Why Are Mass Shootings Happening in U.S. Schools?

Beyond the U.S. gun control debate, another question deserves examination: Why are schools so frequently the sites of mass gun violence in America? We explore the psychology and potential solutions in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hi, brain Stuff,
Lauren vogelbaumb here, I've got a serious one for you today.
We're talking about mass shootings in the United States and
why they seem to be happening so frequently at schools.
We're not getting graphic, but listener discretion is advised. On
Valentine's Day this year, seventeen people, including students and teachers,

(00:23):
were killed by a nineteen year old former student at
Marjorie Stone and Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This
was the tenth mass school shooting in the United States
in the past five years. A mass shooting is generally
defined as one where at least four people are killed
in a single incident, and once again Americans are left
asking ourselves why. Lost in the noisy debate over gun

(00:45):
control and mental health screening is another confounding question, why schools.
Why does so many troubled young men choose schools as
the place to act out their violent and vengeful fantasies,
And what, if anything, could schools do to avoid becoming
the next Columbine Sandy Hook or Stoneman Douglas. We spoke
with Brian Warnick, a professor of educational ethics and Policy

(01:06):
at the Ohio State University, who co authored a paper
on the meaning and motivations behind targeted school shootings. Even
though many associate gun violence in America with poor inner
city communities, mass school shootings almost always occur in upper
middle class suburban schools. That's where the status tournament takes place,
explains Warnick. He said, suburban schools do a lot of

(01:27):
things to select winners and losers in ways that go
beyond academics. Think the adelation of athletics and the crowning
of homecoming kings and queens. He continued, the way we
see it, when schools set themselves up as judges in
the social status tournament, the resentment will sometimes be directed
against these school itself. He notes that in the book
Hollywood Goes to the Movies, sociologist and author Robert Bollman

(01:49):
says that while Hollywood films set in urban schools focus
on heroic teachers and academic achievement, films set in suburban
settings focus on student journeys of self discovery in the
same vain. Many suburban school shooters see what they are
doing is acts of self expression, Warnick said, there's a
different value system at play in suburban schools. It's called
expressive individualism. What we see in movies and TV is

(02:13):
students engaged in this process of self discovery, breaking through
norms of the school, breaking through social cliques. Self discovery
and individual expression aren't necessarily bad things, says Warnick, But
for certain troubled young men who harbored deep resentment of
the system that rejected them, there's no better way to
express their true, tortured selves than through a dramatic act

(02:33):
of violence. And the higher the body count, the more
powerful the message will be. We also spoke with Cheryl Johnson,
a professor of criminal justice at Cincinnati's Xavier University, where
she has studied whether increased security measures, namely armed guards
on campus, locked down buildings, and metal detectors, are an
effective means of preventing school shootings. She found that although

(02:54):
beefed up security made to terr overall crime and violent
crime in schools, there's little evidence to show that those
measures alone can thwart a mass shooting. First, school shootings
are just too statistically rare to gauge the efficacy of
different security methods, and second, there's anecdotal evidence that even
the best security methods can fail. There were armed school
guards a Columbine, the Sandy Hook shooters shot through glass

(03:17):
panes to bypass locked doors, and in two thousand five,
a student in Red Lake, Minnesota, passed through his school's
metal detector before killing an unarmed guard who tried to
stop him, along with seven other people, including himself. There's
also concern that militarizing schools with armed guards and security
checkpoints contributes to the idea that the school is an
unsafe place where violence is almost expected. Johnson's seventeen paper,

(03:41):
obviously written before the February Parkland incident, pointed out that
the raw number of homicides at u S schools each
year since Columbine in had actually decreased or remained stable
over the years. One of the best ways to prevent
school shootings, both Johnson and Warnick agree, is to encourage
people to beak up when they suspect that a classmate, friend,

(04:02):
or family member is contemplating something terrible. A day before
the Parkland shooting, a grandmother in Washington State called nine
one one when she found her eighteen year old grandson's
handwritten plans for a gruesome school attack involving homemade explosives.
Johnson said, that's a school shooting we're not talking about today,
citing a report from the Secret Service and the Department

(04:22):
of Education that of school shootings, at least one other
person knew about the plans. In fifty two or more
people had information about the attacks before they occurred. Warnick said,
usually when school shootings are prevented, it's when students trust
the teachers enough to share that information with them. If
we could really build up schools as places of trust

(04:43):
where children feel like they have adults who care about them,
that would facilitate the communication that's been proven to prevent
school shootings. Of course, speaking up hasn't always been foolproof.
We now know that the FBI received a tip about
the Parkland shooter dating back to September seventeen for making
this sturbing comments on YouTube, but he was never detained
or even questioned. A second person contacted the FBI on

(05:06):
January to report their concerns and to warn them about
the shooters guns and desire to kill, but the FBI
has admitted that the proper protocols to follow up were
left on followed instead of school districts spending money on
expensive and unproven security solutions. Brian Warnick suggests they hire
more teachers and counselors to shrink class sizes and encourage

(05:28):
more meaningful interactions between staff and struggling students. He'd also
like to see more creative outlets like art, literature, and
music classes, which often get cut from tight budgets for
safe individual expression. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse
and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and

(05:49):
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