Preventing School Shootings Research Articles

Demographic differences in perceived effectiveness for policies to prevent school shootings: results from a representative survey in New Jersey

ObjectiveTo determine what firearm policies New Jersey residents believe will prevent school shootings and the extent to which this varies by sex, firearm ownership status, and political affiliation.MethodsA representative sample of New Jersey residents (N = 1,018) was collected via the Eagleton Center on Public Interest Polling (ECPIP). Data were weighted to reflect the state's population. Participants were asked to rate how helpful they perceived different firearm-related policies to be for preventing school shootings.ResultsFindings indicate that participants perceived universal and expanded background checks, increased mental health funding, and requiring a license for firearm purchases as most effective for preventing school shootings. Arming school personnel, prayer in schools, decreasing the number of entrances at schools, and secure storage requirements were viewed as less effective. Firearm ownership, sex, and political affiliation significantly influenced perceptions of the effectiveness of these policies.ConclusionThe study examined the perceived effectiveness of policies to prevent school shootings. The study highlights disparities and commonalities in policy support among different groups, emphasizing the importance of collective efforts to address gun violence in schools.

School Shootings: Current Status and Recommendations for Research and Practice

The recent increase in school shootings has brought about an urgency to renew efforts to understand and reduce them. In this article, the Division for Emotional and Behavioral Health reviews what is known about school shootings, including data related to incidence and shooter profiles. In addition, we describe responses to shootings, accompanied by data on effectiveness, when available. We conclude with recommendations for practice and a call for increased and rigorous research designed to understand and prevent school shootings.

Examining U.S. school shootings as state crimes of omission

ABSTRACT The argument presented in this paper is that the failure of the United States federal government to enact adequate gun control laws that would help prevent school shootings is a state crime by omission. Drawing on international law, as critical criminologists have recommended since the 1970s, the paper shows that the federal government is failing to act when it has a duty to protect schoolchildren. The paper concludes with recommendations for federal gun control.

The Criminological Description and Prevention of School Shootings and Cyberbullying in Russia and Abroad

The authors analyze modern manifestations of violence in educational establishments, such as school shootings and cyberbullying. Cyberbullying and, to a greater degree, school shootings remain practically unresearched by Russian legal scholars, while foreign authors stress the necessity of their research with the purpose of identifying the determinants of deviant behavior and optimizing its prevention. The authors used the materials of criminal cases to study the criminological characteristics of cyberbullying and school shootings, and identified their close interconnection. They analyzed and specified the conceptual framework, offered a classification of school shootings, and described their main types. It is stated that mass murders in educational establishments are an independent criminal phenomenon not connected with the concept of a terrorist attack, involvement of young people into extremist activities or driving an adolescent to a suicide. A general criminological description of school shootings is presented: the authors show its dynamics in Russia and abroad and single out its key determinants. The criminological features of the personality of the criminal are described using the following indices: gender, age, education, specifics of upbringing, moral and psychological traits, specifics of goals and ambitions, etc. It is stated that in the overwhelming majority of cases attacks in educational establishments were carried out by males of 14–18 years old. Most perpetrators had skills in the use of firearms. The authors examined foreign publications on the topic and conducted a comparative analysis of the spread of school shootings and cyberbullying in Russia, the USA and the EU countries from the standpoint of situational approach. It was determined that the overwhelming number of cases of school shootings registered in the world history happened in the USA, while in the EU the cases were evidently sporadic. In Russia in the last seven years there has been a trend for annual mass murders in educational institutions. Using the analysis of foreign experience and the results of a large-scale interviewing of schoolchildren and teachers in different regions of Russia, the authors suggest measures of preventing school shootings and cyberbullying while taking into account specific national features.

