Incidentally, the vast majority of the perpetrators are male by our count, females instigated only four of the 101 school shootings that have occurred worldwide since 1974. In the U.S., the rate of such extreme killings has declined only slightly in the past four years from an uptick in the late 1990s. My colleagues and I have detected a sharp jump over the past decade in the number of such school shootings worldwide-excluding gang-related incidents-that were intended to kill at least two people or a school official. Yet some of these killings now display a new quality: they are premeditated and choreographed, down to the weapons used and the clothes worn. schools has declined since the 1990s-a trend that jibes with the declining rate of homicides carried out by juveniles across the globe. The overall number of homicides committed at U.S. After police arrived, Cho put a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.
Marching through the building, he shot randomly at students and teachers, injuring 37 people before ending his own life.Īnd the deadliest school rampage so far occurred on April 16, when a 23-year-old college student named Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 25 others on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg. Three months later in the small town of Emsdetten, Germany, 18-year-old Sebastian Bosse posted a video message on the Internet: "I can't f–kin' wait until I can shoot every mother-f–kin' last one of you." He then drove to his former school, armed with out-of-date rifles and homemade pipe bombs. Earlier Castillo had murdered his father in the family home. It was Castillo's second exploit involving firearms that day. When the police arrived, Alvaro Castillo gave up without a struggle. On August 30, 2006, a 19-year-old youth, clad in a trench coat, drove into the parking lot of his former high school in Hillsborough, N.C.-and began firing.