CHARLOTTE — After a large fight broke out at Harding University High School around lunchtime on a Tuesday in late November, a pistol was found stuffed in a 15-year-old student’s backpack.
At the time, that was the 17th gun found on a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools campus this school year. Within two weeks, another six firearms were found at area schools, including another at Harding.
The 23 weapons broke the district’s record for guns found on campus in a single school year — a record going back to 2007 and likely longer — though publicly available state data only goes back that far.
Much of Charlotte is feeling in the dark about why so many firearms are turning up on public school campuses. But some experts say it was predictable heading into this school year.
Criminologists, both local and national, say an increase in violent crime over the past couple of years mixed with a surge in gun sales made it almost inevitable that this problem would spill onto school campuses.
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State officials know of 123 weapons seized from school campuses so far this school year — more than the 83 found in the shortened 2019-20 school year. That’s nearly equal to the 124 firearms found during the full 2018-19 school year.
“We’ve seen an extremely high number of weapons on school property,” said William Lassiter, deputy secretary for juvenile justice in the state Department of Public Safety. “That’s alarming and concerning for us.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has accounted for nearly 20% of guns found in North Carolina school districts so far this school year despite having less than 10% of the student population, according to state data.
In a Department of Public Safety survey from 2019, the majority of students said they brought guns on campus for protection. That aligns with what criminologists are seeing now.
“Kids are feeling less safe on their way to school,” said Lyn Exum, a professor of criminal justice at UNC-Charlotte.
State officials say they are alarmed at the degree to which students feel they need to take their protection into their own hands.
After large declines in violent crime over the past 30 years in the United States, the numbers began trending up a couple of years ago.
In 2020, violent crime across the country was up 5.6% from 2019, according to FBI data released in September.
In North Carolina, that spike was even larger. Violent crime in the state jumped 7.5% from 2019 to 2020, FBI data shows. Homicides were up by a startling 23% in North Carolina in 2020.
The national increase increase in violent crime, experts say, can’t be separated from a raging pandemic that upended life for just about everyone, or from a spike in gun sales in a country already awash in firearms.
A gun industry report from early 2021 shows that gun sales in North Carolina jumped about 60% in 2020.
“The more guns on the street, the more likely a gun is going to be used in an assault and robbery. The more likely a gun will be carried to school,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a nationally recognized criminologist who teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “What’s underlying the uptick in firearm purchases? Clearly the pandemic has played a role. It’s produced a lot of uncertainty. I would also argue that what we saw during the summer of 2020 after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis may have also played a role.”
And while all this was playing out — the stress and deaths from COVID-19, the social unrest, 2020’s spike in crime — Charlotte-area students were stuck at home without access to the structure that school usually provides.
And when kids returned to classrooms in August, they brought that baggage with them.
“We can’t help but to see it locally,” said Nicola Bivens, a criminology professor at Johnson C. Smith University. “I think what’s going on in the communities and whatever is going on outside of the schools is starting to trickle into the schools.”
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and police have released very little information about the 23 guns seized on school campuses. The school district did disclose that the majority of the seized firearms had not been reported stolen, in response to a public records request.
Police did not describe how they’re tracing the guns, what they’re doing to try to prevent guns from being carried onto campuses, or how they’re working with the school district on this problem, despite The Observer requesting that information multiple times.
While there has been no public disclosure about where the weapons came from, the state has found guns on campuses generally come from students’ homes about half the time, Lassiter said.
Superintendent Earnest Winston has announced a number of steps the district is taking to prevent guns from being carried onto school campuses, including requiring clear backpacks, beginning with high schools.
The district has also launched a working group to find ways to reduce guns at schools. Part of that group’s work includes evaluating body-scanning equipment and metal detectors as well as focusing on the schools that have seen the most guns.
While state and local officials have said they’re alarmed by the spike in guns, they’re also concerned about another underlying factor: Kids appear to feel less safe at school than in the past.
Lassiter, the deputy secretary of juvenile justice, said his organization’s survey found that the two biggest reasons for bringing protection were bullying and gang retaliation.
“The conflicts that were occurring in the community are now occurring in schools,” he said. “It starts with put-downs and trash talk, and it continues on that continuum until kids are bringing guns to school.”
“We need to start engaging in conversations with kids at these schools.”
Local data shows that even before the pandemic, kids in Mecklenburg County schools didn’t feel as secure as they once did. In 2019, 15% of Mecklenburg County public high school students said that at some point they did not go to school because they felt unsafe on campus or on the way to school, a county Health Department survey of more than 1,600 students found. That was up from only 8 percent of students who avoided school for safety reasons in 2011.
Joseph Asamoah-Boadu, an 18-year-old senior at Olympic High School, said students aren’t keen to report threats to police officers at school. He was a freshman when a 16-year-old student was shot and killed at Butler High School in 2018. Since then, he has seen dozens of guns seized on Charlotte-area campuses.
Asamoah-Boadu said he and his friends are not convinced the school district is doing enough to address the problem.
“It seems like every day there’s something else,” he said.