Explaining school shooters

Profiting from hysteria is nothing new; one could even argue it’s the American way, at least in some commercial corners.

But when it comes to public education—a mandated taxpayer-funded enterprise, not a free marketplace— where dollars are customarily scarce to begin with, it’s more critical than ever to keep a level head over wasteful spending.

Anyone who’s ever budgeted a wedding understands the direct relationship between emotional spending and price. It’s demand-driven retail on hyper-hormonal overload. But in the end, at least, the nuptials occur. As expensive, overpriced and unnecessary as much of the cost might be, there is a matrimonial event to celebrate, enjoy and remember.

It’s rare to spend money preparing for a wedding until the odds are pretty good it’s going to happen. The very nature of preparation planning and justification is normally governed by likelihood. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to build a family budget including kids’ college funds and a retirement package around the current value of the Powerball jackpot. The odds are more than 300 million to 1 against you or me or anyone bringing home eightor nine-figure Powerball winnings.

So if your neighbors saw you working with an architect on what your mega-mansion will look like if you win, or sitting down with a financial adviser to plan your lavish golden years’ world-travel itinerary, they’d think you were silly. But they might also concede that, if that’s how you want to waste your money, well, it’s a free country!

The odds of any student suffering a fatal gunshot wound at school in the U.S. is roughly 1 in 614 million. Yet state legislatures and school districts are stumbling over one another to spend a collective fortune to prepare for “active shooter scenarios.”

The latest estimate on this new cottage industry’s annual cost is $3 billion. Spelled out numerically, that’s $3,000,000,000.

At a national education spending average of $12,000 per pupil, that sum is pulling funding away from a quartermillion students every year. And we hear education bureaucrats bellow about the drain from charter schools with enrollments in the hundreds.

The problem with the active-shooter preparation frenzy and its pricey accompanying accoutrements (think bulletproof whiteboards and gunshotdetector microphones) is that blind panic pushes logic and common sense out of the picture. Frantic fears are furthered by the random “lightning-strike” nature of school shootings (though one’s chance of being struck by lightning is 40,000 times more likely).

Last week, a duo of researchers at The Violence Project released new findings from a comprehensive, analytical look at the life histories of mass shooters. Their database compiled events dating back to 1966 for any shooter who killed four or more people in a public place, and back to 1999 for every active-shooter incident in a K-12 education facility.

The study included interviews with incarcerated perpetrators, families of shooters and victims, and responders and police, as well as students who planned shootings but changed their minds. It also involved a deep dive into shooter-linked literature: manifestos, suicide notes, social media posts and more.

The first finding is nothing new: School shooters are almost always students at the school. In addition, the researchers identified four frequently common characteristics: (1) They have been exposed to violence at an early age, often early childhood trauma. (2) They are angry or despondent over a recent event. (3) They study other school shootings, often online, to devise their own plan. (4) They have the means to carry out an attack.

Nearly every shooting reflected a mental-crisis breaking point, and in 80 percent of incidents, school shooters communicated to others in some way that they were in crisis. Most school shooters are too young to buy their own guns, so in four out of five instances they purloined family weapons.

Among the conclusions the researchers drew from their study is there’s no evidence any of the high-visibility, school-wide active-shooter preparation methods actually work. They might even make things worse: Since school shooters are themselves students, things like drills, lockdowns and simulations enable them to better plan their crimes. The Stoneman Douglas shooter, for example, reportedly used familiarity with the school’s lockdown procedures to inflict more casualties.

So besides spending large sums of money possibly traumatizing students over something that will likely never happen, districts that fund drills and cameras and target-hardening also tip off a prospective shooter on how to defeat or get around those very systems and measures.

Such activities also send the wrong message to all stakeholders. Lethal gun violence at school is an extreme aberration, more than twice as remote from the norm as a Powerball-funded retirement is.

Importantly, in almost every case where a student planned a shooting but abandoned it at the last minute, the reason was an adult reached out to them and restored a sense of hope.

Because mass school shooters typically also kill themselves, threats and hit lists are essentially suicide notes. Adults in schools should be trained not only to respond tactically to active-shooter situations, but also to recognize the predictable red flags and intervene to help students in crisis before they break.