Some school shootings, as we saw in Florida, are targeted attacks aimed at creating as much harm as possible. But these are the least common type.
A comprehensive new research project that involves the University of Texas at Dallas shows school shootings come in myriad forms. And many types of school shootings are the same kinds of gun crimes that plague other parts of our society.
Amid protests against gun violence, potential solutions to the issue, many based in fear, are coming from all corners, making it difficult to separate the signal from the noise. But we do not have a thorough understanding of the causes of gun violence at our schools, and without more information, we risk creating uninformed policies with potentially harmful effects.
For this reason, the National Institute of Justice awarded a grant to a team of criminologists to create the most comprehensive database of school shooting incidents in the United States. Led by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, researchers from the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice, the University of Maryland Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, and the Center for Crime and Justice Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas are collecting detailed data on every time a firearm was discharged on a K-12 school campus in the United States since 1990.
While we are far from finished, one thing is clear: There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The incident at a San Bernardino school in April 2017 was domestic violence; it just so happened that the victim worked at school. A June 2013 school shooting in West Palm Beach, Fla., consisted of a janitor killing two of his co-workers; no students were harmed. So far, our database also contains drug deals gone wrong in school parking lots in the middle of the night and gang disputes that happen at school football games, and neither the offenders nor victims are related to the school community.
These incidents are problematic, since it means that gun violence is affecting our students and their educational experiences in ways that we, as adults, should be very concerned about. But the policy and prevention implications for each and every one of these types of events are very different.
We have to look at the school safety in the totality, including issues related to mental health and bullying; otherwise, we will let too many opportunities for meaningful prevention and more importantly, early intervention, strategies pass by. The fact that there are many different types of incidents also points to the need for innovative solutions, many of which will be school or community specific.
Our current approach is akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks. We hope our project will shed some light on this confusing topic and give school administrators, law enforcement and families the information they need to make meaningful progress in protecting students from gun violence.
Nadine Connell is an associate professor of criminology and director of the Center for Crime and Justice Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Email: nadine.connell@utdallas.edu
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