Preventing School Shootings : A Unique And Difficult Challenge For Law Enforcement, Parents, And School Administrators

School should be a place of peace and opportunity, but gaps in the system of gun control threatens the safety of faculty and students. School shootings have killed a total of 297 lives, young and old (Slate Magazine). Gun control has been a continuous nationwide debate for many years. It seems that no one wants to take a stance against guns unless they are personally affected. In order to take control of the matter and prevent more incidents from continuing schools need to change. To achieve a safe environment in schools need to educate faculty, safe and students, heighten security, and assess mental health issues.

Taken a drastic action against school shootings in every school in our nation might be difficult, but as a parent and legal practitioner; there are many options out there for us to follow if every organizations and agencies including our school’s authorities work together. In this respect the

Unfortunately, the notion of schools being a safe place is no longer a trend across American schools. Disturbing mass shootings in the U.S continue to shock the media. A school shooting is when someone attacks a school using a gun. The Secret Service says these shootings are "deliberately selected as the location for the attack". The reasons massacres occur in schools is because of poor security, violence in video games/media, and bullying. Shockingly the U.S. has the most school shootings than any other country in the world. According to the FBI, mass shootings occur, on average, every 2 weeks in the U.S. While the cause of school shootings are sometimes unpredictable, it is a growing issue and they need to be prevented. Most shooters don’t have mental issues, they have a plan to kill, so there is no singular cause that creates violent people. On April 16th, 2007, the most deadly school massacre occurred. Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two students at Virginia-Tech. As Americans, we no longer should turn on the news and witness these gruesome murders. We try to make sense of these murders, but it’s ineffectual. There are measures we can take as a society to help. The number one question in a school massacre is, "why would a person that has a capable sense of mind even do that?” It is our moral responsibility to fix these issues. In order to stop this problem, we need to find its roots.

In order to solve the problem of violence in schools, we must first find out who the problem is. Being that not every teenager is prone to participate in such violent acts as what happened at Columbine, there must be specific environment imposed on a particular biology to turn a teenager into an Eric Harris or a Dylan Klebold. These are not normal, healthy teenagers, and they don’t just become killers overnight. They become killers because they are already deeply disturbed individuals who can be sent over the edge by all sorts of innocuous influences. Violent teens often have specific characteristics that put them at high risk for committing these crimes. These high risked students may display some of the following traits. First,

School shootings strike into the heart of every American. From Columbine to Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook, the thought of innocent young students being mercilessly mowed down wrenches one’s heart. Yet these events continue to happen, and in ever increasing numbers. What could possibly drive a person to commit such a horrifying act?

Research in school shootings have been administered in many categories, including sociology, psychology, and etc. past studies, and direct later studies in school shootings, offers a sociology stand point for understanding the differences of school shooting incidents, including rampage shootings, mass murders shootings, and examining the mass media dynamic of school shootings; as well as presenting a combination of causes said in the research, including those on the individual, community, and social levels. Suggestions for studies in the future in school shootings are still yet to be explored.

Thirteen people were killed at Columbine High School in 1999, thirty-three died during the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, and twenty-seven people, twenty of whom were children no older than seven, were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 (Kirk). These name only a few of the larger and most well-known school shooting incidences. In total, 297 people have lost their lives due to school-based shootings since 1980 (Kirk). Although this number may be small in comparison to death by guns overall, these instances are completely unwarranted and it is likely that they could have been avoided or at the very least reduced. These people, college and high school students, teachers, and even children, might still be alive today if our

School shootings are terrifying to think about, but there are ways to help prevent the massacres from ever happening again. The first known school shooting was at the Texas Tower at the University of Texas in 1966 where Charles Whitman shot and killed 16 people while injuring 31 others. Who would have known since that date that we would have more then 200 deaths on school campuses? The most storied shooting in the 90’s was probably the Columbine massacre where on April 20, 1999 Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 32 students and faculty before turning the guns on themselves. The horror scene from the day will always be remembered in many lives and will continue over the years. There were many other horrible shootings over the years as

The psychic of the young person is shaped by social interactions as well as the parental training. Often the young murderers were brought in pathological environments, they did not experience the parental love and acceptance, and they forced themselves to drown particular emotions so as not to appear weak. All these factors results in social dysfunctions that triggers violence and violence becomes the perfect self-defense mechanism, because it brings attention. According to the FBI’s list of traits that describe young murderers the most common syndromes are the feeling of isolation, the narcissist disorder, and depression6. A perfect example to support the above argument will be a background check of Jeff Weise, a young sixteen-year-old boy who killed 9 people and committed suicide in the Red Lake Senior High School in Minnesota in 2005. Weise’s family was the kind of pathological one, his parents were separated, his mother had a habit of drinking too much being an abusive alcoholic, what is more Weise himself was often bullied at school7.

School shootings have been going on ever since the 18th century. However, they have become more common. Ever since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High, people have been trying to come up with ways to deter school shootings. Below is a list of things that are being done to deter school shootings:

So much damage can be done by one person and a gun. At some point in a shooters life, something went downhill, and it led to them feeling negatively about themselves and their classmates. There is an array of reasons for this, but the main three discussed in this case study are bullying, isolation, and a strong need to “strike back.” As a society, and even more importantly, as students, there is a lot that can be done to prevent school shootings from happening. Prevention ranges from

This is an issue that unfortunately doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon and the way law makers seem to brush it off as separate incidences instead is not helping. Plans need to be made that can help resolve it in a more peaceful way than just throwing sometimes unreliable technology at it and hoping for the best. A plan needs to be in place to stop these shooting before it happens not after the fact when the damage has already been done. Students should be protected and be made to feel safe at school, but this won’t happen if they have security or police watching them as potential targets. Without the matter being resolved in any way the possibility of a threat to students becomes bigger. There are a myriad of things that could happen

Despite the recent surge of catastrophes in our nation, violence is not a new issue. Violent occurrences such as shootings, bombings, and other terroristic events are things that have been happening for hundreds, or maybe even thousands of years. One aspect of these tragedies that seems to be the most terrible of all is violence in the school setting. Even this type of violence is not a new occurrence. School shootings and other violent acts of that nature have been occurring in the school setting for decades. However, it wasn’t until recently that these issues have been such a front-runner in the public spotlight. The three most well-known acts of school violence to date are the

The FBI’s school threat assessment report by Doctor Mary Ellen O’Toole (2010) details these motivations and how each school can perform threat assessments. The report cites two primary motivations, which occurred in a majority of school shooters. First, 75% of those identified were bullied and or threatened by others. Secondly, 61% were motivated by a want for revenge. Those are some astonishing numbers. In identifying the causes of random school shootings, the primary indicators highlighted a relational weakness among school shooters. By saying that, it means not in capacity but in their daily experience. Further, an outside agency should conduct the threat assessments and inspections to eliminate the possibility of schools not being forthright. Also, when a school conducts its own threat assessment, it can be a moving target and potentially biased; as a result, schools and districts should perform an equity audit to deconstruct how discrimination or privilege function in each

Violence in American schools is escalating faster than a speeding bullet. Society demands that schools be safe for our children, yet recent events indicate we need to escalate our efforts to prevent violence in schools at the same time address violence in the larger community. Crises involving sudden violence in schools are traumatic in large measure because they are unexpected. The shrapnel from bullets fired on school grounds have a way of touching the life's of many. In the wake of such a crisis, members of the school community are asked-and ask themselves-what could have been done to prevent it.