Can School Shootings Be Prevented

Can School Shootings Be Prevented ?



Can School Shootings Be Prevented ?

To prevent the occurrence of such violence, several strategies, policies, and programs must be developed, implemented, and evaluated. (Department of Health and Human Services, 2001)

These include programs that identify high-risk youth likely to commit such violence, attempt to teach social, coping, resistance, and negotiating skills or to manage anger address family dynamics, or provide increased security in the school setting. However, the effectiveness of any prevention program depends largely on the level of support and participation of the target community. Highly successful programs are likely to fail if the target community is unmotivated, fails to understand what is expected of them, or they lack sufficient confidence in the program's effectiveness to guarantee successful adherence. Hence, like other programs designed to promote health and prevent disease, youth-violence-prevention programs must take into consideration the set of culturally determined beliefs and understandings that comprise the explanatory models of individuals, families, and communities regarding the causes of and solutions to youth violence. Unfortunately, such models are rarely, if ever, elicited prior to the development and implementation of prevention programs.22 Although there have been several studies that have examined the impacts of violent events like school shootings and terrorist bombings Psychiatric disorders among survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, none have examined the communities' explanations of these events or their opinions as to how such events can and should be prevented. (Department of Health and Human Services, 2001)

Although predicting violence on the basis of individual characteristics is difficult, much has been learned from recent studies of school shootings. Understanding these factors holds the potential to inform the design of school-level prevention programs. At perhaps the simplest plane of analysis, school shootings can be classified by the type of offender. Some shootings, such as those at Westside Middle School and Columbine High School, involve students who act against peers and faculty. However, other shootings have involved adults who used the school as a setting in which to commit violent acts. This was seen in the Amish school shooting in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where a 32-year-old milk truck driver entered a one-room schoolhouse and held five girls hostage, eventually executing them before killing himself. The gunman indicated that his actions were not directly related to the school or to the Amish community, but were motivated instead by a painful incident in his childhood. When adults enter schools and violently victimize students and staff, risk factors differ from incidents that involve student shooters. School and peer factors may influence a student perpetrator, but have little or no bearing on school shootings committed by adults. (Department of Health and Human Services, 2001)

Even though shootings committed by students differ from those committed by adults, two risk factors appear to characterize both kinds of events. The first, perpetrators often have had a fascination with weapons and they have all had access to guns. The second is disclosure of assault plans, referred to as ...