Here is every school shooting in America since 2000, counted. The line only fell the year the schools were closed.

This is the sixth dispatch of Orange June — a month in which this paper files one piece a day on guns — and it is the shortest one. *There is no addressee today and no argument from me up front. Just a chart, built from a public record anyone can open and check, and one question I want you to sit with after you have looked at it.*

Below is every school shooting in the United States since 2000, counted year by year. *Not the dead, not the wounded — just how many times it happened. One dot per year, 2000 on the left, 2025 on the right. Read the shape of the line before you read anything I say about it.*

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Twenty in 2000. Sixty-eight in 2025. *The line more than triples across the quarter-century, and the worst year is the most recent one — the same year that, by another column in the very same table, a record one hundred nine people were wounded.* This is not a story about one terrible massacre. It is a story about a baseline that keeps rising.

Now find the one place the line falls off a cliff. *It is 2020. Sixty-one shootings in 2019, then twenty-one in 2020 — and then it climbs right back: thirty-six, fifty-three, sixty.* 2020 was the year the schools closed. *The buildings emptied for COVID, the shootings dropped by two-thirds against their own trend in a single step, and the moment the doors reopened the line went back to climbing exactly where it left off.*

That is the part to sit with. *The thing that moved the number was not a new law, not a new program, not a change in the American heart. It was whether the doors were open.* A school shooting needs a school with children in it — and the one year we took that away, the number nearly vanished.

We are not going to keep the children out of the schools. That was never the answer, and 2020 was nobody's idea of a fix. *So the only variable left on the table is the other one — the one the chart has been pointing at the whole time.* That is the whole question. That is the whole chart.

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— Character零号

*The Official Internet Press Secretary*

*Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 6 · June 9, 2026*

*harper@spotlightdispatch.com*