argumentative essays on school shootings

School shootings: What we know about them, and what we can do to prevent them

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, robin m. kowalski, ph.d. robin m. kowalski, ph.d. professor, department of psychology - clemson university @cuprof.

January 26, 2022

On the morning of Nov. 30, 2021, a 15-year-old fatally shot four students and injured seven others at his high school in Oakland County, Michigan. It’s just one of the latest tragedies in a long line of the horrific K-12 school shootings now seared into our memories as Americans.

And we have seen that the threat of school shootings, in itself, is enough to severely disrupt schools. In December, a TikTok challenge known as “ National Shoot Up Your School Day ” gained prominence. Although vague and with no clear origin, the challenge warned of possible acts of violence at K-12 schools. In response, some schools nationwide cancelled classes, others stepped up security. Many students stayed home from school that day. (It’s worth noting that no incidents of mass violence ended up occurring.)

What are the problems that appear to underlie school shootings? How can we better respond to students that are in need? If a student does pose a threat and has the means to carry it out, how can members of the school community act to stop it? Getting a better grasp of school shootings, as challenging as it might be, is a clear priority for preventing harm and disruption for kids, staff, and families. This post considers what we know about K-12 school shootings and what we might do going forward to alleviate their harms.

Who is perpetrating school shootings?

As the National Association of School Psychologists says, “There is NO profile of a student who will cause harm.” Indeed, any attempt to develop profiles of school shooters is an ill-advised and potentially dangerous strategy. Profiling risks wrongly including many children who would never consider committing a violent act and wrongly excluding some children who might. However, while an overemphasis on personal warning signs is problematic, there can still be value in identifying certain commonalities behind school shootings. These highlight problems that can be addressed to minimize the occurrence of school shootings, and they can play a pivotal role in helping the school community know when to check in—either with an individual directly or with someone close to them (such as a parent or guidance counselor). Carefully integrating this approach into a broader prevention strategy helps school personnel understand the roots of violent school incidents and assess risks in a way that avoids the recklessness of profiling.

Within this framework of threat assessment, exploring similarities and differences of school shootings—if done responsibly—can be useful to prevention efforts. To that end, I recently published a study with colleagues that examined the extent to which features common to school shootings prior to 2003 were still relevant today. We compared the antecedents of K-12 shootings, college/university shootings, and other mass shootings.

We found that the majority of school shooters are male (95%) and white (61%) –yet many of these individuals feel marginalized. Indeed, almost half of those who perpetrate K-12 shootings report a history of rejection, with many experiencing bullying. One 16-year-old shooter wrote , “I feel rejected, rejected, not so much alone, but rejected. I feel this way because the day-to-day treatment I get usually it’s positive but the negative is like a cut, it doesn’t go away really fast.” Prior to the Parkland shooting, the perpetrator said , “I had enough of being—telling me that I’m an idiot and a dumbass.” A 14-year-old shooter stated in court, “I felt like I wasn’t wanted by anyone, especially  my mom. ” These individuals felt rejected and insignificant.

Our study also found that more than half of K-12 shooters have a history of psychological problems (e.g., depression, suicidal ideation, bipolar disorder, and psychotic episodes). The individuals behind the Sandy Hook and Columbine shootings, among others, had been diagnosed with an assortment of psychological conditions. (Of course, the vast majority of children with diagnosed psychological conditions don’t commit an act of mass violence. Indeed, psychologists and psychiatrists have warned that simply blaming mental illness for mass shootings unfairly stigmatizes those with diagnoses and ignores other, potentially more salient factors behind incidents of mass violence.) For some, the long-term rejection is compounded by a more acute rejection experience that immediately precedes the shooting. While K-12 school shooters were less likely than other mass shooters to experience an acute, traumatic event shortly before the shooting, these events are not uncommon.

Many shooters also display a fascination with guns and/or a preoccupation with violence. They play violent video games, watch violent movies, and read books that glorify violence and killing. Several of the shooters showed a particular fascination with Columbine, Hitler, and/or Satanism. They wrote journals or drew images depicting violence and gore. The continued exposure to violence may desensitize individuals to violence and provide ideas that are then copied in the school shootings.

