The recent rash of student-involved shootings in North Texas has left families rattled and some school districts scrambling to assuage them. Yet this spate of violence hasn’t drawn national attention, in part because these shootings appear to be targeted, involving only a couple of students. One student at Arlington ISD’s Bowie High School was killed, but the victims in the other two incidents in Dallas are expected to recover, including two students injured off campus in a drive-by shooting.

Parents and students in the affected districts are owed detailed answers about how students were able to sneak guns into school. But while heightened safety measures have become necessary, these shootings should also drive home the point that simply “hardening” campuses can’t fix a culture of violence fueled by easy access to guns and an addiction to social media.

School violence is just a fact of American life, almost as commonplace as tests, football and prom. In the 2021-22 school year, 61% of public schools recorded at least one physical fight or attack without a weapon. About 4% of schools — that’s 3,700 campuses — reported at least one attack with a weapon.

That data comes from the latest federal survey on school crime and safety by the National Center for Education Statistics. It captures only violence that happens in school, though some conflicts follow students off campus.

Gun use in school is also on the rise, even as it remains rare. Everytown, a gun-safety advocacy group, logged 51 incidents of guns discharged on school grounds across the U.S. in 2013, the first year it began tracking that data. Last year, it recorded 137 incidents and 42 deaths.

Things are looking bad this year, too. As of last week, Everytown’s database had tallied 63 incidents of gunfire and 24 dead as a result.

School fights are not what they were when we were growing up. Many of them are filmed with cellphones and often end up on TikTok or Snapchat, where they are shared for social currency.

Meanwhile, lawmakers at the state and federal level have not just resisted passing sensible gun-safety laws — think universal background checks — but they have also made it easier for anyone to carry a firearm. Texas joined several other states in passing permitless carry three years ago.

Texas state legislators have pushed through a spate of school safety regulations in recent years. Among the requirements are having an armed guard at every school, installing panic buttons in classrooms and training certain district employees to recognize students who need mental health support.

Texans can keep trying to fortify their schools even more, but the violence won’t stop at the school doors. We have to send our children out into the world, and we cannot enclose them in a protective bubble. We’ll continue to fail them as long as we focus on hardening schools while leaving untouched this country’s culture of violence and a gun-rights absolutism that enable each other in a nasty loop.

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