For nearly a decade, we have been tracking a series of horrible mass casualty shootings, stabbings, fire attacks, and other mass casualty attacks in schools in the People’s Republic of China. While people in the United States as well as in China have been deeply interested in mass casualty shootings in American schools, the horrific attacks which have left hundreds of Chinese students and educators dead or seriously injured have been largely ignored by the media in both China and the U.S.
In one recent March attack, a knife-wielding attacker killed two relatives and then slashed eleven people including six school children outside a school in China’s commercial hub of Shanghai.
These numerous and deadly attacks demonstrate that even a country with a swiftly applied death penalty for possession of firearms and strict regulation of large knives, school shootings and other mass casualty weapons assaults are a very real threat.
These incidents also demonstrate that school officials should plan, train and prepare for mass casualty weapons assaults using edged weapons, fire, explosives, chemicals, and other weapons that have been utilized for mass casualty attacks in other countries and in some cases in the United States. The two most lethal school mass casualty attacks to date in the United States involved fire – (95 murdered) and explosives (more than 40 killed).