A 12-year-old girl was charged with negligence Thursday after a gun she brought to a Los
Angeles middle school accidentally fired, leaving four other children wounded, a police
spokesman said.
Los Angeles Police spokesman Josh Rubenstein says the girl has been booked on a charge
of negligent discharge of a firearm on school grounds.
Her name was not released.
A classmate of the girl, Jordan Valenzuela, 12, told the Associated Press that he talked
to her just after the shooting.
He says she was sobbing and kept repeating, "I didn't mean it."
He says she told him that the gun was in her backpack and that it accidentally went off
when she dropped the bag.
It's unclear why the girl brought the gun to school.
The gunfire erupted shortly before 9 a.m. at Salvador B. Castro Middle School just west
of the city's downtown, police said.
One of the injured students, a 15-year-old boy, was in stable condition with a gunshot
wound to the head.
A 15-year-old girl hit by a bullet in the wrist was in fair condition, according to
Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott.
The other victims have been released from the hospital.
TV footage showed a dark-haired girl wearing a sweatshirt being led out of the school in
handcuffs.
Steven Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles Unified School Police Department, said a weapon
had been recovered.
School shootings by girls are rare.
One of the most well-known cases was Brenda Spencer, who targeted Cleveland Elementary
School in San Diego in 1979.
The 16-year-old killed a principal and a custodian and injured eight children.
When asked about her motivation, she reportedly said "I don't like Mondays."
On Thursday, the Los Angeles school was placed on lockdown for several hours while authorities
searched the students.
The school has about 365 students in grades 6 through 8.
Most students are Hispanic and many are from low-income families.
The shooting comes a little more than a week after a 15-year-old boy was arrested on murder
charges after police said he killed two and wounded more than a dozen others in a shooting
spree at a rural Kentucky high school.
While school shootings are always alarming, James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology,
law and public policy at Northeastern University says schools are, by and large, safe.
"They've been safe for a long time," he says.
"They remain safe."
Research shows that school shootings' frequency and body count have dropped over the past
20-plus years.
Young people, he notes, are far more likely to die off school grounds — in a homicide,
a fall, a firearm accident, a drowning or even while riding a bicycle — than they
are in a school attack.
Researching a forthcoming book, Fox found that in the years from 1999 to 2013, homicides,
bicycle accidents, firearm accidents, falls and swimming pool drownings accounted for
31,827 of the total 32,464 reported deaths.
Deaths in school shootings numbered 154, or less than 0.5%.
Put another way, a young person in the U.S. is nearly 11 times as likely to die in a swimming
pool than in a school shooting.
Few public officials would say pools are doing a poor job protecting swimmers, but the statistics
suggest that we need "more lifeguards at pools, as opposed to guards at schools,"
Fox said.
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