Fourteen-Year-Old Shooter Attacks Georgia High School, Nine injured, Four Dead
(Picture courtesy of Barrow County Sheriff’s Office)
Kerry Kadel | Editor-in-Chief
“Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal.” – President Joe Biden
The latest school shooting in the United States raises the specter of whether the 14-year-old accused of killing four and wounding more than two dozen will ultimately be put to death for what he did at Apalachee High School, north and east of Atlanta.
At mid-morning around 10:20 on Wednesday, Sept. 4, there was an active shooter within Apalachee High School. The high school resides in the Barrow County of Winder, Georgia, north and east of Atlanta.
Fourteen-year-old Colt Gray, a current student at the high school, has been identified as the gunman and is in custody, according to Emily Shapiro of ABC News. Within minutes of the attack, law enforcement swept in for the arrest and Gray surrendered. Shapiro added that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) stated that Gray will be tried as an adult for injuring nine individuals and killing two students and two teachers. At this time, it’s not clear if the victims of the attack were targeted.
NBC News released this statement from Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith in response to a question about a possible motive: “I don’t know why it happened. I may not ever know. We may not ever know.”
On the topic of warning signs, Sheriff Smith explained that such details will arrive after days of pinning the story together to determine what happened, how Gray obtained a firearm reported to be an AR-style assault rifle, and how he was able to bring it into the school.
President Biden commented on the attack, mourning the deaths and the injured but also had this to say: “Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal.”
Vice President and Democratic Party Candidate Kamala Harris spoke of the attack during one of her campaign events in New Hampshire: “It is a false choice to say you are either in favor of the Second Amendment, or you want to take everyone’s guns away. I am in favor of the Second Amendment, and I know we need reasonable gun safety laws in our country (Shapiro).” Apalachee High and several schools in Georgia canceled school for the rest of the week.
Updates will be posted as the story develops.
School shootings and threats of attacks haven’t been anything new to our world for years, but as President Biden asked rhetorically, how can we keep an incredibly damaging situation from continuing to find itself as a constant fearful thought and event in our society?
The University of Dayton had its own shooting threat in November 2022 when sophomore Joseph Kirill Hartrich, 19 at the time, posted to the anonymous app Yik Yak on the school’s forum about how he was going to “shoot up this school”, starting with UD’s residential dorm Marianist at noon.
He had posted another threat to the app minutes before noon saying, “9 minutes I’ll strike.”
UD Public Safety and area law enforcement used the app’s privacy policy and contacted Yik Yak to collect Hartrich’s IP address, phone number, and the coordinates of the poster. Hartrich posted the threat “as a joke”, but ultimately left the campus and students in fear of the false attack the rest of the day, leading to many classes canceling.