To reiterate, however, there is no true profile of a school shooter. Plenty of people are bullied in middle and high school without entertaining thoughts of shooting classmates. Similarly, making and breaking relationships goes along with high school culture, yet most people who experience a break-up do not think of harming others. Anxiety and depression are common, especially in adolescence, and countless adolescents play violent video games without committing acts of violence in real life. Even if some commonalities are evident, we must recognize their limits.

What can we do?

Understanding the experiences of school shooters can reveal important insights for discerning how to prevent school shootings. So, what might we do about it?

First, the problems that appear to underlie some school shootings, such as bullying and mental-health challenges, need attention—and there’s a lot we can do. School administrators and educators need to implement bullying prevention programs, and they need to pay attention to the mental-health needs of their students. One way to do this is to facilitate “ psychological mattering ” in schools. Students who feel like they matter—that they are important or significant to others—are less likely to feel isolated, ostracized, and alone. They feel confident that there are people to whom they can turn for support. To the extent that mattering is encouraged in schools, bullying should decrease. Typically, we don’t bully people who are important or significant to us.

Second, because most of the perpetrators of K-12 shootings are under the age of 18, they cannot legally acquire guns. In our study , handguns were used in over 91% of the K-12 shootings, and almost half of the shooters stole the gun from a family member. Without guns, there cannot be school shootings. Clearly more needs to be done to keep guns out of the hands of youth in America.

Third, students, staff, and parents must pay attention to explicit signals of an imminent threat. Many shooters leak information about their plans well before the shooting. They may create a video, write in a journal, warn certain classmates not to attend school on a particular day, brag about their plans, or try to enlist others’ help in their plot. Social media has provided a venue for children to disclose their intentions. Yet, students, parents, and educators often ignore or downplay the warning signs of an imminent threat. Students often think their peers are simply expressing threats as a way of garnering attention. Even if the threats are taken seriously, an unwritten code of silence keeps many students from reporting what they see or hear. They don’t want to be a snitch or risk being the target of the would-be shooter’s rage. With this in mind, educators and administrators need to encourage reporting among students—even anonymously—and need to take those reports extremely seriously. Helpful information for teachers, administrators, and parents can be found at SchoolSafety.gov . In addition, Sandy Hook Promise provides information about school violence and useful videos for young people about attending to the warning signs that often accompany school shootings.

Fourth, school leaders should be aware that not every apparent act of prevention is worth the costs. Some people believe that lockdown drills, metal detectors, school resource officers, and the like are useful deterrents to school shootings and school violence more broadly. However, researchers have also demonstrated that they can increase anxiety and fear among students . Students may also become habituated to the drills, failing to recognize the seriousness of an actual threat should it arise. Additionally, most K-12 shooters are students within the school itself. These students are well-versed in the security measures taken by the school to try to deter acts of violence by individuals such as themselves. While few would suggest getting rid of lockdown drills and other security measures, educators and administrators need to be mindful of the rewards versus the costs in their selection of safety measures.

Ultimately, our goal should be creating an environment in which school shootings never occur. This is an ambitious aim, and it will be challenging work. But addressing some key issues, such as mental health, will go a long way toward preventing future tragedies in our schools. As so aptly demonstrated in the Ted Talk, “ I was almost a school shooter ,” by Aaron Stark, making someone feel that they have value and that they matter can go a long way toward altering that individual’s life and, consequently, the lives of others.

Related Content

Kenneth Alonzo Anderson

November 8, 2018

Andre M. Perry

December 4, 2018

K-12 Education

Governance Studies

Brown Center on Education Policy

Dr. Neil A. Lewis, Jr.

May 14, 2024

Katharine Meyer

May 7, 2024

Jamie Klinenberg, Jon Valant, Nicolas Zerbino

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Making Schools Safe for Students

High-profile school shootings, like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have raised concerns that schools can be dangerous places for students. Yet the data suggest that school crime rates have dropped nationwide since the early 1990s and that the student victimization rate declined by 70% from 1992 to 2013 ( see exhibit 1 ). [1]

To the general public, though, thoughts on school safety are often shaped by high-profile school shootings and other tragic incidents that dominate a news cycle. For educators, however, issues such as bullying, harassment, and school discipline policies are at the forefront of their thoughts and can affect school safety on a daily basis.

