A proactive schoolshooting incident prevention system: what matters?

Abstract

Scientific research on schoolshooting has been actualized in the early 21st century, but incidents have been recorded much earlier, since the late 16th century. The article focuses on the causes and explanation of the mechanism of imitation, a significant driving force in schoolshooting. Examples of cases are given to illustrate the effect of the copycat mechanism and measures to prevent the spread of the 'copycat effect' are argued. The paper identifies the key features that unite terrorism and schoolshooting, which provide a strong case for considering schoolshooting incidents as a new type of terrorism. The similarity of schoolshooting incidents to terrorist acts is argued through the description of common characteristics, such as ritual and demonstrative nature of violence, planned and symbolic nature of violence, cultural determination, and group identification. This paper focuses not on the scientific problem of studying schoolshooting as a special phenomenon, but on the problems of creating, organizing, and managing a proactive system of schoolshooting prevention. The results of the analysis of American practice of development and application of threat assessment system to prevent schoolshooting are presented. The description of necessary elements of the complex system for prevention of schoolshooting incidents is presented, the definition of the proactive system is given.