I did some research. I meant to learn if gun laws would stop shootings. That's not what I learned.
Before writing this article, I knew next to nothing about school shootings. All I knew is that it was a popular topic of conversation and that if I wanted to participate in it with everyone else, I ought to know what I'm talking about. So I sat down and began to research, writing this article at the same time.
As you read this article, you'll be following my research process and watching as I come to the conclusion that nobody else does, either - and worse, nobody really cares. School shootings are being used as a tool by the left to achieve something else.
One thing about the school shooter phenomenon that has always confused me is the focus on the guns. We spend a lot of our political capital talking about guns, the way guns affect school shootings, how people get guns, and what kind of gun legislation would change school shootings. Guns, guns guns.
The thing is, school shootings are not the only situation in which guns are a significant factor. Guns are a factor in murder, in suicides, in the military, in skeet shooting competitions, in hunting, and plenty of other situations. At home, the police we depend on carry guns every day. When discussing gun legislation, you need to consider every situation involving guns.
And conversely, school shootings fall into a larger category of mass school violence. School massacres, if you will. There have been school massacres without guns. The worst school massacre in US history did not involve a gun.
School shootings exist as an aspect of a lot of other issues as well. School shootings involve guns, but they also involve students, schools, and the educational system. Since the students committing school shootings are usually mentally ill or disabled, mental health issues also play a role.
These other issues don’t seem to get a lot of air time when it comes to the discussion around school shooting. Our media devotes major coverage to students coming together to agitate for gun legislation, but these other issues only get an afterthought (if they’re mentioned at all).
Since the mass media isn’t spending any time looking at the problem from a different angle, I decided to do it myself.
If we started having an epidemic of, say, Chipotle line workers coming into work and murdering the entire staff, the first thing we’d do is ask Chipotle what the heck their problem is.
Chipotle, being a multinational corporation, would undoubtedly equivocate to some degree. Our legal system would probably open some sort of investigation into their employee hiring and management practices. We’d interview Chipotle employees and ask them if Chipotle was abusing them in any way.
You may notice that this entire course of action centers on Chipotle, not guns. In this scenario, instead of asking ‘why guns,’ people ask ‘why Chipotle.’
“But Megan,” you say, “That’s just conjecture. You have no idea that’s how it would go. You can’t prove anything.”
Interestingly enough, I can.
Most of us have heard the phrase ‘going postal,’ and are aware that to ‘go postal’ means to go crazy and have some kind of sudden, aggressive outburst.
On August 20, 1986 postman Patrick Sherrill walked into his workplace, shot and killed 14 co-workers and injured 6 more before shooting himself in the head.
On October 10, 1991 a former US postal worker, Joseph Harris, killed two employees at a post office in Ridgewood, New Jersey.
Then, on November 14th of that same year, after being fired, Thomas Mcilvane killed 4 people and then himself at a Royal Oak, Michigan post office.
In a terrible coincidence, on May 6th 1993, two separate shootings took place. The first one was at a post office in Dearborn, Michigan, where Lawrence Jasion killed one person and wounded three before killing himself. Within a few hours of that, in Dana Point, California, Mark Richard Hilbun killed his mother, and then shot two postal workers.
Further postal service incidents occurred twice in 2006 where postal workers gave in to the urge to shoot their fellow workmates. On January 30th, Jennifer San Marco killed six postal employees before committing suicide.
Then, on April 4th, Grant Gallaher murdered his supervisor in the parking lot of their post office, reportedly because he couldn’t find the postmaster to complain about said supervisor, so he felt shooting her was the next best option.
The US Post Office did not ignore that this was happening. The post office handled this in an internal manner, relating to their problem: They hired 85 “Workplace Environment Analysts.” Their job was to, you guessed it, analyze the workplace to figure out why their employees kept ‘going postal.’ There was no national discussion around banning guns (or at least, if there was, it wasn’t preserved in the Wikipedia Page).
In that particular situation, the statistics ended up showing that US Post Office employees were actually less prone to violence than to the average worker, and therefore US Post Office employees were at decreased risk of violence from their coworkers.
School is ‘the workplace’ for children. It’s a place they have to go to every day, day in and day out. They face consequences if they don’t go. And while they’re there, they work. So if we’re having an epidemic of teenage workplace violence, why don’t we analyze their workplace?