“It is very important that we continue working to understand and prevent mass shooter events,” said Phelan Wyrick, director of the Crime and Crime Prevention Research Division within NIJ’s Office of Research and Evaluation. “However, we cannot allow the saliency of mass shooter events to overshadow the importance of a wide range of more common safety issues that schools face.”

Shootings are just one of many traumatic events that children may face at school. They may also be threatened or injured by a weapon, be bullied, be physically assaulted, or be affected by natural disasters.

In support of stakeholder efforts to ensure that students are safe in school, NIJ has funded numerous initiatives over the years that evaluate school safety practices. These efforts range from how to prevent tragic incidents like school shootings to how to promote a positive school environment where day-to-day challenges, like bullying and harassment, can be reduced.

Historical School Safety Efforts

Although federal programs and policies related to school safety can be traced to the early 1970s, the United States did not begin collecting national data on school violence until 1989, [2] when the School Crime Supplement was added to the National Crime Victimization Survey. The School Crime Supplement was conducted for a second time in 1995 and then became a biannual survey starting in 1999.

A series of school shootings in the late 1990s, including the one that occurred at Columbine High School, led to new programs that examined the thinking, planning, and other pre-attack behaviors of school shooters. One such program was the Safe School Initiative led by the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secret Service.

As part of this initiative, NIJ supported a 2002 study that explored the behavior of student-attackers in an effort to identify information that could help communities prevent future attacks. [3] The study evaluated 37 incidents of targeted school violence in the United States between December 1974 and May 2000. It found that these 37 attacks were rarely sudden or impulsive. In 95% of the cases, the attacker had developed the idea to harm before the attack.

Perhaps most importantly, the study found that 93% of the evaluated attackers behaved in a way that caused others to be concerned or that indicated a need for help. In fact, in more than 75% of the cases examined, the attacker had told a friend, schoolmate, or sibling about the idea before taking action. But the person who was told about the attack rarely brought the information to an adult’s attention.

“That’s the critical element if we’re going to prevent, reduce, or head off these types of incidents from occurring,” Wyrick said. “We need to have mechanisms in place, school cultures amenable to folks reporting that information.”

The study also showed that there was no accurate profile of a school shooter. The shooters came from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and ranged in age from 11 to 21 years old. Some came from intact families with ties to the community and others came from foster homes with histories of neglect. The academic performance of attackers ranged from excellent to failing.

Evaluating School Safety Technology

School security measures have increased since the Columbine shooting. Today, nearly 100% of schools serving 12- to 18-year-olds use at least one safety or security measure. [4] This includes locked doors, security cameras, hallway supervision, controlled building access, metal detectors, and locker checks. However, use of these measures varies by factors such as the school’s population and location.

NIJ has long supported studies on school safety technology, including one by Sandia National Laboratories. Released in 1999, The Appropriate and Effective Use of Security Technologies in U.S. Schools covered the effectiveness of a variety of school safety technologies. The report also provided basic guidelines for law enforcement agencies and school administrators as they decide which security technologies should be considered when developing safe school strategies. It helped schools and law enforcement partners analyze their vulnerability to violence, theft, and vandalism, and suggested possible technologies to address these problems effectively.

Overall, the report stated that security technologies are not the answer to all school security problems. No two schools will have identical and successful security programs, meaning that a security solution for one school cannot just be replicated at other schools with complete success. However, many pieces of technology can be excellent tools if applied appropriately.

More recently, NIJ has supported other school safety technology evaluations through the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI). This initiative includes a report from the Library of Congress outlining federal school safety efforts between 1990 and 2016 and two complementary projects by the RAND Corporation and Johns Hopkins University, which assess current school technology and outline school needs.

These CSSI reviews of school safety technology shared a major conclusion: No one technology, school climate intervention, or other school safety strategy can guarantee school security or eliminate the underlying cause of school violence. An integrated approach that includes emergency response plans, drills, a positive school climate, and situational awareness is called for, and school security plans must be tailored to the needs of each individual school.

