Where school shooters get their guns

Eleven-year-old Andrew Golden stole seven guns from his grandfather before opening fire on classmates outside Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., in 1998.

Fifteen-year-old T.J. Solo-mon broke into a locked case and used his stepfather's hunting rifles to shoot six schoolmates in Conyers, Ga., in 1999.

A 6-year-old who shot a first-grader a little over a year ago in Mount Morris Township, Mich., found the loaded semiautomatic lying under a blanket in the house where he was staying.

As the number of school shootings continues to grow, topped by last week's tragedy in San Diego, several patterns have emerged: The shooters were often bullied. Many told classmates about their plans ahead of time. And - as in the case of alleged 15-year-old shooter Andy Williams - the vast majority got their guns from their own homes or that of a relative.

As a result, new questions are being raised about the presence of firearms in the home, and the potential moral and legal liability of parents when their kids use those guns to kill.

"We are a society in love with our guns," says Robert Meyers, a professor of anthropology and public health at Alfred University in New York. "We need to get a grip on how we are socializing our children into that, as well as examine what are the responsibilities of parents in restricting access to weapons in the home."

Kids' access to firearms is one of the factors examined in a study of school shootings by the US Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC). According to the survey, two-thirds of the 41 students involved in 37 school-shooting incidents since 1974 got their guns from their own home or that of a relative. In some cases, the guns had been gifts to the attackers from their own parents.

Statistics of gun ownership

The sheer statistics of gun ownership in America are staggering. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence estimates there are 192 million guns in private hands (65 million handguns, 49 million shotguns, 70 million rifles), of which handguns account for 80 percent of all firearm homicides.

The guns are not evenly distributed. Fewer than 10 million individuals own well over half the total figure, with 34 percent of gun owners possessing four or more firearms.

But to many, the issue of how those guns are kept is far more sobering.

The American Journal of Public Health last summer said 43 percent of American homes with both guns and children had at least one unlocked firearm - a gun that was not locked away or had no trigger lock. And nearly 10 percent of all gun owners keep their firearms unlocked and loaded.

Thus, a total of 13 percent of American homes with children and guns (1.4 million homes with 2.6 million children) store firearms in a manner accessible to children.

"What has changed in America is availability of guns," says Laurence Steinberg, a criminologist at Temple University in Philadelphia. "In earlier generations, the same sets of problems leading youths to commit these atrocious killings would lead to fist or knife fights. Now they have access to handguns and automatic weapons so the crimes they commit have escalated out of control."

Changes in society

But to blame school shootings on the easy accessibility of guns is to ignore a whole range of societal factors that led the perpetrators to act out in the first place, say others. And in many cases, the shooters might have found a way to obtain a weapon, regardless of whether their parents had one in the home.

Gun groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) hold that changes in society are responsible for the increase in such events over earlier decades.

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