A school shooting is an armed attack at an educational institution, involving the use of a gun. Many school shootings are also categorized as mass shootings due to multiple casualties. The United States has had the highest number of such shootings, over 50 times as many as all other G7 nations combined between 2009 and 2018. School shootings have sparked political debate over gun violence, gun rights, gun control, and zero tolerance policies, especially in the United States.
According to studies, factors behind school shooting include easy access to firearms, family dysfunction, lack of family supervision, and mental illness among many other psychological issues. Text was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0) license. The top motive of attackers was being bullied, persecuted, or threatened (75%), followed by revenge (61%), while 54% reported having multiple reasons. The remaining motives included an attempt to solve a problem (34%), suicide or depression (27%), and seeking attention or recognition (24%).
Profiling The United States Secret Service published the results from a study regarding 37 school shooting incidents, involving 41 individuals in the United States from December 1974 through May 2000. In a previous report of 18 school shootings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they released a profile that described shooters as middle-class, lonely/alienated, awkward, Caucasian males who had access to guns.
The most recent report cautioned against the assumption that a perpetrator can be identified by a certain 'type' or profile. The results from the study indicated that perpetrators came from differing backgrounds, making a singular profile difficult when identifying a possible assailant. For example, some perpetrators were children of divorce, lived in foster homes, or came from intact nuclear families. The majority of individuals had rarely or never gotten into trouble at school and had a healthy social life. Some, such as Alan Lipman, have warned about the lack of empirical validity of profiling methods.
Age
According to Raine (2002), immaturity is one of many identified factors increasing the likelihood of an individual committing criminal acts of violence and outbursts of aggression.Raine, A (2002) – Biological Basis for Crime in Crime: Public Policies for Crime control (J.Q. Wilson & J. Petersilia) p. 23 ICS Press 2002 Accessed February 20, 2018 This fact is supported by findings on brain development occurring as individuals age from birth.
According to the Australian-based Raising children network and Centre for Adolescent Health (and other sources): , and Accessed February 20, 2018 (1st shown at an earlier date) the main change occurring in the developing brain during adolescence is the (so-called) pruning of unused connections in thinking and processing. While this is occurring within the brain, retained connections are strengthened. Synaptic pruning occurs because the nervous system in humans develops by firstly, the over-producing of parts of the nervous system, axons, neurons, and synapses, to then later in the development of the nervous system, make the superfluous parts redundant, i.e. pruning (or apoptosis, otherwise known as cell death).Feinberg, Irwin – Why synaptic pruning is important for the developing brain Scientific American Accessed February 15, 2018 These changes occur in certain parts of the brain firstly; the pre-frontal cortex, the brain location where decision-making occurs, is the concluding area for development.
While the pre-frontal cortex is developing, children and teenagers might possibly rely more on a part of the brain known as the amygdala; involving thinking that is more emotionally active, including aggression and impulsiveness. As a result, individuals can be more inclined to make riskier decisions more often.Raising children network, in collaboration with, the Centre for Adolescent Health – Brain development: Teenagers Australian parenting website Accessed February 15, 2018
Steinberg (2004)Steinberg, L (2004) – Risk taking in adolescence: what changes, and why? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Accessed February 20, 2018 identified the fact of adolescents taking more risks, typically, than adults; Deakin et al. (2004), and Overman et al. (2004) indicate a decline in risk taking from adolescence to adulthood; Steinberg (2005), Figner et al. (2009), and Burnett et al. (2010) identified adolescent age individuals as more likely to take risks than young children and adults.
Parental supervision "Studies have found that within offenders' families, there is frequently a lack of supervision, low emotional closeness, and intimacy". In a 2018 publication, Dr. George S. Everly Jr, of The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health outlined an accumulation of seven, recurring themes that warrant consideration regarding school shooters. One factor is that school shooters tended to isolate themselves, and "exhibited an obsessive quality that often led to detailed planning, but ironically they seemed to lack an understanding of the consequences of their behavior and thus may have a history of adverse encounters with law enforcement." A criticism in the media of past shooters was questioning how so much planning could commence without alerting the parents or guardians to their efforts. However, this has proven to be as difficult of a question to answer as anticipating any of the past school shootings.