Comprehensive School Safety Initiative

Safety and security technology is just one tool in a comprehensive program that each school should develop to create a safe learning environment for students and staff. NIJ’s CSSI aims to make clear that there is no one solution to ensuring students are safe in school.

Developed following the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, CSSI is one of NIJ’s latest and largest investments in school safety research. Projects funded through CSSI examine different factors from the individual, school, community, and family levels that affect school safety.

A unique program of research for NIJ, CSSI provided funding for both implementation and evaluation as well as research projects that examine root causes. Under a directive from Congress, NIJ allocated approximately $75 million per year between fiscal years 2014 and 2017. Two-thirds of that funding went toward implementing school safety projects, and one-third went toward studying the impact of each program and the causes and consequences of school-related violence. Some CSSI projects have concluded and some are ongoing. They have covered or aim to address a wide range of school safety subjects, including school resource officer training, assessments of social media threats, bullying prevention, and positive behavioral interventions, among other topics.

This initiative will compile a large amount of information over a very short period of time, but the next few years will bring a wealth of knowledge on the effectiveness of school safety practices.

“We’re trying to move the field further and more quickly with so much information in such a short period of time,” said Mary Carlton, an NIJ social science analyst.

Through CSSI, NIJ has funded 96 studies with a focus on K-12 schools. These grant-funded projects are taking place in more than 30 states and more than 2,700 schools. The initial projects are still in the final stage, so it is too soon to assess the impact of the initiative. It may take six to seven years, if not longer, for the projects to reach their conclusions and for the results to be disseminated. Even after the last set of findings is published, taking that body of work and synthesizing it for the field may require another year or so of work, said Nadine Frederique, an NIJ senior social science analyst.

Moving Forward

School shootings are frightening and make headlines. However, today’s students are less likely to be threatened or injured with a weapon at school, including a gun, than they were 10 years ago.

But educators and public safety officials continue to grapple with the challenge of creating and maintaining a safe and healthy learning environment for students. Threats to schools and student safety continue from both inside and outside the school and from adults and other individuals, including students.

NIJ has sponsored numerous studies on the issues of school safety and school climate over the past 25 years and continues to support efforts to improve the safety of students in school. The outcomes of CSSI-funded research will provide valuable context for school officials in the coming years. The 96 projects funded through this effort examine a variety of school safety issues and offer an opportunity for educators, the community, and law enforcement to better understand the factors that most affect school safety.

About This Article

This article was published as part of NIJ Journal issue number 281 , released June 2019

[note 1] National Institute of Justice, “ School Safety: By the Numbers ,” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, November 2017, NCJ 251173.

[note 2] Mary Poulin Carlton, Summary of School Safety Statistics , Comprehensive School Safety Initiative Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, July 2017, NCJ 250610.

[note 3] Robert Fein et al., Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates , Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program, and U.S. Secret Service, National Threat Assessment Center, July 2004.

[note 4] Carlton, Summary of School Safety Statistics .

About the author

Blair Ames is a digital journalist and contractor with Leidos.

Cite this Article

Read more about:, related publications.

• Summary of School Safety Statistics
• NIJ Journal Issue No. 281

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

What do you think? Leave a respectful comment.

Elizabeth Englander, Bridgewater State University Elizabeth Englander, Bridgewater State University

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/analysis-10-ways-we-can-prevent-school-shootings-right-now

Analysis: 10 ways we can prevent school shootings right now

After a shooter killed 17 people at a Florida high school, many have expressed frustration at the political hand-wringing over gun control and calls for prayer .

As a parent, I understand the desire for practical responses to school shootings. I also absolutely believe the government should do more to prevent such incidents. But the gun control debate has proven so divisive and ineffective that I am weary of waiting for politicians to act.

I study the kind of aggressive childhood behavior that often predates school shootings. That research suggests what communities and families can start doing today to better protect children. Here are 10 actions we can all take while the federal government drags its heels.