“DEAR CONGRESS, JUST PLAY DEAD”: TIKTOK’S ABSURD GUIDE TO SURVIVING #LOCKDOWN

This paper examines how young TikTok creators enact strategies of playfulness and absurdity in response to gun violence and trauma. Through a ludic-carnivalesque reading of young people’s irreverent engagement with school shootings, we demonstrate how youth use TikTok to reclaim emotional control of uncontrollable situations. We situate our analysis of playful #schoolshooting videos as part of an imitation public that is constituted through practices of mimesis, replication, and imitation. However, we broaden our focus to consider the latent political potential of the publics that memetic practices create. Within this framework we ask: What discourses and shared practices emerge through playful #schoolshooting memes on TikTok and what are the implications for the everyday politics of youth citizenship? Our methodology consists of two phases conducted over an 18-month period. The first phase of analysis, performed August–December 2019, relies on collated systemic searches for specific hashtags and sounds that young people use to memeify school shootings. In the second phase, we identified two seemingly unrelated events that young people discursively and memetically linked to school shootings: COVID-19 lockdowns from March-May 2020 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol building by radicalized Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. By analyzing these practices through the lens of the ludic-carnivalesque, patterns reveal the ways young people enact strategies to demarcate boundaries, articulate cogent critiques of policies and policymakers that do not prevent school shootings, and to turn painful and traumatic realities into a fun and harmless Bakhtinian carnival.

Racial Sentiment and Public Support for Arming Teachers with Guns in the United States

In the effort to prevent school shootings in the United States, policies that aim to arm teachers with guns have received considerable attention. Recent research on public support for these policies finds that African Americans are substantially less likely to support them, indicating that support for arming teachers is a racial issue. Given the racialized nature of support for punitive crime policies in the United States, it is possible that racial sentiment shapes support for arming teachers as well. This study aims to determine the association between two types of racial sentiment—explicit negative feelings toward racial/ethnic minority groups and racial resentment—and support for arming teachers using a nationally representative data set. While explicit negative feelings toward African Americans and Hispanics are not associated with support for arming teachers, those with racial resentments are significantly more likely to support arming teachers. Racial resentment also weakens the effect of other variables found to be associated with support for arming teachers, including conservative ideology and economic pessimism. Implications for policy and research are discussed.

School safety and violence: Research and clinical understandings, trends, and improvement strategies

AbstractFeeling and being safe provides an essential foundation for children to learn and develop in healthy ways. I will summarize the current research and clinically based understanding about K‐12 school violence and school safety. I summarize prevalence rates that underscore that school violence is tragically common. I then outline the spectrum of experiences that undermine safety in schools: from normal moments of misunderstanding to microaggressions to mental illness to international acts of verbal/cyber cruelty to “grey zone” sexual‐social‐emotional experiences, harassment, and rape as well as natural disasters, assault, murder, and suicide. I then summarize research‐based policy and practice steps that we can take that will dramatically enhance how safe students feel and are in schools: (1) Supporting prosocial universal K‐12 improvement efforts for all students; (2) Supporting coordinated educational, “at risk” and targeted K‐12 interventions; (3) Addressing weapons in schools; and (4) Preventing school shootings. Schools are one of the safest places for children and adolescents to be physically. However, this is often not true psychosocially. Today, there is so much that we do understand about how to promote individual and organizational health as well as prevent school violence and intervene most helpfully when it does occur.

Taking Aim at Preventing School Shootings: A Comparative Analysis of School Board Policy Related to the Practice of Arming Educators

ABSTRACT The issue of school safety is of paramount concern but what is lacking is clarity on the best course of action aimed at bolstering safety in public schools. We sought to answer the following research questions: What topics are addressed in school board policies related to arming employees? What outlying policy topics are addressed in school board policies related to arming employees? The analyzed data came from 14 school district policies, in 13 states, that allow school district employees to access firearms at school. The qualitative analysis resulted in specific themes common in a majority of school district policies as well as outlier policy statements.

Public Support for Policies to Reduce School Shootings: A Moral-Altruistic Model

Objectives:The recurring mass murder of students in schools has sparked an intense debate about how best to increase school safety. Because public opinion weighs heavily in this debate, we examine public views on how best to prevent school shootings. We theorize that three moral-altruistic factors are likely to be broadly relevant to public opinion on school safety policies: moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear.Methods:We commissioned YouGov to survey 1,100 Americans to explore support for a range of gun control and school programming policies and willingness to pay for school target hardening. We test the ability of a moral-altruistic model to explain public opinion, while controlling for the major predictors of gun control attitudes found in the social sciences.Results:The public strongly supports policies that restrict who can access guns, expand school anti-bullying and counseling programs, and target-harden schools. While many factors influence attitudes toward gun-related policies specifically, moral-altruistic factors significantly increase support for all three types of school safety policies.Conclusions:The public favors a comprehensive policy response and is willing to pay for it. Support for prevention efforts reflects moral intuitions about harm, anger about school crime, and altruistic fear.

