Sofia Plastunova, 16, SBHS junior, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Ukrainian SBHS Students Share Their Views on Gun Violence
School shootings are a tragic and devastating problem that have become all too common in many parts of the world, but particularly in the United States, where there have been 380 high-profile incidents over the past few decades.
Although school shootings happen in the U.S. at an alarming rate, they rarely happen elsewhere in the world. The K-12 School Shooting Database said that 80 or 90 percent of all the school shootings in the world happen in the U.S. Guns are so easily obtained that it’s easy to commit violent crime. In the US, including Florida, the ease of obtaining guns is influenced by a combination of federal and state laws, as well as cultural factors. In Florida, gun laws tend to be relatively permissive compared to some other states.
Furthermore, a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the number of physical attacks with weapons in K-12 public schools nearly doubled from 5,326 incidents during the 2015-16 school year to 10,472 incidents during the 2017-18 school year. Threats of an attack with a weapon also increased from 18,260 to 26,676 in 2022.
To compare there was only one case of school attack with a weapon in Ukraine. On September 6, in one of Ukraine’s schools, a girl wounded two teachers with a crossbow.
Severe SBHS students have recently arrived from Ukraine and are shocked by the gun violence. Sofia Plastunova is one of these students.
She came from Kyiv last year. She had heard about school shootings in the US, when she watched the news.
“When I came to American school we had a red code drill and for the first time I was a little scared, because I didn’t know what it was and in Ukraine we never had this,”- said Sofia Plastunova.
SBHS sophomore, Masha Shvedova,16, came last year to the United States, and said she is afraid to go to an American school and she feels scared knowing that anything could happen at any moment.
“In Ukraine, there are no school shootings because children cannot buy weapons.”
”I think school shootings happen in the USA so often because it is free to carry weapons,” said Shvedova.
SBHS, junior Maksym Shvedov, 17, who came from the city of Dnipro in Ukraine, three months ago and had heard a lot about the shootings in the US on social media.
“It was very creepy. When I first came to an American school and heard “code red”, I was very scared, because in Ukraine I had never heard anything like that,” said Shvedov.
He thinks the main reason is the lax gun control laws that shooting happen in the U.S. are. Which makes it easier for people, including minors, to get guns. Shvedov thinks increasing security in schools and creating mental health programs would help prevent this ,but it really sets down access to guns.
“I consider the possession of weapons by minors to be a very serious problem, because it leads to dangerous situations and injuries,” said Shvedov.