Shootings at schools take startling dimensions

GUNS AND BOOKS: A high school in Southern Finland made headlines last month, when an 18-year old boy killed seven children and their principal.

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New Delhi: India is shocked by a school shooting where an eighth grade boy killed his classmates with his father’s gun. However, across the world and especially in the United States, students and guns seem to increasingly go hand in hand, very often with tragic consequences.

A high school in Southern Finland made headlines last month, when an 18-year old boy killed seven children and their principal. Just hours earlier, he posted a video on YouTube predicting a massacre. However, deadly campus shootings are by no means a European phenomenon.

In October this year a 14-year-old student at a Cleveland high school shot and injured two students and two teachers before he killed himself.

The same month, last year a 32-year-old gunman shot dead at least five girls at an Amish school in Pennsylvania, before killing himself

In September 2006, a teenager killed the headmistress of his school in Wisconsin and in November 2005, a student in Tennessee shot dead an assistant principal and wounded two other administrators.

The same year in March, a Minnesota schoolboy killed nine, and then shot himself dead. In May 2004, four people were injured in a school shooting in Maryland. The list of shoot out at schools does not end here.

In April 2003, a teenager shot dead his teacher at a Pennsylvania school and in March 2001, a pupil opened fire at a school in California, killing two students. And the year before, a six-year-old girl was shot dead by classmate in Michigan.

New additions to the list are making the list never ending. At least 10 other major school shootings have been documented in the United States between 1997 and 1999, however, unarguably the worst tragedy in US history took place in April this year, when a gunman killed 32 and injured 21 others.

The Virginia tech massacre even eclipsed the April 1999 Columbine High School shooting, where two students killed 12 and wounded 23 others.

In the US, every school shooting prompts a new wave of debate over gun control laws. However, the question that looms large is whether juvenile crime has taken on a frightening new dimension.