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, such as teacher-invented door-jamming devices and $120 “ballistic panels” for kids’ 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 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 about 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 a 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 casualty toll have dropped over the past 20-plus years. Young people, he said, are far more likely to die off school grounds 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%.
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.
“I’m not sure how much drilling you need for kids to run,” he said.
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.
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. Four students and a teacher died in that attack.
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 students can’t detect, such as classroom acoustic devices that detect gunshots and alert police. “All you really need the kids to know is that if something happens, listen to your teacher.”