4 Students Shot Outside Atlanta High School

Four students were shot in the parking lot of an Atlanta high school on Wednesday afternoon, the police said, in the latest burst of gun violence on an American school campus.

The students were fired at from an “unknown vehicle” shortly after classes had been let out at the end of the day at Benjamin E. Mays High School, Atlanta Public Schools said in a statement. The wounded students, who were not identified, were taken to a hospital and treated for injuries that were not life-threatening, the district said.

A motive was not immediately clear, the district said. The Atlanta Public Schools Police Department, which is investigating the shooting, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Photos and videos from the scene showed yellow police tape zigzagged across a parking lot filled with vehicles and police officers.

Parking lots are the most common location of school shootings, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a research project that tracks instances in which a gun is fired or brandished on school property. In 2023, there were 346 episodes in which a gun was drawn or fired on a campus, leading to 71 deaths and the leaving 249 people wounded, according to the database.