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This year has been by far the worst on record for gun violence in schools, the advocacy group Sandy Hook Promise said, citing research by the US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS).

The NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security counted 94 school shooting incidents in 2018, a near 60% increase on the previous high, 59, an unwanted record set in 2006.

The NPS database goes back to 1970 and documents any instance in which a gun is "brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason", regardless of the number of victims or the day of the week.

In 2018, high-profile attacks in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas, have intensified a national conversation about gun violence in schools.

Seventeen students and staff members were killed in Parkland. Ten students and teachers died in Santa Fe.

"This is beyond unacceptable," said Nicole Hockley, co-founder and managing director of Sandy Hook Promise. "It is inexcusable. Everyone has the power to stop violence before it starts, and we want to arm as many people as possible with the knowledge of how to keep their schools and communities safe."

Hockley's six-year-old son, Dylan, was shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in December 2012, with 19 other children and six adult members of staff.

In response to the NPS findings and to mark the sixth anniversary of Sandy Hook, on 14 December, Sandy Hook Promise will release a jarring public service announcement.

The short film, the group says, "reveals the many warning signs and signals exhibited by an at-risk individual that can lead to gun violence - signs that SHP wants to train individuals to recognize and intervene upon before a tragedy can occur".

The video, made by director Rupert Sanders, shows a series of interactions between high school students from a first-person perspective. Near the end, a student appears to retrieve an assault rifle from a bag.

In a statement, the group said: "While the scene is set with excited students in the hallways, there is another story unfolding simultaneously: a shooter planning to attack the school and exhibiting the warning signs of impending violence.

"These signs happen amongst peers and educators who could have identified these signs and intervened before it was too late. An astonishing 80% of school shooters told someone of their plans prior to taking action - yet no interventions were made."

The spot is an extension of the Know the Signs program, which Sandy Hook Promise says has been used to train more than 5.5 million people from more than 10,000 schools in all 50 US states.

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2018 is worst year on record for gun violence in schools, data shows

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Research cited by Sandy Hook Promise counted 94 incidents, a near 60% increase on the previous high, 59, set in 2006

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I feel as if no matter how much you mourn or debate about this topic, yes slight things might change, but it will still be the say and I feel as if it will still continue to happen and then we will be here...mourning again.

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Newtown, Connecticut Family on Losing Child in Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting

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"Richard and Krista Rikos say talking about their Jessica brings them tiny moments of comfort." Says Reporter

"There was so much pain and confusion when that announcement was made and life was just sucked out of everyone in the room." Says Richard Rikos.

"Its still not real that my little girl who is so full of life and who wants a horse so bad and who is going to get cowboy boots for Christmas, isn't coming home." Says Krista Rikos.

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Mitchell Dworet and Melissa Willey have never met and don't have much in common. Dworet, whom everyone calls Mitch, is an outgoing real estate agent from a busy part of Florida; Willey is a reserved stay-at-home mother of nine from a small town in southern Maryland. But one thing unites them: both had kids on a high school swim team, and now both of those kids are dead.

Dworet's 17-year-old son Nicholas was killed during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February. Soon after, some parents of other children who had been victims of gun violence contacted Dworet, offering him support, guidance and understanding. A month later, 1,000 miles north in Maryland, Willey's daughter Jaelynn, 16, was shot to death by a fellow student at Great Mills High School. When Dworet heard about it, he contacted Willey on Facebook. "I felt like I should reach out," he says. "I wanted to pay it forward."

An invisible network of similar threads connects hundreds of grieving parents across America. The connection is not formal. There is no organizational structure, no listserv, no roster of names. But their bond is strong enough that they often describe themselves-glibly but also in earnest-as "the club." There is only one criterion for membership: you sent a child to school one day and then never saw them again because of a bullet, leaving you with pain, loss and perhaps even other shattered children. "It's a club you spend your whole life hoping you won't ever become a part of," says Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan, 6, was killed in the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. "But once you're in, you're in."

Hockley learned quickly what being part of that community can mean. Just a month after Dylan's death, a group of parents and survivors of other school shootings flocked to her small town to show their support for a foundation she was launching in honor of the kids killed at Sandy Hook. In the crowd was a stranger named Tom Mauser, whose 15-year-old son Daniel was killed at Columbine High School in 1999. He flew from Colorado just to be there. Bob Weiss, whose daughter Veronika was shot dead along with five others near her campus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014, has a phone full of numbers of bereaved parents. They text each other on the anniversaries of their children's deaths. "I would consider them some of my closest friends," Weiss says.

This web of wounded souls spans America. They come from rural outposts and big cities, from Democratic strongholds and the reddest regions of Trump Country. They have different religions, income levels and ethnicities. What they share is the agony that comes with losing a child to gun violence in a place where that child was supposed to be safe. That calamity creates ineffable bonds. Even family and friends "can never fully, fully understand," says Annika Dworet, Mitch's wife. "So you feel a special connection with other parents who have gone through this." Joe Samaha, whose 18-year-old daughter Reema was shot to death at Virginia Tech in 2007, agrees: "We under-stand the pain, the trauma and the long-term aftermath. It's a brother- and sisterhood."