Data from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, covering decades of US school shootings, reveals that 68% of shooters obtained weapons from their home or the home of a relative. Since 1999, out of 145 US school shootings committed by children/adolescents, 80% of the guns used were taken from their homes or relative's home. The availability of firearms has direct effect on the probability of initiating a school shooting. This has led many to question whether parents should be held criminally negligent for their children's gun-related crimes. By 2018, a total of four parents were convicted of failing to lock up the guns that were used to shoot up US schools by their children. Such incidents may also lead to nationwide discussion on gun laws.
The FBI offers a guide for helping to identify potential school shooters, The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective.
Daniel Schechter, Clinical Psychiatrist, wrote that for a baby to develop into a troubled adolescent who then turns lethally violent, a convergence of multiple interacting factors must occur, that is "every bit as complicated...as it is for a tornado to form on a beautiful spring day in Kansas". Thus, reinforcing the issue that school shooters do not necessarily come from "bad" parents, no more than they could come from attentive, educated, negligent, single, married, abusive, or loving parents.
School bullying Dorothy Espelage of the University of Florida observed that 8% of bullying victims become "angry, and aggressively so." She added, "They become very angry, they may act out aggressively online. They may not hit back, but they definitely ruminate."
"Bullying is common in schools and seemed to play a role in the lives of many of the school shooters". A typical bullying interaction consists of three parts, the offender/bully, a victim, and one or more bystanders. This formula of three enables the bully to easily create public humiliation for their victim. Students who are bullied tend to develop behavioral problems, depression, less self-control and poorer social skills, and to do worse in school. Once humiliated, victims never want to be a victim again and try to regain their image by joining groups. Often, they are rejected by their peers and follow through by restoring justice in what they see as an unjust situation. Their plan for restoration many times results in violence as shown by the school shooters. 75% of school shooters had been bullied or left behind evidence of having been victims of bullying. Other academics however are critical of a bullying-school shootings connection.
The Uvalde shooter who killed 21 people was frequently bullied in 4th grade at Robb Elementary school.
Mental illness Although the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are non-violent, some evidence has suggested that mental illness or mental health symptoms are nearly universal among school shooters. A 2002 report by the US Secret Service and US Department of Education found evidence that a majority of school shooters displayed evidence of mental health symptoms, often undiagnosed or untreated. Criminologists Fox and DeLateur note that mental illness is only part of the issue, however, and mass shooters tend to externalize their problems, blaming others and are unlikely to seek psychiatric help, even if available.
According to an article written on gun violence and mental illness, the existence of violence as an outlet for the mentally ill is quite prominent in some instances (Swanson et al., 2015). The article lists from a study that 12% of people with serious mental illness had committed minor or serious violence within the last year, compared to 2% of people without illness committing those same acts.
Other scholars have concluded that mass murderers display a common constellation of chronic mental health symptoms, chronic anger or antisocial traits, and a tendency to blame others for problems. However, they note that attempting to "profile" school shooters with such a constellation of traits will likely result in many false positives as many individuals with such a profile do not engage in violent behaviors.
McGinty and colleagues conducted a study to find out if people tended to associate the violence of school shootings with mental illness, at the expense of other factors such as the availability of magazines generally with a capacity of more than 10 rounds.
The authors expressed concern that proposals to target gun control laws at people with mental illness do not take into account the complex nature of the relationship between serious mental illness and violence, much of which is due to additional factors such as substance abuse. However, the link is unclear since research has shown that violence in mentally ill people occurs more in interpersonal environments.
In a presented study from researchers Baird, Roellke & Zeifman from the Social Science Journal, school size and level of attention given to students can precede violent actions, as students who commit mass shootings in larger schools are more likely to have transitioned from smaller schools.
A 2016 opinion piece published by U.S. News & World Report concluded that 22% of mass murders are committed by people who suffer from a serious mental illness, and 78% do not. This study also concluded that many people with mental illnesses do not engage in violence against others and that most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.
Injustice collectors In a 2015 New Republic essay, Columbine author Dave Cullen describes a subset of school shooters (and other mass murderers) known as "injustice collectors", or people who "never forget, never forgive, [and] never let go" before they strike out. The essay describes and expands on the work of retired FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who has published a peer-reviewed journal article on the subject. It also quotes Gary Noesner, who helped create and lead the FBI's hostage negotiation unit, and served as Chief Negotiator for ten years.
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