When I sat down to analyze the teenage workplace, my first thought was to ask, “Do private schools suffer school shootings at the same rate as public schools?”
If private schools don’t suffer school massacres at the same proportion as public schools, then that implies that some part of the problem, at least, lies with the nature of public education compared to private education. Perhaps public schools have an inferior psychological environment. Perhaps private schools have adequate security measures that public schools lack. Perhaps private schools have fewer targets and are therefore simply less appealing targets.
If private schools do have school massacres, then the problem runs deeper than that, perhaps all the way down to our culture as a society.
I had a bit of trouble finding updated statistics on this issue. There were a couple of authoritative articles written in 2012, but six years have passed since then, and the picture probably changed drastically in those six years.
It looks like the only authoritative way for me to get modern statistics on this issue is for me to go through the Wikipedia School Shootings in the US article, and manually look up how many of these school shootings took place at private schools. (This list, of course, does not include non-gun-related massacres).
But, since I’m just a blogger who is writing this article for my own amusement, I’m not going to do the hours of legwork that would require. A quick glance at the list certainly makes it seem as if school shootings favor public schools (not private schools, reservations, or other alternative educational situations) at a high rate.
Another way to analyze the academic environment is to compare school shootings in America to those outside of America. It’s safe to assume each country has differences in its educational system and structure, so if countries with a given educational structure have fewer school shootings than countries with another educational structure, we can deduce that some of the cause of school shootings lies in these differences.
This isn’t as clear-cut an issue as you would think. When you Google “do school shootings happen in other countries,” a February 15, 2018 article from the Washington Post says that France and Britain don’t have nearly as many school shootings. But of course they wouldn’t — mass school violence wouldn’t be classified as a school shooting if there isn’t a gun to shoot. And the study that conclusion is based on didn’t analyze school stabbings or other school massacres.
What we need, then, are statistics comparing US school violence to school violence in other countries. But not just any statistics on school violence will do — we need some sort of statistic that sorts out school massacres from other violence that takes place at schools, such as gang conflicts between students, fistfights, sexual assault, or group vandalism.
(Ideally, this would be the statistic we use in the US, not just overseas, because it captures the entirety of the problem).
This is a challenging statistic to collect because it requires us to make a definitive claim about what a school massacre is. Right now, we’re using the presence of a gun as part of the qualifier in itself. But if that’s not an appropriate qualifier for a school massacre, what is?
Is it a school massacre if the perpetrator's only goal is to kill?
Is the attempted suicide of the murderer, after the murder, a prerequisite for qualification?
If two troubled teens shot up a school instead of one, does it still qualify?
If a student bombed a school, instead of shot it up, would that qualify?
In order to really analyze this issue across borders (or indeed, in any fashion) in a neutral way, the definition needs to be divorced from the weapon used to commit the act. The definition needs to focus on the pathology of the crime.
Interestingly enough, this is how the pathology of the serial killer was discovered. An FBI investigator conducted a very thorough and very controversial study of all known serial killers at the time, and arrived at a conclusive pathology that is still used to apprehend serial killers today.
A friend also pointed out that in addition to taking into consideration gun laws, one has to take into consideration the gun culture of the other nations. Would a culture with the same gun laws have the same rates of school shootings if their culture had a very unfriendly view toward gun ownership? Does the attitude of the culture toward gun owners affect the rates of school shooting at all?
And, finally, when analyzing this data, we need to control for population size. So a study comparing the number of dead in the US versus Germany wouldn’t be useful, because Germany has 82 million people to the US’s 325 million. We would need to divide the number of dead and injured by the population of the country, to get a proportion of violence.
This is turning out to be challenging to study. A lot of the current statistics focus on gun violence only, ignoring violence with other weapons. And unlike the well-kept school shooting Wikipedia articles, there is no well-kept Wikipedia school massacres article.
As someone on the internet writing this on a lark, I simply don’t have the resources to do this. Without a larger and more powerful research institution making this information available to me, and without the resources to contact national governments and acquire this information (resources that employed journalists might have), there’s not anything more I can do to shed light on this.