The network is sustained in part by its tragically ever expanding size. A recent 15-day period brought the killing of a 16-year-old by a fellow classmate in a crowded morning hallway at David W. Butler High School in North Carolina; the murder of 12 people on "College Night" at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Calif.; and the fatal shooting of a student outside Lamar High School in Texas. The reality of gun violence in America is that there are always more dead kids. There are always more devastated families. "There are constantly more people becoming part of this fraternity nobody wants to join," says Mary Kay Mace, whose daughter Ryanne, 19, was shot and killed in 2008 along with four other students at Northern Illinois University.

But there's another way this league of parents stands out. In a country riven by partisanship, the relationships between those whose children have been taken by bullets transcend the rancor. "When you've gone through this kind of tragedy with other people, you see their humanity, where they're coming from," says Darrell Scott, whose 17-year-old daughter Rachel was killed at Columbine. That doesn't mean they all share similar politics, or see eye to eye on gun-control measures, or even that they all like each other. Rhonda Hart, whose daughter was killed in May in Santa Fe, Texas, has her differences with the other afflicted families in her conservative community when it comes to solutions to the epidemic of gun violence. "Their idea of change is not exactly my idea, and it's better not to talk about it," says Hart. "But we check on each other and our other kiddos." There's a similar dynamic among those whose youngsters died at Sandy Hook. "I'm not saying -everyone always gets along," says Hockley of the mourning Newtown families. "But ultimately, we have respect for each other as people. And that's huge. You really can't overstate how huge that is."

The first thing a parent who has lost a child in a school shooting usually asks another is this: How old was your kid? Many regard the amount of time they had with their child as a defining feature of their relationship, both invaluable and finite. They will never get more of it. Every month that passes, every birthday, every hollow milestone, is imbued with painful significance. So they ask one another: How old was your kid? It's a way of establishing what each parent has lost. Did your boy grow to be as tall as you? Did you get to teach your girl to drive? Was your child old enough to write a Mother's Day card?

People who lose children in mass school shootings also compare procedural notes. Hart, who lost her daughter at Santa Fe, found she had a lot in common with Parkland parents she met. "They asked, 'At what point did you know what was going on? Was it when they sat you in the little room? Was it when they ordered pizza? Was it when the FBI person came in?' We realized that our experiences were the same." School shootings have become so common, says Hart, "that they have the response down to exact science. 'Who's ordering the pizza?' There's a protocol."

For many members of the club, the discovery of a child's death is not the hardest part. In the beginning, the tragedy is so intense, it's incomprehensible, they say. One mother, whose son was killed at Sandy Hook, remembers hearing the news and rejecting it. No, not my kid. Must be some kind of mistake. Others recall their legs going weak or spontaneously vomiting. Some say they floated into a kind of out-of-body detachment, like a kite snapped at the string.

The days and the months that follow a child's murder can resemble a kind of fugue state. Many find themselves slipping back into old routines, designed around a child who is no longer there. One father tells TIME that for weeks after his son was killed, he set his alarm and left the house at 7:30, even though the school drop-off was no longer necessary. Another mom still catches herself reaching for her daughter's small hand before crossing the street. It took months for Hockley to stop calling Dylan to dinner. Pamela Wright-Young, whose 17-year-old son Tyrone Lawson was shot to death outside a high school basketball game in Chicago in 2013, had to consciously break her habit of walking sleepily to his bedroom to wake him up. "Something in you stops when your child dies," she says.

Mass shootings make headlines. They draw TV trucks and reporters and FBI investigations. But that attention cuts both ways, says Sandy Phillips, whose 24-year-old daughter Jessi was shot with 11 others at a cinema in Aurora, Colo., in 2012. "When you lose a child violently and publicly, there's an outpouring of support at first," she says. But that attention fades. "Once the vigils are over and the media is gone, that's when things get really bad. The world moves on, and you don't. You can't. It's a pain you can't outrun."

More than half of those interviewed for this story described a permanent, profound loss of self after their child's death. "I used to have a good life, a blessed life, but it's ruined now," says Andrew Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow was killed in Parkland. "My kid is dead." Part of what makes it so hard is the manner and circumstance in which she was killed. "She didn't 'die.' She didn't 'pass away,'" says Pollack, his voice shaking with rage. "She was shot nine times at school. She was murdered."

Some say they are haunted by the chance involved in these twisted crimes. What if Reema Samaha had gotten into a different college? What if Wright-Young had forbidden her son from going to the game? Darshell Scott, a mom of five from Philadelphia, lives with the fact that her 17-year-old son Bernard, known as B.J., wasn't supposed to be at Overbrook High School on the day he was killed in 2013. B.J. had an unofficial suspension, but Scott called the school's vice principal to ask for a dispensation; her shift at work had changed, and she didn't want to leave him home alone. He was shot as he watched a fight that turned violent. "I beat myself up over that," says Scott, who adopted two daughters after B.J.'s death.

