Five school shootings across the country already this new year

HOUSTON (KTRK) -- Just over a month after the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Connecticut, news of shots fired at a local campus struck a new kind of fear across the community. But sadly, school shootings are not all that uncommon.

As the nation still grieves the children and faculty members who died last month in Newtown, Connecticut, Tuesday's shooting at the Lone Star College North Harris campus is not the first, but the fifth time someone has brought a gun on an American campus and opened fire since that day.

Just one week ago, two people died at Hazard Community and Technical College in Hazard, Kentucky. And if we go back to perhaps the most notorious shooting of our time, the massacre at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, where 12 students and a teacher died before the gunmen turned their weapons on themselves, then Tuesday's shooting in north Harris County is the 49th school shooting in the United States since that Colorado massacre in 1999.

The violence has erupted all over the nation, from Colorado to Connecticut to Michigan and right here in Texas.

Even the very religious have not been safe. On October 2, 2006, a gunman killed five Amish girls before killing himself in their school.

Six months later, Seung-Hui Cho opened fire at Virginia Tech University, killing 32.

And 10 months after that, on Valentine's Day of 2008, violence hit another college campus -- Northern Illinois University. Five people died that day, and 21 were hurt.

Twenty-one more school shootings happened between then and the day of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School. In Arizona and Alabama, Colorado again and Austin, Texas, to California and Utah.

And then came December 14, 2012, when 20 first graders were murdered in their classroom in Newtown. Six adults died, too.

It was a shocking display of violence that left a nation grieving and sparked a debate over gun control.

Between then and Tuesday, more bullets flew in California, Detroit, Michigan, and Missouri.

To put this in perspective, school violence is nothing new. The first recorded school shooting in the United States happened back in 1764, called the Enoch Brown School massacre, a teacher and nine students were shot and killed.

And there are dozens of school shootings that happened between 1764 and the Columbine High School massacre.
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local, adela uchida

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