On April 30, an active shooter was reported in the school grounds of University of North Carolina Charlotte. 2 were killed by the shooter, and 3 others were seriously injured. 1 student, named Riley Howell, was shot 3 times tackling the shooter to save his fellow classmates, and stopping the shooter from getting far. His heroic actions will not go unrewarded, as he is being given a full military burial service, as he was getting ready to join the military. So how did this shooting unfold, and who did it?

The gunman entered a classroom with about 100 students, taking a course on liberal studies. When he entered, all he did was smile before firing at random. The classroom emptied in panic and barricaded themselves inside an office. While everyone ran away from the shooter, Howell ran towards him and tackled him, allowing many other students to escape. When the gunman’s clip emptied, he simply sat down and said, “I’m done”.

Trystan Andrew Terrell is the alleged perpetrator of the shooting. Terrell is a 22 year old who was formally enrolled in UNCC as a history major. He withdrew from the university just recently in February 2019, and had no criminal record. In fact, his grandfather said that Terrell didn’t like gun policies at all, and believed they were far to easy to acquire. He said he never could have imagined Terrell committing a crime, especially a gun related one. There is no known motive yet for this shooting, and with Terrell’s ideals on gun control, it’s hard to say why he did it.

The amount of school shootings in America have skyrocketed, going from 44 in 2017 to 97 in 2018. There have already been 30 school shootings in 2019, and if this trend continues, we’ll have another year of a very high amount of shootings. Shootings and terrorist attacks in general seem to have increased substantially since the turn of the century, and it’s hard to figure out why. But all we can say is that it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and something needs to be done.