tragic. This week’s sniper attack on the Edmund Burke School in DC had all the right components to be the next Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Parkland. It had all the needed elements — pre-planning, multiple weapons, ammo, elevated position, surprise, vulnerable targets — to be one of the worst shootings ever. If the shooter had better aim, #EBStrong would be the next hashtag to punctuate a generation already pockmarked by gun violence and its accordant trauma. With only 4 wounded, most people didn’t offer “thoughts and prayers” on social media, or even care what happened.

This increasingly violent environment poses a threat to children across the country, and policymakers need to recognize the danger. More guns do not make schools safer. CCTV cameras and lockdown drills don’t protect children from snipers. We can’t, as much as we wish we could, hope away the next act of sudden mass violence. In the context of mass shootings, the latest school shooting was barely worth our attention, and because of that, we should be absolutely outraged.

David Riedman is Ph.D. student in criminal justice at the University of Central Florida and the co-founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database. Follow @k12ssdb on twitter.