On September 4, 2024, a mass shooting occurred at Apalachee High School near Winder, Georgia in the United States.

The perpetrator, 14-year-old Colt Gray, killed two students and two teachers, and injured nine other people. In May 2023, local law enforcement, in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, visited Gray and his family to investigate school shooting threats posted online.

Police raid what is believed to be Apalachee High School shooting suspect’s home.

The teen shooter, who used an AR-platform-style weapon in his deadly rampage, surrendered to school resource officers and faces multiple murder charges as an adult. The violence in Georgia marks the deadliest US school shooting of 2024 and comes after the teenager was interviewed by police last year following tips to the FBI about online threats of a school shooting.

Lax Gun Laws a “Death Sentence”

“We were shocked, of course, but we were not surprised,” says Georgia state Representative Dr. Michelle Au, a practicing physician in Atlanta. She had proposed a gun safety bill that was blocked by Republicans in the state who hold both legislative chambers and the governor’s office. “Georgia actually has some of the most lax gun laws in the country, which is of course correlated with having a very high incidence of preventable gun violence.”

This is the 385th shooting in the US this year according to the Gun Violence Archive. The deceased victims were 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, teacher Christina Irimie, and teacher and coach Richard Aspinwall.