School Shootings: Eradicating Bullying Must Be In The Safety Plan

A shooter alert is the one text from your child’s school that you never want to receive. So far this year there have been 22 shootings in schools in which someone was hurt or killed. It follows on 2018, the highest year ever for gun violence in U.S. schools, with 97 incidents and 56 deaths.

Thankfully many active shooter alerts are precautionary lockdowns, and school resumes normal life a few hours later. But if this is what the U.S. Secret Service defines as a “targeted incident of violence” there is probably not enough time to neutralize the threat once the shooter is in the building.

In Sandy Hook Elementary School (Newtown, Connecticut, 2012) there were just 11 minutes between the 911 call and when the shooter killed himself.

In Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (2018, Parkland, Florida) the shooter was inside the school for 8 minutes before he slipped away invisible the throng of students seeking to escape. In other words, the alert comes too late, often the culmination of a series of missed opportunities and failed interventions.

A vigorous industry has grown up since the Columbine High School shooting of 1999. If you attend a conference on school bullying or safety you are likely to see ex-military or police promoting their services. One school superintendent that I spoke to said that he receives an e-mail or a call at least once a week promoting metal detectors, mesh vests for teachers to wear as they take on the shooter, and military-style command centers. Some of these businesses advocate for arming teachers as the solution.

The U.S. is reeling this week from two more mass-shootings, this time in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. ArmorMe, a Hong Kong company, responded with this statement.

"In the wake of more devastating mass shootings, in the United States and a school year soon starting, ArmorMe, the maker of bulletproof school backpacks, reminds parents and college students that it is possible to increase one's level of security. As horrible as these deadly events are, they are an unfortunate fact of life in the United States, according to security specialist and Israel Defense Forces Colonel (ret), Gabi Siboni. As the school year starts in the coming weeks we are sadly certain that school shootings will happen. The ArmorMe backpack was developed with these realities in mind."

Most families do not have the resources to invest in bullet-proof backpacks.

Even if they did, ArmorMe admits on its website that these are ineffectual against assault rifles, the weapons most commonly used in shootings.

School principals and superintendents feel the weight of their responsibility to make school safe and the fear caused by this barrage of marketing has led them to invest millions. Bloomberg News reported that in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting schools pledged US$5 billion in security measures.

Despite the extraordinary level of investment there is no evidence that high-tech security solutions have made school any safer. But it has definitely made it scarier.

Metal detectors and armed police on campus can trigger students into a state of high arousal when the majority is struggling to manage the stress and anxiety caused by their everyday lives.

Lockdown drills have become routine, a required part of the school safety plan. The unintended consequence is that the next shooter is forever in the student consciousness, leading them to scan the classroom they enter for where they would hide and how they can escape.

Dewey Cornell, professor of education at the University of Virginia, says that school shootings have to be understood in the context of gun violence across the nation.

“For every shooting in a school” he says “there are more than 1,600 shootings outside of school. From this perspective, U.S. schools are much safer than the surrounding community. The nation does not have a school violence problem but a gun violence problem.”.

School shootings, for all their horror, are just one-part of the continuum of violence to which students are exposed. The most recent statistics we have from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that students are 15,000 times more likely to be the victim of theft or violence and 500,000 times more likely to be bullied than to be the victim of a school shooting.

The connection between school shootings and bullying is real. If students don’t feel safe they carry weapons. In 2017, about 16 percent of students in grades 9–12 reported that they had carried a weapon at least 1 day during the previous 30 days, and 4 percent reported bringing that weapon to school.

When the Secret Service releases its next report on school shooting– expected October 2019 – it will show that bullying was implicated in 42 of the targeted incidents of violence in schools that resulted in death from 2008 to 2017. For schools the message is clear.

Eradicating bullying has to be part of your school safety plan.