It's not uncommon for families to fall apart in the wake of such tragedies. Studies indicate that parents often become depressed and struggle with their marriages after a child's death. And kids who survive school shootings, when their siblings or classmates don't, are often later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Hockley's older son Jake, who was in the third grade when Dylan was killed at Sandy Hook, is now 14 and still processing the violence he witnessed."People don't think about all the ways people's lives are forever transformed," says Hockley, whose marriage disintegrated after the massacre. "There's this huge ripple effect of violence and anger and dysfunction."

Since their daughter's murder, Sandy Phillips and her husband Lonnie have devoted themselves full time to the formidable task of helping survivors rebuild their lives. They sold almost -everything they owned, moved into a mobile home and formed a nonprofit called Survivors Empowered. They now travel across the country responding to incidents of mass gun violence, working to connect families to networks and offering advice to the newly bereaved.

Some of the support the Phillipses offer is purely emotional, Sandy says. "We show up and look in these parents' eyes and basically say nothing except: We get it. We get it. You feel like dying, like you can't believe you're not already dead?" says Sandy. "I know that feeling. You're not alone." But much of the advice is what Sandy calls "a road map of what to expect." She and Lonnie advise about profiteers who descend after a school shooting to set up websites that purport to benefit children they've never met. They offer warnings about the conspiracy theorists and hoaxers who claim that anguished parents are "crisis actors," paid by gun-control organizations. "No one expects that kind of ugliness," says Sandy.

Some parents avoid the public debates that follow a tragedy. They don't want to talk to reporters or become advocates. But others say they have found solace in speaking out. Lori Alhadeff, whose 14-year-old daughter Alyssa was killed in Parkland, was elected to the Broward County school board in August after campaigning to improve school security. Mace was not initially outspoken about gun policy in the wake of her daughter's murder but decided to begin advocating for change a year later when 13 people died in a mass shooting in Binghamton, N.Y. "That punched through the fog" of her grief, she says. "I'd always thought that someone was going to do something about this, because we live in America and we're taxpayers and this is a civilized country. But I realized no one's stopping this. It's just going to keep happening and happening. And that's on us."

After his daughter was killed this year, Pollack was overcome by fury and frustration at officials' inaction. Why were school shootings still happening? "Why wasn't it fixed after Sandy Hook?" he says. "If we had fixed it back then, maybe my daughter would be alive."

The members of the club-like the citizens of the nation they live in-don't all agree on how to prevent gun violence in schools. Pollack believes the answer lies not in "endless discussions of gun control" but in expanding access to mental-health care and tightening school security. He has lobbied state legislators and school districts across the U.S. to provide metal detectors and hire trained security personnel. Darrell Scott, the Columbine father, and Scarlett Lewis, whose son Jesse, 6, was killed in his first-grade classroom at Sandy Hook, both advocate teaching children social-emotional skills, like empathy and compassion, in school. Willey suggests that mental-health screenings should be extended to every member of a household with guns.

Darshell Scott (no relation to Darrell) works at Saint Gabriel's Hall, a juvenile detention and rehabilitation facility near Philadelphia serving a population racked by poverty and stretched by the demands of low-wage jobs. She says stopping the epidemic of school shootings will require communities-families, neighbors, educators, congregation members--to work together. Three of the four young men indicted for her son B.J.'s murder came through Saint Gabriel's; she says she was a residential adviser to two of them. "They did their time and were released back into the community," she says. "There's nothing for the kids to believe in anymore."

Every year Scott gives a talk to the kids at Saint Gabriel's about what happened to her son and to the young men who brought guns they never intended to use to a fight that didn't have to take place. She passes around her son's autopsy and funeral photos. "I let them know: You could be one of the ones that's laid to rest," she says. "Or you could be one of the ones that's never going to see the outside of a prison door again."

Wright-Young lives in a Chicago neighborhood where gun violence is not uncommon. Her focus is on limiting access to those weapons. "I don't think that solves the whole problem," she says, "but if they don't have guns, they can't do as much damage." Hockley and Mauser are among the many others who are pushing for basic gun-control restrictions, including requiring adults to pass a background check before purchasing a gun and establishing a digital, centralized database so that those checks cross state lines.

Despite their disagreements, this group conducts their gun debates differently from much of the rest of America. "I believe in banning assault weapons, and the next guy may not believe in any gun reform," says Mitch Dworet. "But I will never stand there and go at it with any parent." Pollack, who thinks gun reform is a lost cause, agrees. "There are parents here [in Parkland] who I'm friendly with and I don't agree with their agenda, but I give them a pass," he says. "I'm going to do what I'm going to do, and you're going to do what you're going to do, and the idea is to keep our kids safe." Hart, whose politics lean to the left of those of her fellow grieving Texans, echoes the point: "You do you, and I'm going to do me," she says.

