Causes of Gun Violence in Schools

Causes of Gun Violence in Schools

Gun violence in schools just keeps increasing. How many of our kids are we willing to lose before we actually implement a plan of action to tackle this problem? Every year more than 20,000 children and youth under the age of 20 are killed or injured by firearms in the United States, and the numbers just keep increasing. We cannot afford to be quiet anymore. As a first step, we need to think about the causes. What causes gun violence in schools? What makes a person want to carry a gun and go shoot people? These are questions that we need to discuss before we are able to propose any solutions to the problem. In their article, "School Shooters: History, Current Theoretical and empirical findings, and strategies for prevention,” Catlin Bonanno and Richard Levenson discuss a few theories and characteristics of attackers. For instance, the authors talk about how stress and strain are big factors that cause the attackers to do what they do. They also discuss how there are five stages of strain and they basically indirectly answer the questions above. To begin with, strain can stem from our everyday life situations such as relationships, work, and school. But a major factor of strain that is discussed in the article is when a person is bullied or feels unaccepted by his or her peers. It has been proven that most shooters experienced bulling or were threatened or injured by one of their peers. This sums up the first stage of chronic strain.

When someone feels unaccepted by peers, they usually try to build connections or make relationships somewhere else, this leads to the second stage. Some individuals “either never find meaningful relationships with others or form relationships with students who [also] have been marginalized and who then become supportive of and/or encouraging of their violent antisocial feelings and beliefs” (p.4). Instead of making new friends or connections these individuals end up feeling even more marginalized or make connections with people who suffer the same problem. Making these non-meaningful relationships results in more strain and more suffering to the socially rejected individual.  

This leads to the third stage of strain which is when a person who has the two previous stages then faces events and experiences that seem catastrophic to an already troubled and isolated person.  This stage is basically the catalyst that fuels the attacks on schools. At this stage, the strained person starts feeling like there is nothing else to lose and this leads to the fourth stage; the planning stage. Just as the name implies it is the stage where the attacker starts gathering all the necessary equipment for the attack and making a plan. Finally the last stage is the massacre at the school. Looking at the number of stages that a person goes through before becoming an attacker shows that we, as a community, have many chances to prevent this problem from happening. As a matter of fact, even if a person is already at stage five it is still possible to stop the attack and prevent gun violence in schools. Because even though an attacker has already hit stage five there is still a need for “certain facilitating factors” to be in place such as the absence of security and the many things that might happen before committing the act. 

Another cause of gun violence can be "narcissism." Our current society has “overemphasized material comfort and narcissism [which in turn leads] to feelings of resentment, envy, and hatred toward others’ real or imagined success.” (p.5). These feelings can act as an impetus for attacks on schools, and such feelings have been identified in past school shooters. This adds one more thing to the list of causes of gun violence in schools. There is a massive amount of scenarios and causes of gun violence and we should not lump them into a single category.  

  
Looking at all these causes we can tell they interact with each other. Looking at this problem through a single scope will only limit the problems impacts rather than solving it. Therefore We need to realize that this problem has many different scenarios and not only one cause. Proposing solutions that may primarily change the attackers emotional states and prevent more massacres from happening should start as soon as possible.

Overview to Gun Violence in Schools

Imagine waking up one morning, a typical school day, getting your child, sister, or any member of your family ready for their school day. You can barely wake them up, they use the restroom and take forever, then get dressed, have breakfast, and finally leave for school. They leave to school like they always do, expect this time they never come back. It turns out that the family member was shot and killed along with his classmates in a mass shooting incident by an unidentified attacker. I hope I never have to deal with a situation such as this one, and I am guessing so do you. But a lot of people had to deal with such a situation and a lot will end up dealing with it. Due to guns we are now facing a problem that cannot be ignored. Right now according to Brady campaign guns kill an average of eight children and teens under the age of 20 everyday. Moreover, on average every year about 1895 children and teens are murdered in gun violence incidents. These numbers are beyond imagination. Gun violence in schools is out of control in the U.S and is only getting worse. Below is a chart demonstrating the number of incidents that happened in the United States since 1992. As a nation, we can do better than this.

Furthermore, there are many viewpoints on guns, the article named “Gun Law and Crime,” by Mark Guis explains the different viewpoints on guns. The author talks about how some people think that guns are a problem and they advocate to limit the access to them, while others think of owning guns as “a constitutionally protected right, and that gun control laws are not only unconstitutional but also very ineffective” (Guis, 6). The article also discusses how guns and their impact on the American society have been put on full display after incidents such as Sandy Hook (where 20 Children and 6 staff were killed) and Virginia Tech Shooting (where 32 people were killed). He also explains that dozens of innocent people have been killed at the hands of disturbed young men. And this all happened because they had easy access to guns.

Ever since guns were created they brought upon us many miseries and tragedies. People might claim that guns are useful when used by the right person. They can “protect” you and keep you “safe.” I find this claim to be a very narrow and unsophisticated one, it emits a lot of possibilities and cherry picks the benefits of gun ownership. When they said “used by the right person” I am pretty sure that person is human. Humans are imperfect by nature, when one is angry the trigger can be pulled instantly. Moreover, it is true that some people are better gun holders than others, but the “bad ones” still exist. When you give the so called “good gun owners” the right to access and have guns, you are also allowing the “not so good ones” get them too. All these are possibilities that need to be kept in mind. Gun ownership has some benefits, but its harms are very severe and not worth the benefits of keeping them.

Solutions for the problem of gun violence in schools have been implemented, but they are still far off from completely stopping gun violence. The government has passed many gun control laws, they were somewhat effective in reducing gun shootings, but the number of incidents happening is still way too large to be ignored. From my point of view there are much better solutions for gun violence than gun control laws. Catlin Bonanno and Richard Levenson propose some great solutions and ways of preventing such incidents in their article named “School Shooters: History, Current Theoretical and Empirical Findings, and Strategies for Prevention.” Some of these solutions are: studying the characteristics of the attackers and spreading awareness of these features. This way the attacker can be identified and dealt with before hand. The authors also include some theories of why the attackers would do such a thing as mass shootings; this can help in obtaining further knowledge about the attackers’ characteristics. These are good strategies to use when tackling this problem, even if guns were prevented there will still be illegal access to them, and this will reduce the gun violence incidents by a small degree. But if we as citizens were able to identify attackers, I can only imagine how much safer our community would be. This is problem that we all need to start dealing with because next time it might be me, you, a member of my family, or yours who is shot in a similar incident.