In 1999, two students at Columbine High School with semi-automatic weapons stormed around the campus, murdering 12 students. Eight years later, the same nightmare is relived when Seung-Hui Cho from Virginia Technical Institute shoots and kills 27 students and five faculty members. The federal government responds to these massacres by passing laws which do not prevent teenagers from acquiring deadly weapons. I believe the federal government should take more action concerning violence in schools.
Some may argue that violence in schools is unpreventable; that bullying and school shootings will always be inevitable even if the government takes more action. Although this is true, the government can reduce the number of violent occurrences by passing stricter laws and enforcing them. It is the government’s responsibility to make sure that students are in check. By in check, I mean that government should strengthen school security, require schools to implement anti-bully laws just like the one in Arkansas, except on a federal level. By doing this, students would feel safer and more comfortable going to school and at school, and there would also be less school shootings like the ones at Columbine and Virginia Tech. Others may also argue that the federal government has taken steps to reduce juvenile violence in schools. On January 5, 2008, George Bush signed a law that forbids those declared convicts or mentally ill from purchasing guns. S.M. Smith, judge of the Arkansas judicial court, passed a law that forced all schools in the state to prevent bullying and physical abuse by implementing and enforcing anti-bully laws. Although these laws have been found to reduce the count of violent acts and incidents in schools, how is it that 12 percent of all students in the United States still manage to carry a deadly weapon to school?
Studies show that juvenile violence, which not only includes gang activities and shootings but also bullying and physical abuse, has gradually decreased in U.S. schools over the last 20 years. Despite the god news, school violence is still present on campuses around the country at unacceptable levels. Over a million students are threatened or injured with a weapon on school property at least once every year. That’s 15 percent of the student population in 2007 who fall victim to such violence, nearly the same percentage it was in 1993. It’s not a surprising amount, considering that over a 1,000,000 students take a deadly weapon to school at least once a month.

How these numbers manage to reach so high up in the charts just shows how much the government is really doing to help our schools. The few laws that the government has passed do little to dramatically reduce this number to acceptable levels. The federal government must take more action than they are now to prevent another school shooting from happening.