School shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia
Tumbler Ridge Secondary School has 175 students from Grades 7 to 12. Yesterday, 7 were killed and ~25 wounded during a mass shooting at this small, mountain community school.
Yesterday around 1:20 pm, an alert was issued to residents of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia for reports of an active shooter in the community. The 2,399 residents of this small mountain town were locked down until the alert was officially cancelled at 5:45 p.m. The town has a 5 officer police department, one full-time ambulance, and a 16-member fire department. The single runway airport doesn’t have a traffic controller.
At Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, 7 were killed and ~25 wounded. A woman believed by police to be the shooter was also found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted wound. Two more people were found dead at a home connected to the suspect.
The only photo available from the school is the same image we see in the United States after every school shooting. A line of students walked from the building with their hands up after hiding in closets and barricading inside the school’s autobody shop garage for hours.
Most planned attacks at k-12 schools have the same characteristics (with deviations in the edge cases):
Committed by current or recently former students, or adults (parents, teachers, spouses of staff) with a direct connection to the campus. School shooters are rarely outsiders or strangers.
Use legally owned guns taken from their home.
Commit suicide before police engage them.
Happen at rural schools and small communities (<50k pop).
Attack is committed by a single assailant without a plan for a second phase targeting first responders, or an escape to a second location.
The town of Tumbler Ridge in the Canadian Rockies is more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) northeast of Vancouver, near the provincial border with Alberta. Tumbler Ridge Secondary School has 175 students from Grades 7 to 12.
School Shootings in Canada
Last fall, I wrote about the 50-year anniversary of a school shooting that changed gun laws across Canada.
On October 27, 1975, a troubled high school student in Ottawa murdered a neighbor at his home and then opened fire in his packed religion class at St. Pius X High School. The 16-year-old student was armed with a shotgun when he walked into the backdoor of a classroom. Most of the students were facing away from him when he shot 17-year-old Mark Hough in the head and wounded 5 others.
Mark Hough’s parents had an open casket funeral so that everyone could see the horrific injuries that firearms cause. Within days of the shooting, thousands of Ottawans decided the danger from these weapons was greater than the personal benefit of gun ownership. In the video (link below), you can see piles of firearms being crushed by heavy machinery after Canadians voluntarily turned in their guns.
Read more: 50 years after Canada decided to end school shootings (not the best title now)
While Canada’s rate of gun violence is much lower than the United States, there have been a few major attacks since 1975:
May 28, 1975 in Brampton, Ontario at Brampton Centennial Secondary School. 16-year-old student killed a teacher and student at Brampton Centennial Secondary School and wounded thirteen other people before killing himself.
October 27, 1975 in Ottawa, Ontario at St. Pius X High School. After stabbing a neighbour to death at his home, 18-year-old student shot six other students of St. Pius X High School, killing one, before killing himself.
December 6, 1989 in Montreal, Quebec at École Polytechnique. 25-year-old targeted female students killing fourteen and wounding fourteen other people before killing himself.
August 24, 1992 in Montreal, Quebec at Concordia University. Professor killed four colleagues and wounded another at the university.
September 13, 2006 in Montreal, Quebec at Dawson College. A non-student parked his car outside Dawson College and opened fire outside and inside the school, killing a woman and wounding nineteen other people. The shooter committed suicide after being shot by a police officer.
January 22, 2016 in La Loche, Saskatchewan at La Loche Community School. 17-year-old shot and killed two of his cousins at a home before going to La Loche Community School and killing two people and wounding six others.
June 2, 2024 in Toronto, Ontario at North Albion Collegiate Institute. Two gunmen exited a truck and shot into a group of people outside North Albion Collegiate Institute, killing two men and wounding three other people.
As I said in the opening section, most planned attacks are committed by current students who end their own lives before police arrive. We need to realize that school shootings are violent public suicides that aren’t deterred by fortification or armed security because these teens plan to die. Instead, we need to treat school shootings as a suicide prevention issue.
I’m aware of 64 shootings at schools (both k-12 and higher ed) in Canada since 1966. For comparison, there have been 3,238 in the United States during the same time period.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my podcast—Riedman Report: Risk, AI, Education & Security—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.