Darrell Scott once testified before Congress that the National Rifle Association was not to blame for his daughter's death. He was heralded as a champion of the Second Amendment, but he's uncomfortable having his views simplified that way. "I'm not the same person I was," says Scott, whose desire to foster student kindness led him to start a foundation, Rachel's Promise. His neighbor and fellow Columbine parent Mauser is an outspoken critic of the NRA. But both prefer to focus on their shared convictions. Each of them, for example, supports the idea of keeping weapons, or access to weapons, from people with mental-health issues who might be a danger to themselves or others. "We have to stop thinking of this issue as one extreme vs. another extreme and you have to choose a team," says Mauser.

On a national level, there is more of a consensus on certain gun policies than the political debate suggests. Polling shows that Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of a handful of gun restrictions. According to a 2017 Gallup survey, 96% of Americans, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, support background checks for all gun sales. Three-fourths favor a 30-day mandatory waiting period before a potential owner is permitted to receive a gun, and another 70% believe that all privately owned guns should be registered with police.

Many of us, in other words, are like Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, who describe themselves as "Texas Republican gun owners" but believe in modest gun restrictions. "The hardest thing for anyone," Sandy says, "is to challenge their own belief system." Language is part of that battle. Hart learned from the students in Parkland to not use the politically freighted term gun control. Instead, she says, "I am for kids not dying from getting bullets in their bodies."

But for many of these folks, shaping the national gun debate is secondary to the work that needs to be done right away and for which they alone are suited: helping others through the crisis. Life hasn't paused for Willey; her second oldest, Jaelynn, is dead, but she has eight other children, ranging in age from nearly 2 to 17 years old. While dealing with her own sorrow and loss, she has to help her kids handle theirs. "The kids come first," she says, describing her coping strategy. "But I don't know if that's working."

In another part of the country, Mitch and Annika Dworet, whose younger son Alexander was wounded in the Parkland shooting, just endured their first Thanksgiving without Nicholas. "It's not really like we're thankful," says Mitch. "How could you be?" But in the midst of his mourning, he does what he can to support other struggling initiates of this burdensome, blighted club. In the past few months, he has kept an eye on Willey's Facebook page, placing hearts on the photos she regularly posts of her daughter. It's the slenderest of connections, and Willey is too grief-stricken to respond. But he wants to make sure she knows that Jaelynn, like his Nicholas, is not forgotten.

Write to Haley Sweetland Edwards at haley.edwards@time.com.

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Parents Who Lost Children in School Shootings Find Comfort in a Group No One Wants to Join

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Mitchell Dworet and Melissa Willey have never met and don't have much in common. Dworet, whom everyone calls Mitch, is an outgoing real estate agent from a busy part of Florida; Willey is a reserved stay-at-home mother of nine from a small town in southern Maryland.

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“When you’ve gone through this kind of tragedy with other people, you see their humanity, where they’re coming from.” says Darrell Scott

“Once the vigils are over and the media is gone, that’s when things get really bad. The world moves on, and you don’t. You can’t. It’s a pain you can’t outrun.” Says andy Phillips

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The extraordinary number of kids who have endured school shootings since Columbine

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Thirteen at Columbine. Twenty-six at Sandy Hook. Seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Over the past two decades, a handful of massacres that have come to define school shootings in this country are almost always remembered for the students and educators slain. Death tollsare repeated so often that the numbers and places become permanently linked.

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It is just really sad to see all the handful of deaths there have been that have been related to school shootings and its just heartbreaking.

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Can you spot the signs of gun violence in this video by parents of Sandy Hook victims?

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I think its crazy how some dont notice the little things and I wish they would've cause it could have prevented an awful action. Some choose to bully one for not being like themselves and they can be a large lead to why some individuals who shoot up schools are teens.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Student survivors of the worst high school shooting in U.S. history took their message abroad for the first time on Saturday, calling for greater gun safety measures and sharing with educational professionals from around the world their frightening experience.

"It's so important to be educated, and to be educated in a productive sense is to feel safe at school," Suzanna Barna, 17, said.

The Feb. 14 attack in Florida killed 17 people, 14 of them students, becoming one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. The attack was carried out by a former student wielding an assault-style rifle who strode into one of the school buildings and opened fire.

"It's so important to be educated, and to be educated in a productive sense is to feel safe at school," Suzanna Barna, 17, said. "No child should ever have to go through what we did."

Barna and her classmates Kevin Trejos and Lewis Mizen, all seniors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., each wore a red ribbon representing the color of their school in honor of the victims as they talked about their experience and their push for stricter gun safety measures. They spoke in Dubai at the Global Education and Skills Forum that coincides with the $1 million Global Teacher Prize, awarded to one outstanding teacher from around the world each year.
READ NEXT: U.S. students stage school walkouts to protest gun violence
Trejos, 18, described the ordeal as "scary" and said students were crying and trying to comfort one another as they hid inside a closet in a classroom for nearly two hours.

"We didn't know where the shooter was. We didn't know if he was coming to our classroom next," Trejos said.

"We need to improve school safety," he added, saying that the students are not trying to ban guns "because we understand it's practically impossible to do," but are working to limit the accessibility of guns to criminals or potential criminals.

Like other school shootings before it, the attack has renewed the national debate on gun control. On Wednesday, tens of thousands of students across the U.S. walked out of their classrooms to demand action from lawmakers on gun violence and school safety.