What schools can do

Because educators observe students’ emotional and behavioral development daily, they are best positioned to detect troubled behaviors and intervene. In Los Angeles, for example, schools have successfully used outreach and training to identify potentially violent students before problems occur.

1. Teach social and emotional skills

Children learn social skills from everyday interactions with each other. Playtime teaches young people how to control their emotions, recognize others’ feelings and to negotiate. Neighborhood “kick the can” games, for example, require cooperation to have fun – all without adult supervision.

Today, frequent social media use and a decrease in free play time has reduced children’s opportunities to learn these basic social skills .

But social and emotional skills can – and should – be taught in school as a way to prevent student violence. Students with more fluent social skills connect better with others and may be more able to recognize troubled peers who need help.

2. Hire more counselors and school resource officers

Due to budget cuts, many schools have few or no trained school psychologists, social workers or adjustment counselors on staff . These mental health professionals are society’s first line of defense against troubled students – especially with the current increase in adolescent depression and anxiety .

In my opinion, school resource officers – trained police officers who work with children – are also helpful for students. While untrained officers may pose a threat to students , well-trained school resource officers can connect with kids who have few other relationships, acting as a support system. They are also on hand to respond quickly if crime or violence erupts.

Putting trained school resource officers and counselors in every school will cost money, but I believe it will save lives.

3. Use technology to identify troubled students

Technology may challenge kids’ social development, but it can also be harnessed for good. Anonymous reporting systems – perhaps text-message based – can make it easier for parents and students to alert law enforcement and school counselors to kids who seem disconnected or disturbed. That enables early intervention.

In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, one such tip appeared to prevent extreme violence in May 2017. Police took a young man who’d threatened to harm his peers into protective custody before he could act on his words.

What communities can do

Communities also help raise children. With many eyes and ears, they can detect often smaller problems before young people grow into violence.

4. Doctors should conduct standard mental health screenings

Extreme violence is almost always preceded by certain behavioral problems. These typically include a propensity toward aggression , a marked lack of social connectedness , indications of serious mental illness and a fascination with violence and guns .

Doctors could detect these problems early on with a standardized screening at health checkups. If concerns arise, referrals to counseling or other mental health professionals might follow.

5. Enlist social media companies in the effort to detect threats

Most young people today use social media to express their feelings and aspirations. In the case of school shooters, these posts are often violent . A single violent post is hardly a guarantee of homicidal acts, of course. But evidence strongly indicates that repeated expressions of this nature can be a sign of trouble .

I would like to see companies like Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat create algorithms that identify repeated online threats and automatically alert local law enforcement.

What parents can do

Parents and guardians are often the first to detect their child’s emotional struggles. Here are some tips for monitoring and promoting healthy emotional development at home.

6. Think critically about your child’s social media use

From virtual war games to cruel trolls, the internet is full of violence. The relationship between violent content and aggression hasn’t been consistent in research: Some studies see no relationship at all , while others find some correlation between violent video games and violent behavior.

This mixed evidence suggests that online content affects children differently , so parents must assess how well their child handles it. If your daughter likes “Assassin’s Creed” but is gentle, socially successful and happy, the onscreen violence may not be strongly impacting her.

But if your child is drawn to violent games and tends to be aggressive or troubled, discuss the situation with your pediatrician or school counselor.

7. Consider what your child is missing out on

Is your child sleeping properly? Do your kids socialize with other young people? These two behaviors are linked to mental health in children , and excessive screen time can reduce or diminish the quality of both .

Make sure digital devices aren’t disrupting your kids’ sleep , and schedule play dates if your kids don’t make plans on their own.

8. Assess your child’s relationships

Like adults, children need confidants to feel invested in and connected with their community. The trusted person can be parent, a family member or a friend – just make sure someone’s playing that role.

For children who struggle to make friends and build relationships, there are programs that can help them learn how.

9. Fret productively about screen time

Research shows that excessive screen time can damage kids’ brains . That’s alarming in part because parents can’t realistically keep kids entirely off devices.

So rather than just fret over screen time, focus instead on how children can benefit from a variety of activities . Evidence shows that children who experience different pursuits over the course of their day – from sports and music to an after-school job – are happier and healthier for it.

