The Atlantic

It’s the Guns

The outrage after Parkland set off a moral reckoning and awakening—there’s a simple explanation for school shootings.
Source: KTRK-TV ABC13 / AP

Americans of high-school age are 82 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than 15- to 19-year-olds in the rest of the developed world.

This stark discrepancy is often treated as a baffling fact, requiring some counterintuitive explanation. After today’s massacre in Texas, the state’s lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, that the problem may be that high schools have too many doors. “Had there been one

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