President Donald Trump and some gun supporters say the solution is to put more guns in the hands of trained school staff - including teachers. The student survivors speaking in Dubai strongly disagree, saying more guns is not the answer.

Mizen, 17, said protocols shouldn't be preparing schools for when shootings happen, but should be stopping them before they happen.

"Teachers are there to educate their students. They shouldn't have to serve as the first line of defense between them and a rampant gunman on campus," Mizen said, eliciting applause from the audience packed with educators.

Mizen said that addressing the global forum in Dubai was as a chance to talk to world education leaders and stress the importance of safety in schools.

"If we can get the international body on our side then that will make it so much easier to make change back at home," he told The Associated Press.

Barna said that despite the sharp political divide over gun control in the United States, all can agree that schools and children should be safe. She is calling for laws that would limit access to high-capacity magazine firearms, like the AR-15 assault-style rifle used by the shooter in Florida.

Students are next planning a "March for Our Lives" rally in Washington Mar. 24. Since the shooting, they have taken trips to the U.S. capital and the Florida capital of Tallahassee to confront lawmakers. In response, some major U.S. retailers have put curbs on the sale of assault-style rifles and will no longer sell firearms to people younger than 21.

The Florida shooting was the latest in an era of school massacres that began with a shooting in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado that killed 13 people. The country's deadliest school shooting killed 20 children in first grade and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

"We've had to grow up a lot," Barna told the AP. "Emotionally it's been tough to deal with the loss we have to see every day, but we're also in the process of getting back to normal. It will happen eventually, but it's going to take time."

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Survivors of school shooting take gun control message abroad

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Student survivors of the worst high school shooting in U.S. history took their message abroad for the first time on Saturday, calling for greater gun safety measures and sharing with educational professionals from around the world their frightening experience.

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I think that gun control is a main thing we need to focus on because that would eliminate the shootings by a handful. With maybe checking peoples background, change the age limit, and "Red Flag" Laws which gives them more power to confiscate more weapons so there would be less of an issue.

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I feel as if they say they are going to do change all these laws like; raise prices of guns, limit violent video games, and arm teachers. All those are going to take time and in that time frame another shooting could possibly happen.

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The idea of arming teachers-or loosening state restrictions to allow concealed-carry permit holders to bring guns into schools-is often circulated after school attacks. It gained attention after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and was revived in the wake of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

But putting guns in the hands of school staff is often met with resistance from educators, who say they don't want the responsibility of carrying and securing a firearm on top of their already demanding jobs. Many teachers believe that arming themselves-and their peers-would make schools less safe.

Here's what you need to know about the divisive issue:

Who Supports the Idea?

President Trump, for one. At a speech just after the Parkland shooting, he argued that armed teachers with training and experience who "love their students" might be better able to protect them in an active shooting scenario than an armed police officer.

"A teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened," Trump said, referring to the former student who is accused of the slayings.

Not surprisingly, gun-rights advocates have long pushed for laws that allow educators to carry weapons.

There Are Already Teachers Carrying Guns at School

Many schools are "gun-free zones," but the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act allows states to authorize certain individuals to carry firearms on school grounds.

In addition to Texas, the states of Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota allow staff members-with certain caveats-to carry guns on school grounds.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety-a gun-control advocacy group-15 states allow concealed carry of some sort in schools, and this year two dozen states considered similar policies:

Adopting a Policy for Arming Teachers Could Be a Minefield

Among the questions schools who want to arm staff members have to answer:

who-exactly-is authorized to carry a firearm,

where should guns be stored, and

should armed employees get some sort of bonus.

There's also the thorny question of liability: Who would be responsible if something went wrong? Many things could go wrong, experts say-a student could find or steal a teacher's firearm, the weapon could accidentally discharge, or a teacher could shoot an innocent bystander during an active-shooter situation.

Arming staff could get expensive. A high-quality, name-brand, semi-automatic pistol or other type of handgun could run anywhere from $500 to $1,200. And the idea of diverting already stretched resources to these and other costs such as firearms training could be a very tough sell. (Perhaps that's why Texas is asking if its districts can tap into those federal dollars.)

Who Opposes the Idea?

All the major teacher, principal, school employee, and school security organizations oppose guns in schools, except when carried by a police or security officer.

And so do most teachers and Americans.

Teach Plus, a national advocacy group for teacher leadership, polled 1,233 teachers and found nearly 80 percent said they strongly oppose arming teachers in school.

The National Education Association surveyed 1,000 of its members and 82 percent of respondents said they would not carry a gun to school even if they had firearms training and were allowed to do so.

And a Gallup poll found less than 30 percent of teachers think that arming teachers would be very or somewhat effective in limiting the number of victims in a school shooting.

Education Week has spoken to many educators who think carrying a concealed weapon is , including school shooting survivors themselves.

Jim Moffatt, a retired principal who was shot by a student at Fergus High School in Lewistown, Mont., in 1986, actively campaigns against legislative efforts to arm teachers:

While their numbers may be smaller than those who oppose carrying guns, there are teachers, principals, and superintendents who favor it.

