Introduction

A bad guy with a gun.

At 09:30am on the 14th December 2012, the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School locked the school's doors, a security precaution they took every day. At 09:35 a gunman shot his way through a glass panel and entered the school. By 09:40am twenty children and six adults were dead.

Surely something so horrific must be an isolated incident?

It wasn’t.

Since that day there have been active shooter incidents at almost 1000 schools and colleges across the US. In 2022 alone 47 people have been killed and 118 wounded by gunmen in American schools.

We’ve all seen the aftermath of the shootings, the grieving families, the marches, the vows of ‘never again’ yet it does happen, again and again.

America has a complicated relationship with guns, less than half of households claim to own one yet there are estimated to be 393 million firearms owned by American civilians. That’s a lot of guns.

So where did it all start and why does the threat of gun violence provoke some politicians to loosen gun restrictions rather than increase them?

It all starts and ends with a bad guy with a gun.

Producer: Lizzy McNeill Narrator: Alison Shultes Editor: Penny Murphy Studio Manager: Rod Farquhar

Thanks to the following for the use of their archive:

The Revolutionary Institute The Nation Rifle Association TED x Boulder, Aaron Stark. Tiktok Cassie Walton