Protestors marched against gun violence at City Hall in Los Angeles in 2022 following an elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers, and other mass shootings. New research shows that a quarter of teachers in the U.S. last year reported a gun-related lockdown in their schools. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo
April 12 (UPI) — A quarter of teachers in the United States say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last year, and more than half worry about a shooting at their school, new data from the Pew Research Center show.
The study comes amid a record high in school shootings. There were 83 reported in 2023, a quarter of a century after a mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado thrust the issue to the forefront of the national psyche, and began a trend of similar incidents that have become almost commonplace.
Gun control issues will be an issue in the 2024 election campaigns.
According to the report, 23% of teachers said they experienced a lockdown in the 2022-23 school year over a gun or suspicion of a gun at their place of work, while 15% said it happened once during the year and 8% reported it happening more than once.
“A third of high school teachers reported going into a gun-related lockdown, 22% of middle school teachers and 16% of teachers in elementary school teachers,” the report continued.
Teachers in urban schools were more likely to report gun-related lockdowns, it said, with 19% of suburban teachers and 20% of teachers in rural schools reported going into lockdown.
Nearly 40% of teachers say their schools have done a poor or fair job training them and providing the resources they need to respond to an active shooter. Fewer than a third say they have been given excellent or very good training, and 30% say their schools have done a good job preparing them.
Only 21% of teachers in urban areas say they are least likely to know how to respond in the event of an active shooter, compared to about a third in suburban and rural schools.
“Teachers who have police officers or armed security stationed in their school are more likely than those who don’t to say their school has done an excellent or very good job preparing them for a potential active shooter (36% vs. 22%),” the report said.
Overall, 56% of teachers say they have police officers or armed security stationed at their school, with 64% of those at rural schools and 56% at suburban schools reporting this, compared with 48% in urban schools.
“Only 3% of teachers say teachers and administrators at their school are allowed to carry guns in school,” according to the report. “This is slightly more common in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2020 than in school districts where a majority of voters cast ballots for Joe Biden (5% vs.