10. Talk with your child

This is both the easiest and hardest way to make sure your kids are doing OK. Children, especially teenagers, don’t always want to talk about how life is going. Ask anyway.

My research shows that simply asking children about their friends, their technology use and their day is an important way to show you care. Even if they don’t respond, your interest demonstrates that you’re there for them.

Try this one now. Ask your children what they’re thinking about the shooting in Florida and how they like their friends and school. Then listen.

Elizabeth Englander , Professor of Psychology, and the Director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center (MARC), Bridgewater State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation . Read the original article .

Professor of Psychology, and the Director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center (MARC), Bridgewater State University

Support Provided By: Learn more

School Shootings: Five Critical Questions

• Share article

The school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., stoked many questions about safety, guns, and the psychology behind such attacks. Here’s what the research says about school shootings.

What counts as a school shooting?

Advocacy and research organizations use widely varying criteria about which incidents should be considered school shootings, leading to sometimes conflicting figures in news reports.

Everytown for Gun Safety , a group that advocates for more-restrictive gun laws, includes in its count any incident in which “a firearm discharges a live round inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds,” including on the campuses of colleges and universities. That count includes suicides and incidents that did not result in injuries, like the accidental discharge of a security guard’s weapon.

Other organizations only track mass shootings, using differing criteria for what is involved in such incidents. Those lists leave out many school shootings that don’t meet the minimum threshold for injuries and deaths, but that still had significant effects on schools and communities.

Federal data on school shootings are limited. The annual Indicators of School Crime and Safety Report—assembled by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education— only tracks violent deaths in schools , breaking them into categories of suicides and homicides. But that data do not specify what, if any, weapons were used in those incidents, and they don’t include a breakdown of firearm injuries in schools.

Education Week ‘s tracker includes shootings with firearms at K-12 schools, on school buses, or at school events that resulted in at least one firearm-related injury to an individual who was not the suspect. The total count of injuries for each incident may be minor or major and are not necessarily the result of gunfire.

Are school shootings becoming more common?

Heavy news coverage and social media discussions about school shootings, like the one in Parkland, have stoked fears that the number of school shootings have increased dramatically in recent years. Experts who study mass shootings, including those in schools, say that they are not happening more frequently, but many of them are more deadly than past attacks.

Three of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history have happened in the last year, including Parkland, which ranks eighth. Federal data appear to contradict popular notions that schools have grown significantly less safe in recent years.

The numbers of school-associated violent deaths have not trended upward in the last 20 years. Other forms of student victimization are on a downward trend, and fewer students report fear of harm at school than in previous years, the most recent federal data show.

Do school shooters fit a specific profile?

There are widely held beliefs about the “profile” of a student shooter, but school safety experts say acts of school violence have been carried out by attackers of all races, ages, disciplinary histories, and family backgrounds.

School safety experts say it’s important for schools to take all threats and concerns seriously, regardless of the profile of the student involved.

A 2002 report by the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, prepared after the agency analyzed 37 school shootings, concluded that “there is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence.”

In the incidents analyzed, attackers fell all along the social spectrum, from popular students to “loners,” the Secret Service report said. While the agency didn’t find common demographic threads, it did note some psychological trends among attackers: Many “felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack,” many had a history of suicide attempts or feelings of depression or desperation, and most had no history of criminal behavior.

School shooting suspects are predominantly male , and researchers have various theories about why.

“The fact that school shooters are typically male is part of the overall phenomenon of violence being a predominantly male phenomenon,” said Peter Langman, a psychologist who studies school shootings and has authored several books about them.

In the case of “rampage shootings,” perpetrators often have a sense of “ damaged masculinity ,” which Langman defines as a sense of failure or inadequacy in parts of their life that they have linked to male identity, like sexuality or physical strength, he said.

What can be done to prevent school shootings?

As the public searches for answers after a school shooting, family members and classmates often suggest it was an unexpected, impulsive act , saying things like “He just snapped.”

But psychologists and school safety experts say that’s rarely the case. One of the most important ways to keep schools safe is to create a consistent, reliable system for reporting and responding to concerns about students’ intentions, they say.

