Another SF Bay Area School Shooting Ignored

I was waiting on some information to come in about this story before posting it, but it never came in.

By now you’d think that when a student is shot on campus, during the school day, the public would demand clarity. A suspect is in custody. A student is wounded. A locked-down school sits shaken. You’d expect police to lay out the basics quickly, especially the most fundamental question of all: was the shooter a student?

But days later, San Francisco police still aren’t saying. And in a media cycle drowning in chaos, this story barely made a ripple outside the Bay Area.

Just after 12:10 p.m. on December 2nd, a teenage boy was shot in the leg at Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood. Students were heading to lunch. Then came the sirens, the shouting teachers, and the rush to lock classroom doors.

Officers found the wounded student minutes later and provided first aid. He was taken to the hospital in stable condition. The school went into lockdown, with staff securing the perimeter and holding students inside for roughly an hour. Some ran. Some cried. Some did what teens do best and pretended they were fine.

The shooter? He bolted.

But not for long.

SFPD’s Crime Gun Investigations Center located a juvenile male on the 1400 block of Shafter Avenue, about a mile to two miles away, depending on which report you read, and arrested him without incident. A firearm was recovered.

The victim is expected to survive. The suspect will face charges, eventually.

And that’s about all the public is allowed to know.

Every outlet repeated the same line:

Police have not confirmed whether the detained juvenile is a Burton High student.

That detail, whether the shooter walked those same hallways, sat in those same classrooms, and possibly knew the victim, is still a blank space. And authorities refuse to fill it in.

Why? Ongoing investigation? Privacy concerns? Or just a system conditioned to say as little as possible so these stories fade faster?

Whatever the reason, the silence is loud.

This wasn’t national news. It didn’t hit front pages. Cable news didn’t break in. Social media barely twitched.

A student was shot at school during lunchtime, and the country shrugged.

If that doesn’t say something about where we are in 2025, I don’t know what does.

School shootings, whether it’s a homicide attempt, an accidental discharge, a gun in a backpack, or a threat intercepted, have become so common they now function as background noise. We’ve normalized the alarms, the lockdowns, the parents refreshing their phones, the kids sprinting to homeroom, and the ones who say, “I don’t even want to come tomorrow.”

Multiple Burton students described panic, confusion, screaming teachers, and the surreal aftermath. One said simply, “I’m scared. I don’t want to come tomorrow.”

That’s the part people miss.

The wound doesn’t end with the leg. It settles in the mind.

Every time a shooting fails to make national headlines, every time the public shrugs and moves on, and every time police withhold clarity that could reassure a community, we reinforce the same message.

This is normal now. This is your life. Get used to it.

And the students do. Because they have to.

(Sources)