School Counselors’ Perceptions of School Shooting Causes and Protocols

ABSTRACT In order to ascertain school counselors’ beliefs regarding the causes of and strategies for preventing school shootings, 50 school counselors participated in a qualitative survey. The survey used Content Analysis to organize and analyze the school counselors’ responses into themes that represented their beliefs about school shootings. Overwhelmingly, the school counselors supported the provision of counseling services as a means to prevent school shootings and also supported some school security measures, as well as educational interventions targeting relationship building. The relevance of these findings are discussed in relation to current research and position statements on the causes and prevention of school shootings.

Preventing School Shootings: The Interprofessional and Community Approach to Prevention

This essay examined the issue of school shootings within the United States, to include a literature review and analysis of the current status of the issue on a national level. From the review and analysis, the essay provides the multidisciplines engaged in school safety issues with viable, workable, and quickly implementable solutions to address this serious national issue at the local school district and even school level of implementation. This analysis examined a multidiscipline and multiprofessional community approach using existing federal guidelines that address actionable intelligence (social media and human information/informants), school design and incorporation of safety and protective features, involvement of law enforcement on campuses, and engagement of law enforcement with administrators and educators. Most importantly, it provides awareness to educators, administrators, and law enforcement along with the general public that the attitude of “It can’t happen here” can indeed and way too many times it has “happened here.”

Victimological Measures for Preventing School Shootings: Expert View

Victimological Measures for Preventing School Shootings: Expert View

The Illicit Supply of New Psychoactive Substances in China: A Literature Review

The study aims to develop scientifically based victimological measures for preventing school shootings. It is an urgent issue nowadays as there are frequent attacks at educational institutions all around the world. However, it is not only the law enforcement agencies that must ensure the safety and security of citizens but citizens themselves can contribute to their safety. The expert survey method was used in this study. 214 respondents (investigators, interrogators, lawyers, and other practitioners) involved in crime control and prevention were interviewed during the survey. The article describes the most effective prevention measures taking into account the opinion of the respondents as well as the results of the authors' analysis of the incidents which have taken place in the USA, Russia, Germany, and other countries. These measures include socialisation ofpotential offenders,. awareness-raising activities involving potential victims (students), highlighting the impropriety ofsuch negative behavior as bullying; installation ofclassroom door locks; evacuation devices acquired by schools.

How to Prevent School Shootings and Other Mass Homicides

Mass homicides, of which school shootings are a species, are all too common. What makes them philosophically interesting is that the usual punishments for such crimes are ineffective. How does one deter a person who is intent on killing himself or herself upon completion of the massacre? After clarifying the concepts of prevention, deterrence, and punishment, I describe various modes of punishment. If we are serious about preventing mass homicides, we must not rule out any mode of punishment a priori. I suggest several punishments, such as torture and imprisonment with hard labor, that may deter prospective mass murderers. The aim is to find a punishment that the prospective mass murderer fears more than death. I also recommend the inculcation of theism (understood as belief in a retributive god) as a means of deterring mass homicides.

Arming Schoolteachers: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go From Here?

An editorial is presented which addresses the authors' views about a call to arm schoolteachers in America with firearms as a means of preventing school shootings, and it mentions a mass shooting event at a school in Parkland, Florida. Gun violence prevention research is examined, along with the impact that arming teachers might have on child development, student learning, and the school environment. School security is assessed, along with safety measures.

School Threat Assessment in the USA: Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Teaching and Using the Federal Model to Prevent School Shootings

This article provides a brief history of the development of the federal model of school threat assessment, which was created by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education based upon findings from their empirical research on school shootings across the USA. The article reviews the major findings from that behavioral research, which demonstrates how it is possible to prevent school shootings and other targeted violence in school. The article also describes the components of this evidenced-based federal model and implementation guidance for schools and districts within the USA as well as other countries. The article concludes with the lessons learned by the authors and their colleagues in using the federal school threat assessment model to handle individual school threat cases and in training tens of thousands of other school, law enforcement, and mental health professionals how to use threat assessment to prevent school violence.