"I do think it's reasonable for someone like me, but if you look at the landscape of American educators at large, I don't think it's realistic," he said. "I don't represent the majority of teachers."

Jeffrey Woofter, a former sheriff and the superintendent of West Virginia's Barbour County school district, does not think that all school personnel should be armed either. But he believes that trained staff should be allowed to carry concealed weapons or have access to concealed weapons on campus.

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Should Teachers Carry Guns? The Debate, Explained

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The idea of arming teachers-or loosening state restrictions to allow concealed-carry permit holders to bring guns into schools-is often circulated after school attacks. It gained attention after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and was revived in the wake of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

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WASHINGTON - A commission appointed by President Donald Trump listed more than 90 "best practices" on Tuesday to prevent mass shootings at schools, but played down the president's controversialcall to arm teachers and administrators.

"Nothing is more important than protecting our nation's children," Trump said at a meeting of government officials and family members affected by school shootings.

The recommendations of the Federal Commission on School Safety ranged from long-discussed improvements to the instant background check system for gun purchases to more funding under the Stop School Violence Act. The group's emphasis is on action at the local level.

Trump created the commission in response to the shooting in February at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that claimed 17 lives.

At the time he touted the idea of arming teachers as a way to confront mass school shootings and referred to the sheriff's deputy at the school as a "coward."

The federal government cannot impose "one-size-fits-all solutions," Education Secretary Betsy Devos told reporters, so state and local governments need to work with their school districts on "holistic" approaches.

"Local problems need local solutions," DeVos said.

Suggestions included better access to mental health programs as well as increased use of extreme risk protection court orders to prevent firearms access to people who are considered dangerous.

As for arming teachers and administrators, DeVos said the report encourages states and school districts "to seriously consider the option of partnering with local law enforcement in the training and arming of school personnel."

Some Democratic lawmakers said the Trump administration should not even broach the possibility of arming teachers. They also criticized the report for ignoring gun control proposals in general.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said "only Betsy DeVos, President Trump, and the gun industry think the best way to stop a school shooting is to load schools up with guns."

He called for "tighter" gun laws "to make sure that criminals don't have access to guns and that no one can walk into a school with a weapon of war."

The report also challenged media coverage of shootings.

DeVos cited the "No Notoriety campaign," which she said is designed to "keep the focus on the facts and the victims, and urges journalists not to mention the names or publish photos of the perpetrators."

Trump appointed the commission shortly after a Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., left 17 students dead.

Family members invited to the White House to discuss the report expressed support.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals lauded the committee's effort, but said it was "puzzling" that the commission would spend "untold tax dollars on rediscovering well-known school safety strategies."

JoAnn Bartoletti, executive director of the principals' association, also said the commission undercut its credibility "by staying mute on the issue of firearm access and other prevention efforts that reduce the need to turn schools into fortresses."

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/18/donald-trump-commission-school-shootings-require-local-solutions/2354694002/

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Donald Trump commission says local governments need to address school shooting issues

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WASHINGTON - A commission appointed by President Donald Trump listed more than 90 "best practices" on Tuesday to prevent mass shootings at schools, but played down the president's controversialcall to arm teachers and administrators. "Nothing is more important than protecting our nation's children," Trump said at a meeting of government officials and family members affected by school shootings.

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The following table lists the worldwide school shootings from 1996 to the present. Find the date, location, and a short description of each incident.

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I think there can be mixed emotions with this debate. The children/teens could have easier access to a weapon which is very scary and more risky but then again you can also defend yourself if an intruder were to come in.

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I wonder if the government is ever going to do something about it. There has been a very over whelming about of shootings and nothing has changed.

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At the request of Theory to Practice, alumnus Peter Langman-a sought-after expert on the psychology of young people who commit rampage school shootings-recently sat down with one of his former professors in Lehigh's College of Education, Professor of Counseling Psychology Arnold Spokane, whose research also touches on violence in schools.

Their conversation uncovered some fascinating insights on the individuals who conduct school shootings as well as what teachers, administrators, parents, and students can do to help prevent these tragedies. The following is an edited version of their discussion.
Q: The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, approximately 1 percent of students aged 12 to 18 reported being the victim of violence at school. For serious violence, it is one tenth of 1 percent. Does the public perception of the prevalence of violence in schools match the reality?
Peter Langman (PL): First of all, we have to define what you mean by school violence. Some people would include bullying. My focus is on the large-scale school shootings. I can talk about that. There is also the whole issue of gang violence. In terms of school-related homicides, those are down significantly. In fact, violent crime in general has gone down over the last 20 years in the U.S. However, that is not people's perception, so I think that is where the media comes into play.

Also what comes into play is the fact that even when school-related homicides are going down, when they do occur, it seems like they are occurring en masse. It is not just one kid shooting another kid or stabbing another kid. It is the large-scale rampage attacks that gets the media's attention.

