The Chinese News Service Xinhua has published a new graphic map showing their understanding of the landscape of school shootings. In the last decade, since Columbine, the focus for such visual aids has been on the USA and the shootings by students at their own schools. It is interesting to see the media attention being extended by international incidents and graphics such as this one from the Chinese.
Including old "rampages," such as the one in Scotland conducted by an adult outsider, reminds people of how the phenomenon can shift around, from outsiders, to the school's own youth as shooters, to outsiders again.
Furthermore, it is to be noted that American school shootings and suicides dominated between February 1996 (Moses Lake, Washington State) & February 1997 (Bethel, Alaska) through April 1999 (Columbine), up until March 2001 (two in California & one each in Pennsylvania and Indiana). Then they all grew quiet in the USA, right before and after 9/11. That is, for about two years.
School shootings became a re-ignited topic of media interest due to international incidents in February 2002 (Munich, Germany), April 2002 (Erfurt, Germany), April 2002 (Vlasenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina), and January 2003 (Taiuva, Brazil), before school shootings returned in earnest, in April 2003 to the USA.
Nowadays, the global school shooting events dot the world map, from towns in Finland to Fayettevilles in America.
The new Chinese map is a lesson in where the eyes outside of the USA are looking for this new history.
As I have noted before, while Asian school shootings are rare, the Orient does have outbreaks of Japanese and Chinese school stabbings. A significant school stabbing/slashing cluster occurred in five communities in China, between August and November of 2004.
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