USA TODAY International Edition
School shootings: Fear vs. the facts
Educators try to ensure ‘safest place’ for kids
Americans have lived with the reality of school shootings for 20 years.
In that time, educators have hardened schools’ defenses with bulletproof entrances, active shooter training, security consultants and a host of sometimes creative, sometimes desperate solutions: from teacher-invented door-jamming devices to $120 “ballistic panels” for children’s backpacks.
Fears came full-circle this week: A 15-year-old faces two counts of murder and 12 counts of first-degree assault after police said he killed two and wounded more than a dozen others in a shooting spree at a rural Kentucky high school.
Tuesday’s attack, the third at or near a U.S. school in the past few days, took place 35 miles from a similar one that happened nearly 20 years earlier: the shooting Dec. 1, 1997, at Heath High School in Paducah, Ky.
In that shooting, 14-year-old Michael Carneal fired on an early morning prayer group, killing three and injuring four. The shocking attack — Carneal had ridden to school with his sister, a pistol stashed in his backpack — helped usher in a generation of fears about students killing classmates.
What often goes unnoticed in the wake of such shootings is an enduring, quiet truth, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University: “Schools are safe. They’ve been safe for a long time. They remain safe.”
Though the odds of any child being the victim of a school shooting are extremely long, he said, the only way to truly prevent your child from such an attack “is to home-school your kid.”
The truth of the matter, he said, is that for many kids, school is “the safest place for them, because they have structure.” Their neighborhood — even their home — may well be a violent, uncertain or unsafe place. For many
students, school offers a respite, not a threat.
Fox has long maintained that school shootings are overstated in the public imagination. Research shows that both their frequency and body count have dropped over the past 20-plus years. Young people, he said, are far more likely to die off school grounds — in a homicide, a fall, a firearm accident, a drowning or even while riding a bicycle — than they are in a school attack.
Researching a forthcoming book, Fox found that from 1999 to 2013, homicides, bicycle accidents, firearm accidents, falls and swimming pool drownings accounted for 31,827 of the total 32,464 reported deaths. Deaths in school shootings numbered 154, or less than 0.5%.
All the same, as recently as 2013, more than two-thirds of students reported that their schools had security cameras, locked doors and police or security guards on duty during the school day. About half of students said their school ran locker checks, presumably to uncover weapons.
Fox said parental pressure often pushes schools to engage in activeshooter drills, evacuations and more extreme exercises — even though few adults would tolerate fortress-like workplaces or stressful emergency drills in their everyday lives. If every time you boarded a plane, the flight attendants asked you to practice evacuating the aircraft from an inflatable emergency slide, he said, “that would be very upsetting” to travelers.
Yet parents tolerate drills that could well scare the heck out of young people, he said.
“I’m not sure how much drilling you need for kids to run,” he said. “The problem with drills is that they can be very traumatizing.”
In one type of self-defense training, coaches drill students to ambush a shooter en masse and throw hard objects at the shooter’s head. In 2015, an Alabama middle school sent letters home to parents asking them to send children the following day with “a canned food item” weighing 8 ounces.
“We realize at first, this may seem odd,” administrators said, “however, it is a practice that would catch an intruder off-guard. The canned food item could stun the intruder or even knock him out until the police arrive. The canned food item will give the students a sense of empowerment to protect themselves and will make them feel secure in case an intruder enters their classroom.”
The letter concluded, “We hope the canned food items will never be used or needed, but it is best to be prepared.”
In 2013, a high school in Massachusetts noted that each science class was “equipped with cans of soup” to be thrown at an intruder but that students and teachers had come up with “more creative ways” to handle attackers by proposing to throw textbooks, chairs, calculators and “other heavy classroom materials.”
An English teacher suggested equipping each student with a hardcover edition of the French novel Madame Bovary,
and a math teacher placed filing cabinets by the door to act as barricades.
Fox said a clever shooter could easily outsmart even a well-prepared school. In a shooting in 1998 at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Ark., two shooters ages 11 and 13 simply pulled a fire alarm and waited from a perch in the woods, picking off students as they filed out of the school.
Even solutions that seem sensible, such as classroom doors that lock from the inside, could have unintended consequences, such as predators trapping students inside, Fox said.
He suggested that schools enact “invisible” security measures that students can’t detect, such as classroom acoustic devices that detect gunshots and alert police. He also suggested that schools conduct emergency drills for teachers and staff only — after school or on weekends.
“All you really need the kids to know is that if something happens, listen to your teacher,” he said.
“Schools are safe. They’ve been safe for a long time. They remain safe.” James Alan Fox, professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University