The year was not a month old when a 16-year-old allegedly opened fire in a cafeteria in Italy, Texas, injuring one of his classmates on January 22nd. It was the first shooting on a K–12 campus this year. One day later, in Benton, Kentucky, a 15-year-old student allegedly killed two of his classmates and injured 17 others. Over the next three weeks, there were shootings at or near Lincoln High School in Philadelphia, Salvador Castro Middle School in Los Angeles, and Oxon Hill High School in Maryland. And on February 14, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, allegedly killed 17 people and wounded more than a dozen others.
2018 has been indelibly marked by school shootings, and there was concern—at least at the outset—that it would be a year defined by a failure to address the problem, which several political figures, mostly Democrats, identified as access to guns. There had been hundreds of gun laws passed since a gunman killed 26 people, including elementary-school students, in Newtown, Connecticut, and most of them had expanded access to guns. But according to the Giffords Law Center, a gun-violence-prevention advocacy group, “the gun-safety movement experienced a tectonic shift in 2018.”
The law center tracked 1,628 firearm bills in 2018 and compiled a year-end review, which was released earlier this month. In total, 26 states and the District of Columbia enacted 67 new “gun safety” laws. “The growing number of mass shootings and domestic violence homicides, as well as the devastation wrought by guns in urban communities, has culminated in a surging pressure to address this epidemic,” the report reads.
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