The conversation
Shooting in Knoxville serves as a strong reminder of a known – but preventable – threat
People are watching for the victims of the Saugus High School shooting in Santa Clarita, California, in 2019. Hans Gutknecht / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images With most American students learning virtually in 2020 due to the pandemic, the country recorded a record low for shooting incidents. There were only three deaths in a total of ten shootings during the whole of 2020. This can be compared to eight deaths in 25 shootings in 2019. Now, when students return to schools for personal instruction, the spectacle of school shooting is back. This is evident from the shooting incident at the April 12 school at Austin-East Magnet High School in Knoxville, Tennessee. The shooting killed one student and injured a school resource officer. A shooting in Knoxville, Tennessee has killed one person. As criminologists and authors of a new book, “The Violence Project: How to Stop A Mass Shooting Epidemic,” we are concerned that gun violence in America’s schools may be even more likely in 2021 than before the pandemic due to a number of aggravated risk factors. for violence. Young people’s mental health suffered during the pandemic. And some young people were trapped in homes where they endured abuse. As we note in ‘Trauma’, a chapter in our book, it is likely that children who experience abuse in their childhood will commit violence later in their violence. Meanwhile, there were a record number of gun sales in 2020, driven in part by the pandemic and civil unrest following the assassination of George Floyd last summer. As a result, students now have more access to firearms than ever before. Ominous Statistics The shooting at Knoxville on April 12 was the 37th shooting incident of 2021, according to the K-12 Shooting Database of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The database contains information on ‘every time a gun is swung, shot, or a bullet hits school property for whatever reason, regardless of the number of casualties, the time of day or the day of the week.’ Year-to-date comparisons are complicated because not all school districts went to remote or hybrid learning at the same time or to the same extent. If we take a closer look at shooting with injuries or deaths that occurred while the school was running, it was the fourth shooting of 2021 and the second fatal shooting of the year. The term “school shooting” is commonly reserved for mass casualties, such as the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and the 2018 Parkland High School shooting. Talking about school shooting only when people die reduces the damage that guns cause to schools and children all the time. Response in the United Kingdom Twenty-five years ago, in March 1996, a gunman entered Scottish Dunblane Primary School and opened fire, killing 16 children and a teacher. A successful arms regulation campaign followed, laws were changed, handguns were banned and the UK has not had a school shooting since. Yet in America, a gun is swung every two to three days on some K-12 campus. From 2015 to 2018, there was an ‘active shooter’ every 77 days – someone who was actively killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Since 1970, more than 1,600 shooting incidents have claimed the lives of 599 people on April 13, 2021. Prior to the pandemic, many parents took their resignation to send their children to schools with active shooting practice to practice for an actual shooting incident. Some even bought bulletproof backpacks for their children. Finding solutions Our research on school shooting, in line with research by the US Secret Service, shows that schools can do more than just accept an America where “back to school” returns to school shooting, even without an act of Congress to possibly stop gun violence. We have been researching the lives of school shooters for the past four years and looking for solutions. Our findings are freely available in a database we compiled with a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. The data show important that school shooters tend to be current or former students of the school. They are almost always in a crisis before their attack, indicated by a noticeable change in the behavior of usually. Often it manifests in suicidal thoughts. Shooters also tend to leak their plans for violence in advance, mostly to their peers, often via social media. And school shooters usually get their guns from family and friends who do not store them safely and securely. It is unclear at this stage how well the Knoxville shooter fits this profile, but these findings point to important ways to prevent school shooting prevention. Besides the school police First, if school shooters are almost always students of the school, educators and others who work with them must work harder to find ways to identify them and give advice before ever picking up a gun. The existing $ 3 billion homeroom security industry aims to erect walls to keep out active shooters, rather than build bridges to keep real students connected. Some school districts rely on school resource officers, or SROs, to police student problems to such an extent that the ACLU estimates that millions of students in schools are with the police, but are not counselors, school psychologists or social workers. SROs have intervened in school shootings in the past, including the one that took place in Knoxville on April 12, but we believe it is another example of society’s excessive reliance on police to solve systemic social problems, from mental illness to homelessness to drug abuse. Research shows that the presence of police officers in schools presents a greater social problem, known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”, in which even minor offenses at school are dealt with by the criminal justice system. In a February 2021 study, we examined 133 mass school shootings from 1980 to 2019 and, taking into account other factors such as school size, number of shooters, and the number and type of firearms, found that the death rate for victims – that is, the offender is excluded – was three times larger in shooting with armed guards at the scene. Research has shown that the presence of officers’ weapons increases aggression – this is known as the ‘weapons effect’. This effect can be further exacerbated by the fact that many school shooters are suicidal and intend to lure law enforcement officers to shoot them. This event is known as ‘suicide by a policeman’. On the way to a future without shootings, even though many lawmakers want to see more guns in schools by arming teachers, we feel this is not a solution. This logic is contrary to our research, which shows that warm and welcoming school environments where all students feel safe and supported are the foundation on which good school safety is built. According to us, counselors, social workers, peer support networks and small class sizes are what schools currently need most to prevent violence following a pandemic. They can emphasize strong and trusting relationships between students and adults and teach students empathy and alternatives to violence as a means of resolving disputes. School staff and students need training to identify a student in crisis and describe how to report something they see or hear that indicates violent intent. Educators need new tools to identify students before they become a threat. This means that students in crisis are not unnecessarily punished with eviction or criminal charges – things that can increase the crisis or any grievance at the institution. [Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.] And when students go back to school, safe gun storage at home is of the utmost importance. Shooting is not inevitable. It can be prevented. We believe that the steps above help to promote school safety, but also to protect the well-being of students. This article was published from The Conversation, a non-profit news site dedicated to the exchange of ideas from academic experts. It was written by: James Densley, Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson, Hamline University. Read more: Peer rejection is not the culprit behind the shooting. There is so much contradiction in the shooting data at school, James Densley received funding from the National Institute of Justice. He is affiliated with The Violence Project. Jillian Peterson receives funding from the National Institute of Justice. She is affiliated with The Violence Project.