by Carole Devine

Created on: October 29, 2009   Last Updated: October 30, 2009

The Columbine massacre in 1999 and the Virginia Tech shootings in April of 2007, have made it appear as if school shootings are a modern phenomenon. While the number of victims in these slayings have sharply increased due, in large part, to the perpetrators access to automatic weapons, the problem itself has been around for a long time.

While there have been a number of school shootings committed by former students, adults, terrorists, and various military and police units alike throughout the rest of the world, the majority of student perpetrated school shootings have occurred on American soil, and they have become more prevalent throughout the 1990s and the current decade.

The first recorded school shooting took place on these shores before the United States was even a country. The Enoch Brown School Massacre took place on July 26, 1764, in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania, when four Lenape American Indian warriors entered a log schoolhouse of white settlers and shot and scalped the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, before turning their tomahawks on the children.

Nine students were reportedly killed during this incident (David Dixon, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac's Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America, University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). While this was a politically motivated massacre, it marks the first in a long line of killings at schools around this country.

There have been recorded incidents of shootings on school grounds fairly regularly since the late 1800s, but the numbers have jumped considerably in the past four decades as students themselves have begun to take up arms and turn them on their teachers and fellow students.

Documented cases in the United States and beyond detail various school masters and principals, as well as disgruntled teachers, parents, former students, and even school board members opening fire on students since as far back as 1891 (Case of James Foster, St. Mary's Parochial School. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school-related_ attacks).

Students appear to have been perpetrators of these crimes as early as 1925. In May of that year, at least two eighth grade students at Joachim Lelewel high school in Vilnius, Poland attacked the board of examiners with revolvers and hand grenades, killing several students, at least one teacher, and themselves (Revolverschusse und Bombenwurfe gegen Lehrer, Neue Freie Press, May 7, 1925).

The first reported incident in the United States of a student perpetrated

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