The Weekly is a rundown of news by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission highlighting the week’s top news stories from the public square and providing commentary on the big issues of our day.

5 Facts About School Shootings in America

On Wednesday, a teenage gunman opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 and wounding at least 14 others. The shooting is the most deadly attack on a high school campus since the massacre at Columbine High School in 1999. 

Here are five things you should know about school shootings in America:

1. There is no official consensus on how many school shootings have occurred in America because there is no consensus on what counts as a “school shooting” for the purposes of data collection. Some databases frequently cited by the media, such as the one created by Everytown, include unintentional discharges of firearms, suicides, incidents on school buses, and shootings that occur near a school campus or parking lot. Even if we limit the data to “mass shooting” or “mass killings” the numbers remain unclear. The FBI does not officially define “mass shooting” and does not use the term in Uniform Crime Report records. And it was only in 2012, after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that Congress officially defined “mass killing” as “three or more killings in a single incident.”  

2. An unofficial tally (these numbers should be considered minimums, rather than a complete list) finds that during the nineteenth century, 24 people were killed in school, including 14 children. In the twentieth century 256 were killed including 116 children (of these, 14 were killed unintentionally; 11 died by suicide, one by the execution of a suicide pact; one by Russian Roulette; one was an infant and one was a child in the womb of a student). In the twenty-first century (not including 2018 and the latest shooting), 227 were killed including 90 children (12 were killed unintentionally, and two school-girl friends died together by the execution of a suicide-pact).

3. The highest casualty toll at an elementary school was 27 deaths and two injuries during the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. The highest casualty toll at a high school (prior to the Parkland shooting) was 15 deaths and 27 injuries during the Columbine High School shooting in Columbine, Colorado in 1999. The highest casualty toll on a college campus was 32 killed and 17 injured during the Virginia Tech shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007.

4. The U.S. Secret Service released a report in 2002 on incidents of targeted school violence that occurred in the United States from December 1974 through May 2000. The study defined an incident of targeted school violence as any incident where a current student or recent former student attacked someone at his or her school with lethal means (e.g., a gun or knife), and where the student attacker purposefully chose his or her school as the location of the attack. The report found that in almost three-quarters of the incidents, the attacker killed one or more students, faculty, or others at the school (73 percent) and that more than one-half of the attacks occurred during the school day (59 percent). Almost all of the attackers were current students at the school where they carried out their attacks (95 percent) with only two attackers being former students (five percent). All of the incidents of targeted school violence were committed by boys or young men (100 percent) and in the vast majority of the incidents, the attackers carried out the attack alone (eight percent).

5. The Secret Service study also found that, aside from being all boys, there is no accurate or useful “profile” of students who engaged in targeted school violence. The attackers ranged in age from 11 to 21, with most attackers between the ages of 13 and 18 at the time of the attack (85 percent). Three-quarters of the attackers were white (76 percent) while one-quarter came from other racial and ethnic backgrounds, including African American (12 percent), Hispanic (five percent), Native Alaskan (two percent), Native American (two percent), and Asian (two percent). Almost two-thirds came from two-parent families (63 percent), living either with both biological parents (44 percent) or with one biological parent and one stepparent (19 percent). Many of the attackers were doing well in school at the time of the attack, generally receiving As and Bs in their courses (41 percent) and very few were known to be failing in school (five percent). The largest group of attackers for whom information was available appeared to socialize with mainstream students or were considered mainstream students themselves (41 percent), though almost three-quarters felt persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked, or injured by others prior to the incident (71 percent). Most of the attackers had never been in trouble or rarely were in trouble at school (63 percent) and fewer than one-fifth had been diagnosed with mental health or behavior disorder prior to the attack (17 percent).

This week on ERLC podcasts: Daniel Darling talks to U.S. Senator James Lankford about his life in government and how he maintain his spiritual disciplines in a demanding, public life. On the Capitol Conversations podcast, the ERLC’s D.C. team runs down what to expect in a week of rare activity in the Senate: an open amendment and debate process on immigration reform. On the Countermoves podcast, Andrew Walker interviews Baptist political theologian and IX Marks editorial director Jonathan Leeman on the subject of the church’s political identity and how Baptist ecclesiology produces a unique contribution to religious liberty. And on the ERLC podcast, Daniel Akin talks about how a strong marriage empowers you to be strong parents. 

Other Issues

American Culture

Trump pitches plan to replace food stamps with food boxes
Helena Bottemiller Evich, Politico

The Trump administration is proposing to save billions in the coming years by giving low-income families a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month instead of food stamps.

Study links 4/20 to an increase in deadly car crashes
Stephen Johnson, Big Think

A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that drivers in the U.S. faced a 12 percent greater risk of dying in a car crash on April 20 over the past 25 years. The likely explanation? Impaired drivers crashing cars.

Christianity and Culture

FEMA funds for disaster-stricken churches now law
Tom Strode, Baptist Press

Churches and other houses of worship now have the assurance of federal law that they may receive disaster relief funds.

International Issues

U.S. pastor among ChinaAid top 10 persecution cases
Diana Chandler,, Baptist Press

A Virginia pastor interrogated and evicted from China during a discipleship seminar he led in the nation is among ChinaAid's top 10 cases of Christian persecution there in 2017.

Gay marriage reversed in Bermuda
Diana Chandler, Baptist Press

The Bermuda Legislature has outlawed same-sex marriage only months after the Bermuda Supreme Court approved such unions there, making the island the first nation to reverse gay marriage.

250 Child Soldiers in South Sudan Begin Recovery with World Vision
Kate Shellnutt, Christianity Today

With the help of World Vision, more than 250 South Sudanese children will have the chance to return to school, reunite with their families, and receive counseling after years of being forced to serve as soldiers and domestic workers during their country’s civil war.

Religious Discrimination in Canada
Derek Ross, Public Discourse

Canada takes pride in being a progressive nation, but our government is relying on the same tired excuses for religious discrimination that the United States Supreme Court dismissed more than fifty years ago.

Religious Liberty

Trump Should Withdraw Radical Nominee Who Would Oppose Religious Liberty
Sen. Mike Lee, The Daily Signal

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may seem like an unlikely threat to religious liberty and the institution of marriage. After all, the federal agency was created to combat workplace discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

T-shirts now in religious liberty battle's spotlight
Art Toalston & Kentucky Today Staff, Baptist Press

Blaine Adamson, owner of Hands On Originals apparel company, has become another figure in the battle over religious liberty for refusing to print T-shirts for a gay pride festival because of his Christian beliefs.

DOJ Imposes More Oversight On US Attorneys In Religious Liberty Cases
Howard Friedman, Religion Clause

In order to insure compliance with a memo on protection of religious liberty issued last October (see prior posting), DOJ's new procedures instruct U.S. Attorneys to appoint a contact person to carry out the following instructions.

Sexuality Issues

Let’s Ban Porn
Ross Douthat, New York Times

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine there is a long profile of a new kind of pedagogy unique to our particular stage of civilization. It’s called “porn literacy,” and it involves explaining to young people whose sexual coming-of-age is being mediated by watching online gangbangs that actually hard-core pornography is not an appropriate guide to how the sexes should relate.

The Department of Education Will No Longer Investigate Transgender Student Bathroom Complaints
Molly Olmstead, Slate

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education told BuzzFeed News that the agency will no longer investigate complaints from transgender students barred from using school bathrooms that match their gender identity. This comes after a year of uncertainty about how the Trump administration was officially handling transgender issues in public schools.