Most school shootings don’t occur out of the blue – there are often warning signs.
A yr earlier, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opened fire in his highschool math class in Winder, Georgia, on September 4, 2024 – two teachers and two students killed – authorities visited his house investigate several anonymous suggestions about online threats to commit a faculty shooting.
When they questioned the then 13-year-old boy, he denied making the threats. The father told police that there have been hunting rifles in the home, but that the boy had no “unsupervised access“ to arms.
The FBI said in a press release On the day of the shooting, there was “no reasonable cause for an arrest” and native law enforcement had “alerted local schools to continue to monitor the individual.”
The school’s teachers received special ID cards with panic buttons every week before the shooting. While authorities imagine the IDs made the shooting seem worse than it was, the motion got here too late to stop the killings.
In some ways, the story reflects dozens of comparable stories that we, a sociologist And psychologistwe have now collected lately in our efforts to Lives of mass shootersIt's a typical example of certainly one of the most important challenges schools face in stopping school shootings: recognizing and responding to the warning signs that college shooters almost all the time send out long before they open fire.
In Our database of mass shootings within the United States since 1966 – defined as incidents by which 4 or more victims were murdered with weapons in a public place and weren’t linked to underlying criminal activity comparable to gangs or drugs – there have now been 15 shootings at K-12 schools. The first took place in Stockton, Californiain 1989.
Seven of those school shootings occurred within the last decade, including the second and third deadliest in history: Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 (21 deaths) and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 (17 deaths). The deadliest in history occurred in December 2012, when 20 children and 6 adult employees were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
A complete of 138 people were killed within the attacks and a minimum of 177 were injured.
What we find out about mass shootings at schools
If the Columbine High School massacre took place in 1999 and was a turning point within the United StatesAt the time, it was the worst mass murder at a faculty within the country's history.
25 years later, it’s in fourth place.
Despite the Billions of dollars There has been no investment in class safety since Columbine, but school shootings have turn out to be more frequent and deadly. Aside from the mass shootings that make headlines, a gun goes off in an American school almost day-after-day.
Our research and dozens of interviews with school massacre perpetrators, survivors, and first responders suggest that a part of the issue lies with law enforcement and faculty officials. Influenced by myths and misinformation about Columbine, they still don't know enough about trends in class massacres to acknowledge the warning signs.
The majority of mass school shootings were committed by a lone perpetrator. Only two – Columbine and the 1998 school shooting Westside Middle School in JonesboroArkansas – carried out by two armed men.
The alternative of the term “gunmen” to explain the perpetrators is apt – all but certainly one of the mass school shootings recorded in our database were committed by men or boys. The average age of those involved within the attacks was 18 – the youngest was 11 and the oldest was 32. As minors, most school shooters used weapons borrowed or stolen from their parents, caregivers and other significant adults of their lives.
After every school shooting, people say, “We never thought something like this could happen in our community.” But school shootings most frequently occur in small suburban or rural communities like Winder, Georgia. There, the suspect is a 14-year-old student. This just isn’t surprising. Most school shooters have some connection to the varsity they attack. In our database, we found that 15 of the 17 school shooters were either current or former students.
For most perpetrators, the mass shooting is a final act. Most school shooters die within the attack. Of the 17 school shooters in our database, eight were arrested. The rest died on the scene, just about all by suicide – the one exception was the shooter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, who was shot dead by police.
Preventing the following school shooting
Inspired by previous school shootings, some perpetrators seek fame and notoriety. However, most school shooting perpetrators are driven by desperation and general anger; over 80% of perpetrators of mass school shootings showed signs of crisis before the shooting, including depression, mood swings, agitation, isolation, problems with day by day tasks, and other noticeable behavioral changes.
Most importantly, over 90% of perpetrators communicated their plans to others upfront, preempting their attacks by leaving posts, messages or videos warning of their intentions. communicate their intention to cause harm as a final, desperate cry for help.
The key to stopping these tragedies is to listen to those warning signs and act immediately. Even if investigators don't have enough evidence to make an arrest, they’ll continually monitor students and help connect them with school- or community-based services or interventions, comparable to peer mentoring or mental health treatment. Simply criminalizing or punishing threats increases the danger of violence by exacerbating grievances against the varsity.
At the identical time, parents could be reminded Store weapons safelyAlmost all shootings by children and young people could be prevented by safely storing firearms and Responsibility for adult gun ownersWhen a gun is stored separate from its ammunition, locked and unloaded, it’s rather more difficult for somebody to quickly use it in a violent attack.
Parts of this text originally appeared in previous articles by the authors, first published on February 8, 2019 and May 25, 2022.
image credit : theconversation.com