Opinion Columnists | Nabbing gunslinging kids has become America’s lesson plan | Fred Grimm

In a nation awash with firearms, confiscating Daddy’s Sig Sauer before Junior teaches impudent classmates a thing or two has become a necessary addition to the K-12 curriculum. Teachers once concerned with English, math or science are now tasked with intercepting disaffected wannabe gunslingers before they shoot up the joint.

Scores of guns are seized each year in South Florida schools; hundreds in the state, thousands in America. Broward schools kicked off this semester with the discovery of a loaded, 9 mm Glock in the backpack of a 15-year-old knucklehead at Coconut Creek High School.

Welcome back to school, children. This is not a drill.

The phenomenon is not limited to high schoolers. Elementary school kids are packing heat. Two years ago, a 10-year-old brought a pistol to Walker Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale. (Last year, teachers in Corpus Christi, Texas discovered a loaded pistol in the backpack of a 4-year-old student.)

Earlier this month, the Washington Post attempted to quantify gun seizures in American schools by reviewing media reports. The Post counted 1,150 newspaper and TV accounts of guns seized in kindergarten-through-12th grade schools last year. That comes to six firearms each day.

But the Post cautioned that those 1,150 media-documented instances were considerably fewer than the actual number, given that many school districts don’t report gun incidents unless they erupt in violence. Even if schools faithfully reported ordinary seizures, local media might consider a firearm found in a kid’s backpack too commonplace to be newsworthy. Unless the child starts shooting.

But the Post was able to obtain enough data from 47 major large school districts to conclude that student gun seizures have risen a startling 79% over the last five years. “In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings,” the Post reported.

Here’s another frightening finding. About 4% of high school students surveyed by the National Center for Educational Statistics admit they had carried a weapon to school at least once in the previous month.

Florida data on gun seizures is limited, but last year, the Naples Daily News reported that Florida school officials had collected 1,151 weapons — both guns and knives — from students in the 2020-21 school year, up from 983 the previous year.

In the 2007-2008 school year, the most recent report I could locate from Broward County schools, school officials commandeered 503 weapons (up from 315 the previous school year).

None of this is all that surprising. In a nation with more firearms than people (estimates range from 350 million to 400 million), it’s statistically inevitable that guns show up in alarming settings — schools, colleges, churches, bars. Last year, the TSA intercepted 134 pistols while scanning passengers at Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport.

School confiscations jibe with another statistical horror spawned by American’s cowboy gun culture. (An admittedly unfair label, given that sensible civic leaders of Wild West towns like Tombstone, Dodge City, Abilene and Deadwood required visitors to stow their firearms at the sheriff’s office, according to Smithsonian Magazine.)

Researchers with Boston Children’s Hospital published a study in the journal Pediatrics on Oct. 5 that found gun-related deaths among children had surged by 87% between 2011 to 2021. In 2021, 2,590 children died from gunshot wounds, compared to 1,311 in 2011, making firearms the leading cause of juvenile fatalities in America.

Nationwide, one in 47 school-age children — 1.1 million students — attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year. Again, the actual number of kids sharing the schoolhouse with armed classmates would be much, much higher.

Presumably, most kids caught smuggling guns into classrooms were not bent on homicide. Maybe they wanted to impress their buddies or intimidate bullies. Maybe, like their adult counterparts, firearms lent them a sense of empowerment.

But innocent intent is no sure bet in America. Education Week has counted 33 school shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths so far this year, after 51 in 2022, 35 in 2021 and 10 in 2020. It’s a gruesome trend.

If drugs were killing these children, we’d be hellbent to punish the dealers. But for child-on-child gun killings, we’d need to lock-up thousands of negligent parents, the real culprits responsible for this crisis. Researchers with the Journal of Urban Health estimated that 4.6 million American kids live in households where guns are loaded and accessible to children.

Which explains why so many American kids come to class locked and loaded.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at or on Twitter: @grimm_fred.