Rural schools are more at risk for mass shootings, and need more mental-health care; Uvalde has been seeking a clinic

Tuesday's shooting in Uvalde, Texas, highlights rural schools' disproportionate risk of suffering a mass shooting (defined as those with four or more deaths). 

Uvalde County, Texas (Wikipedia map)

Salvador Ramos, 18, killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. It was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. school since 2012, when 28 were killed in Sandy Hook, Conn., another small community. Nine of the 16 mass shootings at U.S. schools in the last 100 years have been in rural areas, though rural America now has less than 20% of the nation's population. Most of the shooters, rural and urban, were former or current students. According to a 2020 Government Accountability Office report, rural schools were the most likely to be targeted for shootings.

The Uvalde shooting also highlights disparities in rural mental-health care. Friends and acquaintances of Ramos said he was relentlessly bullied and dealt with mental-health issues and "had a fraught home life as a child," The Washington Post reports. Before going to the school, he shot his grandmother in the face; she called police.

As a recent series by The New York Times highlighted, mental-health care can be difficult for rural teens to access. And though experts don't know whether bullying is more pervasive in rural communities, they say the small size of the community can make it harder for bullied students to cope. Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents the area, told CBS News that he has been working with the Republican mayor of the City of Uvalde and the Democratic county judge of Uvalde County to find money to build the city's first mental health clinic.