Sandy Hook, Columbine, Sparks, Red Lake, Oak Creek, Columbine, and, even more recently, Toqueville High School (in Grasse, France) and South Carolinaâs Townville Elementary School, Benton, Kentuckyâs Marshall County High School, and Parkland, Floridaâs Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This partial list of school shootings continues to present us with questions of âhowâ: How could this happen â and in a school or college campus, of all places? How might education respond? How can we prevent what has become an increasing frequency of rampage and targeted school shootings? How can we help our children, school personnel, and communities heal in the wake of such trauma? How can we begin to understand? Asking these questions, we seek guidance for coping, comprehending, preventing, and responding.
Rather than considering these questions from the perspective of one discipline alone, we respond to these questions from a wide range of conceptual and disciplinary angles. The authors of this section are experts from the fields of criminology, sociology, philosophy, education, social theory, cultural studies, ethics, and forensic psychology. Without presuming to have conclusive answers explaining these tragedies, this sectionâs contributors provide compelling contextual understandings and new directions for policy and practice, revealing a complex matrix of often overlooked factors that contribute to school shootings and suggesting thoughtful, wellâgrounded measures for prevention and response.
Equally important, the authors address prevalent misconceptions, misrepresentations, questionable, counterproductive responses, and their unintended, but harmful consequences. When we hear of a school shooting we become preoccupied, justifiably, with issues of school security, mental health, response time, and deterrence. These important concerns, however, can foreclose responses to pervasive underlying problems. By beginning to expose the latter, we offer new, ambitious, hopeful directions for understanding, preventing, and responding to the scourge of this form of devastating violence.
We all sense with empathy the deep pain, anger, and resolve of survivors and their loved ones. Their quests for safer school environments are exemplified in Sandy Hook Elementary School parentsâ and Newtown, Connecticutâs community leadersâ continuing campaign to educate school personnel and students to âknow the signs of planning a shooting,â asserting that âgun violence is preventable when you know the signsâ (Sandy Hook Promise 2015). The ability to recognize signals of a potentially imminent repetition of anything akin to the seismic shock of the 2012 rampage school shooting and similar tragedies may be of great value.
As will become evident in this sectionâs chapters, there are other actions that could prove efficacious. For example, at this writing, the Connecticut Supreme Court has consented to hear an appeal of the Newtown victimsâ families on their previously dismissed wrongfulâdeath lawsuit against the manufacturer of the ARâ15 assault rifle used by Adam Lanza in his December 14, 2012 shooting rampage at their childrenâs school. Also named in the lawsuit are the weaponâs distributor and the store where the weapon had been purchased by the shooterâs mother (Altimari 2017). One online retailer markets the ARâ15 assault rifle with the service mark, âShoot now. Pay laterSMâ (GrabAGun.com 2017). Also used in the San Bernardino, California and Aurora, Colorado shootings, the largeâmagazine ARâ15 is called âAmericaâs Rifleâ by the National Rifle Association (Altimari 2017).
Despite the complexity of school shootingsâ contexts and circumstances, there are significant, indisputable facts. As sociologist Ralph Larkin points out in Chapter 4, included among these are âthat rampage school shooters are almost all maleâ and âthat the vast majority of school shootings happen in the United States.â And these additional points are beyond contention:
- The number of rampage school shootings worldwide has increased in recent decades, from six in the 1970s, to 11 in the 1980s, to 36 in the 1990s, to 57 between 2000 and 2013 (Böckler et al. 2013).
- Since 1925, the United States has had 76 rampage school shootings. The country with the next largest number is Germany, with 8 during the same period (Böckler et al. 2013).
- These do not include the significant number of planned attacks that were averted (Madfis 2012). On February 1, 2017, for example, police in Florida arrested two teenagers for allegedly plotting what could have been a mass shooting the next day in their school. Other students reported overhearing them say that the attack would be âbigger than Columbineâ (Hanna and Ansari 2017).
This sectionâs contributors provide new ways of interpreting and responding to these and many other alarming facts. Much recent research has minimized the shootersâ relationships to their educational, communal, and political environments and to the times in which we live, searching instead for a typology of common psychological profiles and proposing intensified security measures. The media, too, often overlooks relational, contextual understandings, tending to focus, instead, on spectacularized images and perpetratorsâ mental illnesses and manifestos. Thus, a common response has been increased security measures, lockdown drills, the arming of staff, and defensive protocols. And there have been distorted, even false, characterizations in academia, as well, such as this recent one in a social science and policy journal: âThese days, it is not uncommon for a teenager or a young man to walk into his present or former school on a shooting rampageâ (Frank 2016, emphasis added). After reading these chapters, we hope our readers with recognize the inaccurate or misdirecting nature and effects of such depictions and hyperbolic claims.
In Chapter 1, criminologists James Fox and Emma Fridel argue that caricaturing school shootings as not being uncommon is the source of common misconceptions that schools today are unsafe places. They show how this disproportionally inflated understanding of the risk of school shootings has spawned widespread counterproductive responses, such as oversurveillance, zero tolerance measures, the increasing ubiquity of school security personnel, more simulated drills and lockdowns, firearms for staff, student profiling, and unwarranted, draconian punishments. The authors demonstrate how the unintended, but harmful, consequences of such increased measures are heightened fear, tension, a confrontational school climate, achievement declines, increased dropout rates, and psychological problems. They provide a broader perspective on school shootings, suggesting compelling alternative approaches and measures that consider school architectural design, the size of the student body, and school climate.
In Chapter 2, Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist, responds to the shortcomings of widespread profiling, metal detection, and surveillance measures, presenting his wellâdeveloped, increasingly utilized, evidenceâbased threat assessment approach to prevention. The Virginia Student Threat Assessment Guidelines is showcased as an appropriate way to recognize and respond to studentsâ threats of violence, while placing those threats in the context of the actual relative infrequency of violent crimes in educational settings. Arguing compellingly for the heterogeneity of student threats, Cornell shows how these threats are not generalizable and require thoughtful consideration of each individual context, avoiding a kneeâjerk alarm when a student makes a threat or fits a kind of profile. Beyond threat assessment, Cornell then argues for broader prevention measures: Support for familiesâ childârearing efforts, strengthening student services, addressing socioeconomic inequities, and considering the particular context of an...
