Earlier this week there was another incident in Ohio where a student brought a gun into his school and opened fire on fellow students, his intent being to kill classmates who had been bullying him. Unfortunately, this is just the latest in a string of school shootings that have been occurring almost on a regular basis since the mid 1990's. Since 1992 in fact, there have been 14 incidents of fatal shootings on school grounds in the United States. It has not always been the students, but it seems that overwhelmingly, they are the perpetrators. This phenomenon seems to have ramped up exponentially within the last two decades. While reading an article in the NYTimes, I saw on the left of the screen a quick history of school shootings in the United States. It appears that the first one on record happened in 1927 followed decades later by the massacre at the University of Texas in 1966. It was another few decades before the next occurrence in 1992. Since then, it seems that these shootings have been occurring almost every year. (Click here to check it out the timeline yourself) So what is behind this increase in school shootings? One can try and blame gun laws saying that by allowing every American of age to own or carry a gun, we are essentially enabling this troubling trend. But gun laws have been in place for much longer than school shootings have been occurring and to place the blame solely on the laws would be to deny people the individual responsibility that accompanies owning a gun. If it were merely the gun laws, then there should be more recorded instances dating back even before 1927 and should have been occurring on a more regular basis. However, that is not the case.
Similarly, one can try to place the blame solely on bullying as a cause, but even there, bullying and its accomplice, hazing, are not new to schools. These two acts, bullying and hazing, have been around longer than the school shootings on record and as such, the blame can not be entirely placed on these acts as a trigger. To be fair, in a good number of these cases, bullying or hazing have been the trigger that pushed a person past their limit and as a result, they felt the best way to deal with it was to kill the bullies or others who made them feel inadequate. I think that if we are to address this disturbing trend, we can not just focus on the bullying and hazing as a cause, for that is but just one piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, it seems that the way schools and society address these incidents is by re-focusing their attention on bullying and its negative effects. While these issues should be addressed, they do not go far enough. I don't think that by simply trying to eradicate bullying or hazing, these issues will be resolved. For troubled students, they will simply wait for another trigger to send them over the edge. To truly address the root cause, we must look instead at the environment outside the school, at these students lives outside the classroom, at their homes, their families, and look there instead for the true reason why these students and others feel sidelined, forgotten, or discriminated against. School is only one factor in these students lives who eventually take it upon themselves to dole out justice. Why do they reach for the gun? What is it about life or society that makes them think that shooting others will rectify their situation?
If we look deeper into any of these situations, I would wager that we would find issues with these perpetrators outside the school. When looking at their life outside the school, we can try and blame society saying that they were marginalized, discriminated against, or made to feel inadequate. Yet, people in general are marginalized and discriminated against in one way or another on a daily basis and 99.99% of them don't feel the need to go grab a gun and start killing people. So it can't just be society either, although it probably does play some role. Instead, I feel we must look more at the families of these perpetrators to see what their life at home was like. Did they go home every day to a loving family, one that embraced who they were, and one that made them feel adequate? Or did they instead go home to a family divided or troubled, one that didn't care what happened to them or maybe loved them a little, but didn't take the time to really get to know them? I feel that these perpetrators lives at home should be the first place we start to look for reasons as to why they did what they did. I am not saying that in all cases we will find the answer there, but more often than not, I feel that their home life will be indicative of the way they acted elsewhere. If we look at the trends in society over the past few decades, we will find that more and more families have both parents working or divorced, there is less time devoted to their children and creating a loving environment for them, and in general, the time spent at home is not as fulfilling as it was before the 1980's. Before anyone objects, I can hear the arguments already, "but if this is happening across the United States, why aren't there more shooting instances?" Not everyone who has a troubled home life will go out and shoot people, but starting there, building with society marginalizing them, and culminating with their experiences in school, some will be pushed to reach for that gun, if it is available. While there is no one answer to why these students do what they do, I think if we look at their lives as a whole, we can see the indicators well before any incident happens. The trouble is, we don't want to single out any one individual and label them as a potential school shooting perpetrator.
What is truly needed is a return to ensuring that children have a loving environment at home. I know, this is much easier said than done. We can't just go into every home and force parents to be more loving, to be more accepting of their children, or to make sure they are home more for their children. It is just not going to happen that easily. To reverse trends in society takes the effort of millions of people. The most we can do it seems, is to ensure that the environment we create for our children is loving, accepting, and open. Perhaps by starting small, it can grow and change society, but it will not happen overnight, and to err on the realistic side, it probably won't happen on a large scale. Perhaps if we can identify other children who are not loved and accepted, open our arms to them, and show them that people can and will accept and love them, then we might prevent some of these incidents in the future. Who knows what will happen. We had a year off last year from fatal school shootings, but we can only guess at what the future will hold. Let us only hope that troubled children, students, and people at large, can find a place that welcomes them, loves them, and makes them feel accepted. For that is the only way we can prevent things in the future.
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