‘Please keep kids safe from guns’: How Trump replied to a 7-year-old’s anguished letter
washingtonpost.com
excerpt:
The boy accused of firing the gun that ruined Ava’s life grew up in Townville and even attended the same elementary school, where teachers remembered him as a model student. But Jesse Osborne had found trouble when he left. In seventh grade, his family said in interviews last year, he was kicked out of middle school after bullies harassed him, and another student spotted a hatchet in his backpack.
That’s why he was at home on that Wednesday in late September 2016. For reasons that remain unclear, his mother said, Jesse retrieved a gun from his father’s nightstand, shot him in the back of the head and then, investigators allege, drove to the elementary school and opened fire.
On that day, Townville’s kids joined a group that now includes more than 150,000 students, attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools, who have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, according to a Post analysis of online archives, state and federal enrollment figures and news stories. That doesn’t count dozens of suicides, accidents and after-school assaults that have also exposed children to gunfire. |