Another aspect by which we may measure the school environment is socioeconomic class and area (rural, suburban, urban). For instance…
If school shootings take place at schools in poor urban areas, we may conclude that it is the poor conditions of these areas that incite kids to violence.
If school shootings take place exclusively at rural schools, we may conclude that there is something damaging in the culture of rural schools.
If school shootings occur equally between all socioeconomic classes or city areas, then the problem is not due to the nature of any of these individual places.
Ballotpedia maintains a page of US School Shootings from 1990 to the present day (again, a statistic which does not include non-gun-related school massacres). Their page covers shootings that take place in K-12 schools (not shootings that are nearby, and not college and university violence).
By and large, their chart shows that more school shootings have happened in more populated states, and less in less populated states. On the face of it, this isn’t surprising. It’s unclear whether or not these rates of shooting are proportional to state population, but at first blush, they seem to be. Were I motivated, I could tally that up and find out on my own.
That said, not all populated states have a school shooting problem. New York, despite being home to New York City, has only had two incidents and 3 injuries (with no fatalities), compared to 20 injuries and 5 fatalities in Ohio.
School shootings don’t seem to favor republican or democrat areas specifically, striking California, Oregon, Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Ohio. They don’t seem to favor rich states or poor states, since California is a hotspot and NYC is not.
A more in depth analysis, with the population of cities, states, city income, and other factors on hand, might reveal a further trend. But since I’m just an internet blogger who is writing this article to satisfy my curiosity, I’m not going to spend the multiple hours that would require on it. It’s enough for me that no huge trends leap out at me.
Going into writing this, my thinking was that there would be important studies available that just weren’t getting the attention they deserve. But while researching this, it became clear to me that no, the studies just haven’t been done in the first place.
As a nation, how can we claim to have an accurate picture of school massacres when we don’t even have this basic information about the problem? Until we get this information, we as a nation will be groping in the dark, hoping we just happen to land on a solution.
Whatever solution we do land on will most certainly be overkill, and if it does work, it’ll work purely accidentally.
Perhaps banning guns (or just greatly increasing regulations) would prevent school shootings, but not school massacres. If the issue is due to an underlying failure not related to the presence of guns, children will start acting out with knives, explosives or other weaponry.
If the issue is due to an underlying failure in the educadtional environment, the millions of students still suffering from that underlying failure won’t be helped.
Likewise, if the true issue lies with an epidemic of mental illness in teenagers, banning guns won’t give these teenagers the healthcare they need to lead happy and satisfying lives.
We can’t have a satisfying solution until we understand the problem.
It’s interesting to me that the powers that be are not asking these questions. If our goal is truly to end school shootings, then why aren’t they asking…
Does the school environment make a school massacre more likely? What about the neighborhood of the school, or the country of the school?
Why do school massacres not committed with guns not count?
Indeed, what is the true definition of a school massacre?
As a nation, we’re jumping right past the data and leaping to a conclusion. And boy, is the conclusion we’re leaping to huge. Banning guns (or any kind of heavy regulation) is a big legislative step to take, especially in light of the 2nd amendment. It’s the nuclear option.
Why is our nation only talking about the nuclear option?
Why aren’t we talking about more moderate solutions?
As far as I can tell, we as a nation have not tried any more moderate solutions.
Why haven’t we even tried?
The only answer I can come up with bothers me greatly.
The only answer I can come up with is that the larger forces that be are not concerned about ending school massacres. Or, rather, they are concerned about ending school massacres insofar as they can end it their way. By banning guns.
Therefore, if there existed a simple solution that would end school massacres that didn’t involve the gun regulations they wanted, the forces that be wouldn’t give it any airtime, and, consequently, no one would talk about it (or even know about it).
Hey, wait a moment…
This post hardly covered every possible aspect of school shootings. How the topic of mental illness interacts with school violence is a topic so rich it deserves it’s own article, let alone book. Should the urge come over me to research that as well, I’ll write a separate article about it. I can only hope that the studies needed to come to a meaningful conclusion have actually been done.
Additionally, the metaphor of the school being the teenage workplace and investigating environmental factors in that workplace only goes so far. Some shootings (I do not know how many as a proportion) are not committed by current students. Sandy Hook in particular was done over a decade after Lanza’s attendance of that school.
Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash
Originally published February 23rd, 2018