In terms of numbers, school shootings are such a rare phenomenon. Most of us will not see a school shooting in our lifetime. Someone once put together statistics on secondary school shootings, and you would have to be at that school for like 6,000 years before you would see a school shooting. That is how rare they are.
Q: What are some of the factors that lead kids to reach the point of becoming violent in school? And is it a slow build, or do they just snap?
PL: Generally, it is a long, slow build. They don't tend to snap as people talk about it-"He's a nice kid, I guess he snapped." You don't just wake up one day and become a mass murderer.

What I outline in my book-Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters-is three distinct types of people who commit school shootings. I think that is important to understand because they come from different backgrounds, and they do what they do for different reasons.

The three types are the traumatized shooter, the psychopathic shooter, and the psychotic shooter.

The traumatized shooters-they come from dysfunctional families, poverty, abuse in the home, a number of them were sexually abused outside the home, parents are poor, kids bounce around between mom to dad to grandma, sometimes they are in and out of foster care, there is no stability. And eventually, the rage and depression build.

The other two types come from essentially stable and intact families. One type is the psychopathic, someone who is narcissistic, doesn't care about other people, no empathy, no remorse, no respect for laws and regulations or authority, they are going to do what they feel like doing. They are often sadistic, so they get a thrill over having the power over life and death.
Arnold Spokane (AS): Are these psychopathic shooters isolated?
PL: They don't typically have a real strong social group. They may have some friends and they may have some followers. Some of them are fairly isolated.

But when you are talking about isolated, the third group is the psychotic group. This group is under the schizophrenia spectrum and some of them are very isolated. Take Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. He didn't have a friend. He didn't speak to anyone in four years of college. He was an extreme loner. Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook [Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adult staff members were shot to death in December 2012] spent most of his time in his mother's basement playing videogames and watching movies. He was very isolated. So when you see that extreme isolation, this is usually with the psychotic shooters. They are having hallucinations, they hear voices talking to them, paranoid delusions, delusions of grandeur.

Going back to your question about slow build or do they snap, people may be evolving into schizophrenia over a period of years. There often is a series of events shortly before the attack that pushes them over. What you see is there is some kind of an event, or they are rejected by a girl. They get in trouble at school-it may be a minor thing, but there is some kind of conflict with the school. Sometimes they get into trouble with the law, sometimes drugs or alcohol. So you see one thing on top of another thing on top of another thing, and it is building and building and building. And often they talk to their friends about school shootings, maybe about their own plans. Sometimes these friends are supportive, or they don't say, 'No you can't do that' or tell an adult, so there is a sense, 'It is OK with my friends-they don't object to it,' and if they do object, they may say 'I was just kidding-I would never do that.' But really, they are planning and it builds and builds. There is often peer encouragement of some kind. Sometimes the shooters have role models for violence. They look at Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School as a role model or Charles Manson or Hitler. They get into various ideologies that would support violence as appropriate. There are a lot of things coming together.

But you don't have an ordinary kid who wakes up one day and becomes a mass murderer.
Q: What's the role of media, and videogames, movies, and television programs?
PL: There is the media as in the news media, and then there is violent media as in films and so on. Some kids will tell you after the fact that they were very much influenced by something in the media. For example, [Eric] Harris and [Dylan]

Klebold from Columbine, the code name for their attack was NBK, which is Natural Born Killers. They loved the movie and watched it so many times they could essentially recite the dialogue. Another kid, Jamie Rouse, said after he saw Natural Born Killers that it made killing look fun, it made killing look easy.

When you talk about videogames or violent films, on the one hand, millions of kids and adults play violent videogames and watch violent movies and never pick up a gun. But there are a few kids who are already at risk, who may be close to the edge, who find sometimes inspiration in violent media.

AS: Relatively speaking, school shootings are very infrequent acts. And we don't have enough evidence yet to know which perpetrator is going to actually wind up doing something, so it is very difficult to assess or predict who will actually go through with a shooting and who will not. There may be a large number of kids, who will fit that description but who won't do it so that is the trick-to try to figure out who will do it.
Q: Regarding school violence, what should teachers and administrators be on the lookout for in terms of red flags?
PL: When you talk about warning signs, there are a couple of key things. One is attack-related behavior. This means anything a kid or an adult is doing that indicates he or she is planning an attack. And that could be stockpiling weapons, researching other shooters, recruiting a friend to join the attack, or it could be warning a friend to stay away from school that day.

The latter things fall under a category called leakage-when people leak their intentions. So secondary school shooters often leave quite a trail, they often talk about their plans with their friends and encourage them to join them. And if those kids were trained on those warning signs, they'd know they'd better tell someone.