“I think this idea of ‘just snapped’ really undermines the importance of ongoing risk management and assessment,” Anders Goranson, a psychologist and threat-assessment specialist, said in a lecture at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 2014. People need to feel empowered to share information or conversations that “made the hair stand up on the back of their neck,” he said.

The U.S. Secret Service report concluded that attackers in 31 of 37 analyzed shooting incidents had told at least one person about their plans beforehand. In 22 cases, two or more people knew about the planned attack in advance, the study concluded. In nearly all cases, those peers were classmates, siblings, and friends of the attackers, it said.

That idea of “leakage” has motivated many states and school systems to create advanced anonymous reporting systems that allow youth to report suspicious behavior by their peers. The operators of a tipline in Colorado, which was started after the school shootings at Columbine High School in 1999, believe that system has helped dismantle the plans of multiple would-be school shooters.

Sandy Hook Promise, an organization formed by parents of children who died in the 2012 Newtown, Conn., school shootings, also works to train schools in threat assessment . In special sessions, teachers learn to identify and address concerns. The organization also works with students to encourage speaking up when peers contemplate harming themselves or others in a campaign called “Say Something.”

Are guns the only threat to school safety?

Guns are not the only threat to school safety, though most public policy discussions are centered on the risk of school shootings.

In 2014, a 16-year-old boy injured 21 students and a school security officer when he went on a stabbing spree with two large kitchen knives in a crowded hallway of his Pennsylvania high school.

And the deadliest school attack in U.S. history happened in 1927, when a man blew up a school in Bath Township, Mich., with hundreds of pounds of dynamite. Forty-five people died, including 38 children and the attacker himself.

Video: How Schools Should Respond to a Student’s Threats

School shootings have led teachers and administrators to rethink their actions when a student makes a threat. Dewey Cornell, a professor of education at the University of Virginia, has been studying school violence for decades and has developed guidelines for schools to follow:

More Resources The answers to some other questions about school shootings can be found in the Education Week archives:

• Learn more about the debate over arming teachers .
• Hear from educators who’ve organized to oppose bills that would make it easier to carry guns in schools.
• Read about the debate over school safety drills that teach students to “run, hide, and fight.”
• Learn about efforts to prevent school shootings through threat assessment .
• See a collection of Education Week ‘s coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn.

How to Cite This Article Blad, E. (2018, February 16). School Shootings: Five Critical Questions. Education Week . Retrieved Month Day, Year from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-five-critical-questions/2018/02

Sign Up for The Savvy Principal

Edweek top school jobs.

Sign Up & Sign In

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Students, We Want to Hear What You Have to Say About School Shootings

By The New York Times Opinion

How many words have adults spoken in the aftermath of mass shootings in America, and are we any safer? Countless words. Countless arguments about gun control and gun violence. Countless thoughts and prayers. Adults have been doing the talking since Buffalo, Uvalde and Tulsa; now it’s time for us to listen too.

We want to shift the discussion to American teenagers and listen to you — high school students and middle school students, who are regularly drilled on gun safety and threat response in between English, geometry and other classes.

We want to understand what you are thinking and feeling in the aftermath of these shootings, and what you are talking about with your friends, classmates, family members, teachers and others. What will it take to feel safe, healthy and less anxious in school when there is so much access to guns today?

For all the good-faith efforts in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals to address school shootings and gun laws — and we hope they lead somewhere — these discussions among adults can also be frustrating to follow, given that the likely result is no result (if the recent past is any guide). Our nation’s leaders passed an assault weapons ban just 28 years ago that was allowed to expire in 2004. Reinstituting such a measure, notwithstanding President Biden’s words last week, is far out of reach now.

There is real value in hearing from students — not only because of the potential threat you face, but because you’re preparing to become voting citizens in our democracy and society. Tell us what you think and how you are doing. Tell us about the kind of schools and the kind of America you would build. In a democracy, every voice should matter — and your voices matter so much on this issue.

— Patrick Healy, deputy Opinion editor

How do you cope with the threat of a school shooting?

If you are a high school or middle school student and 13 or older, please share your responses with us below.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram .