School shooting

A school shooting is an incident in which gun violence occurs at an educational institution.

Definition
The term school shooting most commonly describes acts committed by either a student or intruders from outside the school campus. They are to be distinguished from crowd-containment shootings by law-enforcement personnel, such as the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in the United States, or the October 6, 1976 Massacre in Thailand. They are also differentiated from other kinds of school violence, such as the mass killings of the Bath School disaster (which involved a homemade bomb rather than shooting), the Cologne school massacre (which involved a flamethrower); or terror attacks involving multiple kinds of weapons, such as the Ma'alot massacre, or the Beslan school hostage crisis in which at least 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children.

One of the most prominent school shootings was that at Columbine High School, near Littleton, Colorado. On Tuesday, April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered thirteen people (twelve students and one teacher) on the school campus before they committed suicide, for a total of fifteen deaths. 24 others were wounded. The shooting was initially planned as a bombing, followed by the shooting of survivors.

In the United States, one-on-one public-school violence, such as beatings and stabbings or gang related violence, is more common in some densely-populated areas. Inner-city or urban schools were much more likely than other schools to report serious violent crimes, with 17 percent of city principals reporting at least one serious crime compared to 11 percent of urban schools, 10 percent of rural schools, and five percent of suburban schools in the 1997 school year. However school shootings in other countries may take on more national or religious overtones, such as the Mercaz HaRav massacre.

Profiling
School shooting is a topic of intense interest in the United States. Though companies like MOSAIC Threat Assessment Systems sell products and services designed to identify potential threats, a thorough study of all United States school shootings by the U.S. Secret Service warned against the belief that a certain "type" of student would be a perpetrator. Any profile would fit too many students to be useful and may not apply to a potential perpetrator. Some lived with both parents in "an ideal, All-American family." Some were children of divorce, or lived in foster homes. A few were loners, but most had close friends. Some experts such as Alan Lipman have warned against the dearth of empirical validity of profiling methods.

While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward "profile", the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. "The researchers found that killers do not 'snap'. They plan. They acquire weapons. These children take a long, considered, public path toward violence." Princeton's Katherine Newman has found that, far from being "loners", the perpetrators are "joiners" whose attempts at social integration fail, and that they let their thinking and even their plans be known, sometimes frequently over long periods of time.

Many of the shooters told Secret Service investigators that alienation or persecution drove them to violence. According to the United States Secret Service, (see Fein, R.A., Vossekuil, B., Pollack, W., Borum, R., Reddy, M.,& Modzeleski, W. Threat assessment in schools: A guide to managing threatening situations and creating safe school climates. U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secret Service, May, 2002 for the research and the recommendations therefrom), instead of looking for traits, the Secret Service urges adults to ask about behavior:

1. What has this child said? 2. Do they have grievances? 3. What do their friends know? 4. Do they have access to weapons? 5. Are they depressed or despondent?

One "trait" that has not yet attracted as much attention is the gender difference: nearly all school shootings are perpetrated by young males, and in some instances the violence has clearly been gender-specific. Bob Herbert addressed this in an October 2006 New York Times editorial. Only two female school shooting incidents have been documented.

Another reported similarity is that most of the perpetrators had been taking antidepressant drugs,  which have a documented history of producing violence and aggression as a side effect.

School shootings receive extensive media coverage and are infrequent. They have sometimes resulted in nationwide changes of schools' policies concerning discipline and security. Some experts have described fears about school shootings as a type of moral panic.

Such incidents may also lead to nationwide discussion on gun laws.

Political impact
School shootings have had a political impact, spurring some to press for more stringent gun control laws. The National Rifle Association is opposed to such laws, and some groups have called for fewer gun control laws, citing cases of armed students ending shootings and halting further loss of life, and claiming that the prohibitions against carrying a gun in schools does not deter the gunmen. One such example is the Mercaz HaRav Massacre, where the attacker was not stopped by police but rather a student, Yitzhak Dadon, who stopped the attacker by shooting him with his personal firearm which he lawfully carried concealed. At a Virginia law school, there is a disputed claim that two students retrieved pistols from their cars and stopped the attacker without firing a shot. Also, at a Mississippi high school, the Vice Principal retrieved a firearm from his vehicle and then eventually stopped the attacker as he was driving away from the school. In other cases, such as shootings at Columbine and Red Lake High Schools, the presence of an armed police officer did nothing to prevent or shorten the shootings.

A ban on the ownership of handguns was introduced in the United Kingdom (with the exception of Northern Ireland) following the Dunblane massacre.

Armed classrooms
For years, some areas in the US have allowed "armed classrooms" to deter (or truncate) future attacks, presumably by changing helpless victims into armed defenders. In 2008, Harrold Independent School District in Texas became the first public school district in the U.S. to allow teachers with state-issued firearm-carry permits to carry their arms in the classroom; special additional training and ricochet-resistant ammunition were required for participating teachers. Students at the University of Utah have been allowed to carry concealed pistols (so long as they possess the appropriate state license) since a State Supreme Court decision in 2006.

A commentary in the conservative National Review Online argues that the armed school approach for preventing school attacks, while new in the US, has been used successfully for many years in Israel and Thailand. Teachers and school officials in Israel are allowed and encouraged to carry firearms if they have former military experience in the IDF, which almost all do. However, statistics on what percentage of teachers are actually armed are unavailable.

Reports

 * Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech Report of the Review Panel
 * U.S. study of school shootings, "The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative"
 * Advice for safe schools, Threat assessment in schools: A Guide to managing threatening situations and to creating safe school climates
 * School Violence