School Shootings : Research, Theory, And Policy

The lack of school surveillance plays a big role for school shootings. Author of the book Rampage: the Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine Newman states that “Failures of surveillance systems that are intended to identify troubled teens before

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.

The problem with society, is that people tend to wait for the problem to occur before making a change. Troubled children and teens have always existed but unfortunately now we’ve entered into an era where shootings are no longer just seen in action movies, it has now become a reality in our schools. Why do these children end up killing their classmates and why the number of school shootings in America have increased in the past several years? These articles try to give some kind of explanation into why these tragic accidents occur. As well as preventions that teachers, parents, and the community as a whole can partake in. This paper will focus on these two main ideas or themes.

Over the past couple of decades, school shooting have seemed to occur often-- continuously shocking the nation and reminding everyone that no community is exempt from such horror. One main contributor of this hysteria is found within the media. At the catalyst of this hysteria, lies the horrific Columbine shooting in 1999. Since then, school shootings have received ample coverage-- some argue that this has romanticized school shootings, others argue that is has provided condemning coverage of the often insane perpetrators. In the first year after the Columbine shooting, over 10,000 articles were written about the event, likely setting the stage for the nationwide desire for constant coverage of such events (Elsass et al, p. 445-446).

The intention of this paper is to look at and present some issues and strategies that members of a school community think about when trying to create safer schools. Particularly when addressing an active shooter in a school setting. A major issue to consider when trying to keep all schools safe, is the simple fact that no two schools are the same. Understanding this can lead us to the conclusion that it is impossible to have one global plan or program that can be 100% effective in all schools. “Violence prevention programs work best when they incorporate multiple strategies and address the full range of possible acts of violence in schools. For any set of policies to work, it must be established and

The idea of violence is instilled in everyone’s head in some way or another. From the time we are born we are equipped with the idea that we must react when we are upset. When someone affects us in a negative way, there is an idea in our minds that urges us to fight back or cause harm to that person. This idea of causing harm stays with us from childhood until we take our last breath. Since 2013, there have been 242 school shootings within America. Even worse, there have been over a thousand mass shootings in the country resulting in mass casualties. Most recently, one single man murdered fifty-eight people at a concert in Las Vegas, Nevada and injured over 240 others. Although the motive may have been different between these shootings, one thing remains the same for all of them, the act of violence.

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

There has been an average of one school shooting every week in America since the Sandy Hook shooting. On the fourteenth of December, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, 20-year-old Adam Lanza not only killed his mother in her home, but also twenty children and six members of staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. This was to be the third deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The Huffington Post reports that as of 2014, there have been over 200 school shootings. These have resulted in at least 94 deaths and over 156 serious and minor injuries. And, with an issue as emotive and contentious as the murder of school children, the question has been frequently asked: why do school shootings happen?

"I'm angry someone would do this to us. There are lives ruined, families ruined, and our whole school year is ruined" (Brackely 1). Casey Brackely, once a student that attended Columbine High School, remembers the tragedy of the horrific Columbine shooting that killed and injured many students. Mass shootings in the United States have been on the rise since the 1980’s, especially in the last decade. These shooters motives and profiles are almost all terrifyingly alike. Many of these shooters try to imitate and parallel the tragic shooting of the Columbine High School in 1999. These shootings have made peaceful organizations, such as an elementary school; become a place of violence and death. Currently, in the United States, an epidemic of

Jude P. Dougherty. School Shootings. Laura K. Egendorf, Ed. At Issue Series. Greenhaven Press, 2002.

Rampage-style school shootings are rare and tragic events. Although measures of prevention have become more advanced, school shootings have increased in frequency over the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Here in the United States, they have become especially prevalent, with 63 shootings just this year (Acevedo). The aftermath of rampage shootings leaves gaping holes and questions in communities. People try to heal and seek closure at their own pace, but the biggest question most are left with is “why”? In Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Katherine S. Newman seeks to answer this question. She lays out her research and methodology for studying rampage shootings and comes to the conclusion that shootings are not spontaneous, but rather the build up of psychological issues and negative sociological situations within a student’s community that causes them to seek to regain power over their own lives through a rampage shooting. The story Rampage builds out of the narratives of shooters and their victims along with national data and trends is important because it highlights the places that our societies fail in providing a safety net for deviant students and their peers.

School shootings have altered American history greatly over the past two decades. From 1997 to 2007, there have been more than 40 school shootings, resulting in over 70 deaths and many more injuries. School shoot-outs have been increasing in number dramatically in the past 20 years. There are no boundaries as to how old the child would be, or how many people they may kill or injure. At Mount Morris Township, Michigan, on February 29th, 2000, there was a 6 year old boy who shot and killed another 6 year old girl at the Buell Elementary School with a .32 caliber pistol. And although many shootings have occurred at High Schools or Middle Schools, having more guns on those campuses would not be a good environment for children to grow up in.

It is without a doubt that there has been an increase in violent crimes in schools throughout recent years. School shootings continue to become more and more common, especially in North America. Safety concerns for any and all students and staff in schools are at all all time high due to the high number of fatal and non-fatal occurring incidences. Since 2013 to the present, it is estimated that the United States has seen approximately 205 school shootings. Weekly, that is a shocking one shooting on average. Many of these shootings have resulted in the injuries and deaths of multiple of students and staff members. (Everytown Research, 2017) Evidently, school shootings are tragic events that affect so many more people than just the victims. However, these events are also interesting to look at from the psychological and sociological point of views. Through much research, it can be concluded that school shootings are a complex problem that are caused by a mix of improper brain development and societal and media influences which motivate school shooters to emerge. Psychological factors may include struggling with mental illnesses and/or abuse that leads to damaged brain development. Additionally, being bullied and/or the role of the media are examples of sociological factors.

The horrifying spate of school shootings between 1997 and 1999 has transformed that uneasiness into an almost desperate alarm. Behind the facade of our material comfort,