Preventing School Shootings: The Effectiveness of Safety Measures

ABSTRACTThe tragedies at Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook Elementary School catapulted concern about school shootings into the national spotlight. Calls for something to be done to protect our students, faculty, and staff became a salient concern for school administrators, with many schools hiring armed security officers, restricting access to campus buildings, installing metal detectors, and training individuals how to respond when a shooter enters school grounds. However, many of these security measures were implemented with little to no consultation of the empirical literature. This failure to enact evidence-based responses has had fiscal and latent consequences that are only now being discovered. This essay seeks to fill that void by examining the empirical evidence surrounding common security measures enacted in response to well-publicized school shootings and calling for the use of an evidence-based approach to school safety.

School Threat Assessments: Psychological and Behavioral Considerations

Preventing school shootings is a matter of conducting thorough, ongoing assessments of potential perpetrators. This is generally done in schools by a threat assessment team comprised of individuals in several roles and positions, including psychologists. This article addresses the importance of access to information and information exchange, warning signs of potential violence, elements of a comprehensive threat assessment (including motive, means, and opportunity), and the role of life stressors that contribute to desperation and rage, and three psychological types of school shooters.

Gun Violence and the Meaning of American Schools

ABSTRACTIn the United States, targeted school shootings have become a distinct genre of violence. In this essay, Bryan Warnick, Sang Hyun Kim, and Shannon Robinson examine the social meanings that exist in American society that might contribute to this phenomenon, focusing on the question: “Why are schools conceptualized as appropriate places to enact this form of gun violence?” The authors analyze the social meaning of American schooling by using empirical data, everyday observations, films, and poetry, and then connect these points of meaning to stories of individual school shooters. Through this analysis, three aspects of school stand out. First, schools are places of both real and symbolic violence, where force and power often rule the day. Second, schools are places connected to expectations of hope and refuge, friendship and romance, and when these expectations are not met, bitter resentment flows against schools. Third, suburban schools are seen as places of expressive individualism, which, in rare cases, is manifest in terms of “expressive violence.” Together, these points of meaning can make schools, for some youth, seem like appropriate places to express violent intentions. The essay concludes by speculating about how this analysis can be applied to prevent school shootings.

Issue editors' notes

New Directions for Youth DevelopmentVolume 2011, Issue 129 p. 1-6 Issue Editors' NotesFree Access Issue editors' notes Dewey G. Cornell, Dewey G. Cornell University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this authorHerbert Scheithauer, Herbert Scheithauer Freie Universität Berlin, GermanySearch for more papers by this author Dewey G. Cornell, Dewey G. Cornell University of VirginiaSearch for more papers by this authorHerbert Scheithauer, Herbert Scheithauer Freie Universität Berlin, GermanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 April 2011 https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.382Citations: 2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat REFERENCES 1 Erickson, W. (2001). The report of Governor Bill Owens' Columbine Review Commission. Denver, CO: The State of Colorado; Fisher, K., & Kettl, P. (2001). Trends in school violence: Are our schools safe? In M. Shafi & S. Shaffi (Eds.), School violence: Assessment, management, prevention (pp. 73– 83). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. 2 For example, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2004). Violence-related behaviors among high school students—United States, 1991–2003. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 53, 651– 655. 3 Borum, R., Cornell, D., Modzeleski, W., & Jimerson, S. R. (2010). What can be done about school shootings? A review of the evidence. Educational Researcher, 39, 27– 37; Mayer, M. J., & Furlong, M. J. (2010). How safe are our schools? Educational Researcher, 39, 16– 26. 4 Modzeleski, W., Feucht, T., Rand, M., Hall, J., Simon, T., & Butler, L., et al. (2008). School-associated student homicides—United States, 1992–2006. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 57, 33– 36. 5 Harding, D. J., Fox, C., & Mehta, J. D. (2002). Studying rare events through qualitative case studies: Lessons from a study of rampage school shootings. Sociological Methods Research, 31, 174– 217. 6 Syvertsen, A. K., Flanagan, C. A., & Stout, M. D. (2009). Code of silence: Students' perceptions of school climate and willingness to intervene in a peer's dangerous plan. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 219– 232. 7 Compare Bondü, R., & Scheithauer, H. (2010). Explaining and preventing school shootings: Chances and difficulties of control. In W. Heitmeyer, H. G. Haupt, S. Malthaner, & A. Kirschner (Eds.), Control of violence: Historical and international perspectives on violence in modern societies (pp. 295– 314). New York: Springer. Citing Literature Volume2011, Issue129Special Issue: Columbine a Decade Later: The Prevention of Homicidal Violence in SchoolsSpring 2011Pages 1-6 ReferencesRelatedInformation