Texas GOP congressman laments ‘difficult’ nature of predicting ‘anomalous’ school shootings

By Shawna Mizelle and Andrew Millman, CNN

Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw on Sunday lamented the “difficult” nature of predicting American school shootings given their often “random and unexpected” nature.

“They’re very difficult to build a pattern behind. It’s not like criminal activity, which you can target and prevent through law enforcement. This is harder,” the Texas congressman told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Crenshaw’s comments come on the heels of a tragic shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, that left three 9-year-old children and three adults dead. The attack was the 19th shooting at an American school or university in 2023 in which at least one person was wounded, according to a CNN count.

It was also the deadliest since the May 2022 attack on an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 dead. There have been 42 K-12 school shootings since Uvalde, where a gunman fired 100 or so rounds before police breached a classroom more than an hour later and killed the attacker to end the siege.

The tragedies have left children, their parents and school leaders struggling with how to stop and handle mass shootings, even though such incidents remain rare and schools are still quite safe.

“I think we do need to have a real conversation about what is happening here. What I have long called this is sort of social contagion that’s occurred ever since Columbine,” Crenshaw said Sunday, asserting that, “This never happened before Columbine, but then Columbine happened and it was very famous and it sort of opened the door for very, very disturbed people, whoever they might be, to go in and commit these kind of dramatic, randomized shootings as their outlet for their own evil and crazy.”

Two students killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999 in one of the worst mass shootings in US history.

Pressed by Bash on prioritizing solutions for the issue, Crenshaw called for “a minimum of two armed guards at every school in America from here on out.”

Crenshaw, who received campaign donations from the National Rifle Association of America Political Victory Fund, refused to call for any federal restrictions on firearms, saying “You’re not going to get rid of guns, and I’m not going to say that people can — that law-abiding citizens cannot defend themselves anymore and exercise their Second Amendment rights and think that’s going to stop mass violence.”

“People will figure out other ways to commit mass violence,” Crenshaw said.

Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year. That’s about five children lost for every 100,000 children in the United States. In no other comparable country are firearms within the top four causes of mortality among children, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.

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