Gun violence in academic settings continues to be widespread, despite the increase in school security measures, the Associated Press reported Sunday.
On top of that, statistically the rate of school shootings has not changed since the mid-to-late '90s, experts told the AP.
Ronald Stephens, the executive director of the National School Safety Center, told the AP about 500 people have lost their lives due to school violence in the last 20 years.
The reason for the violence has been blamed on many factors, from violent video games to bad parenting, easy gun access and a disregard for human life, the AP reported. Halting the actual violence, however, has been difficult to do.
"I think that's one of the major problems. There are not easy answers," Stephens told the AP. "A line I often use is do everything you can, knowing you can't do everything,"
In 1997, a 14-year-old freshman at Heath High School in West Paducah open fired and killed three female students. Bill Bond, who was the school's principle at the time of the shooting, said when it comes to shootings, the perpetrators are always misguided males.
"You see troubled young men who are desperate and they strike out and they don't see that they have any hope," Bond told the AP.
Schools across the nation have implemented classroom lockdown drills, similar to fire drills, in response to the increase in shootings. Other schools have installed medical detectors, surveillance cameras and fences, the AP reported.
Law enforcement are also training officers to immediately confront a shooter, called "active shooter" policies.
"The goal is to stop it, from the law enforcement side, stop it as quickly as you can because we know with an active shooter if you don't stop it, more lives will be lost," Mo Candy, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, told the AP.
The training began after the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, when two gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves, the AP reported.
Yet the violence persists. There were 11 school shootings that occurred in 19 days during the month of January.
Arne Duncan, Education Secretary, brought the blame for the widespread school shootings back to easy gun access, a topic relentlessly debated in the nation's legislature.
"This is a societal problem," Duncan said, according to the AP. "It's not a school problem."
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