There Have Been Over 200 School Shooting Incidents Since The Sandy Hook Massacre

Progress on gun violence prevention policy has been steady at the state level, but nearly nonexistent at the federal level.

There have been over 200 school shooting incidents ― an average of nearly one a week ― since the horrifying morning when 20-year-old Adam Lanza marched into Sandy Hook Elementary School and did the unthinkable.

Four years ago today, Lanza shot and killed his mother in her home in Newtown, Connecticut, before making his way to the school and opening fire, leaving 20 children and six staff members dead.

According to data from Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks gun violence and other shootings on school grounds, there have been at least 94 gun-related deaths and more than 156 people injured as a result of more than 200 school shooting incidents since Sandy Hook. This doesn’t include plots that thankfully didn’t come to fruition, like the one police stopped this week in Oklahoma, when they arrested a heavily armed 13-year-old girl who had reportedly threatened her classmates.

Many believed the Sandy Hook massacre, now the third-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, would mark a turning point in the struggle against gun violence and lead to stricter gun laws. Yet while gun violence prevention organizations say there’s been steady progress at the state level, Congress has consistently failed to pass federal gun control legislation.

“I think there’s really no better way to read the temperature of the people and where this movement is when it comes down to actual voters than by looking at state-level progress,” Brendan Kelly, a spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told The Huffington Post.

A total of 19 states — seven of them since Sandy Hook ― have closed the private sale background check loophole, which allows unlicensed “private” vendors to sell firearms at gun shows and online without requiring background checks.

But state-level progress isn’t enough, said Shannon Watts, founder of the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a nonprofit created in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. The organization has since joined forces with Everytown to become the largest gun violence prevention organization in the country.

“What is needed is a federal solution, because this is a national crisis,” Watts told HuffPost on Tuesday.

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