U.S. school shooting victims number rising over past decade: media

LONDON, May 30 (Xinhua) -- The number of people seriously injured or killed in school shooting incidents in the United States has been going up over the past decade, the British Sky News has reported.

Robb Elementary School mass shooting in Texas, which claimed 21 lives, refreshed the memory of another brutal American school gun attack shocking the world, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, which occurred nearly a decade ago and left 20 children and six staff members killed.

Tragically, these two incidents are far from isolated or unique, Sky News said on Thursday.

Quoting data from the U.S. Center for Homeland Defense and Security, the report said from 1970 to 2015, the average annual victim number for school shooting was just under 35 deaths or injuries.

Since 2016, the average has risen to more than 112, despite schools being shut for a period of time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year was the bloodiest on record, and 2022 will be even worse if shootings continue at the same rate as they have done this year so far, according to Sky News' analysis of the data.

In 2020, children in the U.S. were more likely to die from being shot with a firearm than they were from any other cause of death.

The result of another CNN research shows that there were 288 recorded school shooting incidents in the U.S. between 2009 and 2018, while 45 similar incidents from all the other 26 major countries combined.

The researchers found that the U.S. population is about 1 in 15 of the total of the 27 countries in the study, but was responsible for 13 out of every 15 school shooting incidents.