Yesterday's shooting at Lone Star College, which wounded three people including the gunman, was already the fifth school shooting in the U.S. this year.
So far in January, shots have been fired at high schools in California and Michigan, as well as at community college campuses in Missouri, Kentucky, and Texas.
On Jan. 10, a 16-year-old student walked into a science classroom at Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., and shot a fellow student in the chest with his brother's shotgun, according to KABC News. Two days later, a teen was shot after a high school basketball game in Detroit, Mich.
Just three days after that, a student at the Stevens Institute of Business and Arts in Missouri shot a school official using a stolen gun. And that same day in Hazard, Ky., two people were shot to death in the parking lot of Hazard Community and Technical College.
These recent shootings have not drawn the same kind of sustained national media attention as events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, or last month's tragedy in Newtown-perhaps because they were not mass shootings, and perhaps because some of them resulted from personal disputes.
But small-scale shootings like these provide steady fuel for the gun control debate in Washington, as President Obama pushes for sweeping policy reforms and gun-rights activists argue that all gun owners will be penalized for the criminal acts of a few under the proposed changes.
President Obama has proposed extensive gun control policy reforms, which involve making changes in four main categories, described by the Huffington Post as "law enforcement, the availability of dangerous firearms and ammunition, school safety and mental health."
"This is our first task as a society: keeping our children safe," Obama said in a statement provided by the Huffington Post. "This is how we will be judged. We can't put this off any longer."
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