And if schools were trained on how to recognize threats, they could prevent that attack. Sometimes kids are so obsessed with another shooter that they model themselves after that kid, quote them on their website, etc. In a couple of cases, they have even made pilgrimages to the places where those shootings occurred. For example, in 2006 a kid named Alvaro Castillo lived in Hillsborough, N.C., and he was obsessed with Columbine. In fact, he tried to commit suicide on the seventh anniversary of Columbine. His father came home and stopped him. He was psychotic. He decided God had spared his life for a higher purpose, which was to commit a Columbine-type attack. He lived in North Carolina and convinced his mother to drive him to Littleton, Col., where he videotaped from the car scenes of Columbine High School. They drove by the house Eric Harris had lived in. While he was out there, he bought a black trench coat just like Harris wore. He was obviously obsessed with Harris and Klebold and Columbine. And a few months after his attempted suicide on the anniversary of Columbine, he committed a small-scale shooting [after shooting and killing his father]. Fortunately, he didn't do too much damage. But his mom obviously knew he was obsessed with Harris and Klebold. He was in love with his gun, named his gun, slept with his gun; his gun was his best friend at the time. So you have an obsession with firearms, obsession with Columbine, mental instability-a lot of warning signs.
Q: Overall, what are some of the most important things teachers and administrators can do to help prevent violence in schools?
PL: Schools need to have threat assessment procedures-multidisciplinary teams within the school, trained on threat assessment. Right now at the secondary school level, the focus is on lockdown procedures. That is what you do when there is an armed intruder in the building. That is a little late. Lockdown procedures are going to minimize the damage; they won't prevent an attack. The idea of threat assessment is you look for the warning signs that lead you to the attack-related behavior, you identify the risk before someone ends up with a gun in the school. And that means training the students, too, because if anyone knows who's planning something, it is most likely the other kids, and they need to be trained. For example, if you see this or hear this, this is what you do and why you do it. And even if it is your friend who you think will be mad at you, if you don't tell anyone, your friend is probably going to be dead or in jail for the rest of his or her life. You may be dead, your other friends may be dead, and you are going to have to live with that. So kids need to be guided through and maybe given some role-plays and scenarios. They need to think through the ramifications.

In addition, teachers need to be trained in warning signs they may see that other people wouldn't. There are kids who have written stories about kids killing other kids at school and handed them in as school assignments. A few weeks later they do exactly what they wrote about in their papers.

When Cho was in high school, Columbine occurred, and he wrote a paper in favor of Columbine. Virginia Tech didn't know that, but when he was at Virginia Tech, he wrote a paper about a guy named Bud who was planning a school shooting. Bud ended up not doing it, but there was an interdepartmental email from Virginia Tech where one of his professors told colleagues, 'Every assignment he had handed in has been about shooting people.' So teachers may see suspicious school assignments. Harris and Klebold made a video in their video production class called "Hit Men for Hire," where a kid was being picked on, and he hired Klebold to come in and shoot people.
AS: Do you have any advice to students coming into the College of Education on how to conceptualize problems with violence in schools and school safety and education broadly for children?
PL: A few thoughts come to mind. The first is, avoid reductionist thinking. So much of the material on school shooters points to a single cause or a single explanation. The kid was bullied. Well, millions of kids are bullied in this country and maybe one in ten million becomes a school shooter. He may have been bullied, and he may not have been. In some cases, maybe he was the bully. Or people blame the media. He watched Natural Born Killers. Yes, but so did millions of others. There is a tendency to focus on one cause, but you have to think very broadly. That may have been a factor, maybe he was bullied. Or he was obsessed with the videogame Doom. But why was he obsessed with Doom? What did that do for him as a person, why was he drawn to it? What was the family life like? Was there a lot of rejection? Was he using drugs? What of a dozen or more different factors came together to cause him to do this?
AS: In other words, look at a child's context deeply and broadly and not superficially. Know these kids.
PL: Yes.

AS: There is a phenomenon that occurs, I'm not sure how often, but someone will have an inkling or small thought or feeling that a student is in trouble or something is wrong, but they will gloss over it. And I think it is important in the training to trust those suspicions or small feelings and not just dismiss them. Rather, take some action and find out whether that is a kid who is in trouble and whether there needs to be something done to respond to it.

PL: If you read 10,000 papers in your career, and suddenly you read one and you start getting nervous, pay attention to that.

AS: Even a student's behavior that seems out of line. We are psychologists, but even as professors and trainers, we may see things, and they may hit as almost a subconscious feeling about someone. You may act on it, or you may just forget about it and go on about your business. I think the tendency to go on about your business is a mistake now, and I think monitoring behavior and recognizing it as suspicious is very critical.

I think it is hard for teachers and school personnel when their ratio [of students] is so high. Now with cutbacks with the economy, collateral personnel are now being withdrawn, and that is the wrong way to go. It means fewer eyes on the classroom.

What we need is more people looking, more people checking their instincts for what might be going wrong and then acting on those instincts to try to prevent them. Instead, I don't think the economics we are dealing with is backing that up. Instead, we are having fewer eyes on the classroom, fewer eyes on the school and neighborhood.

And there is very good evidence that the more monitoring you have of any environment, the safer that environment is.

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Written by Elizabeth Shimer Bowers | Illustrated by Edel RodriguezAt the request of Theory to Practice, alumnus Peter Langman-a sought-after expert on the psychology of young people who commit rampage school shootings-recently sat down with one of his former professors in Lehigh's College of Education, Professor of Counseling Psychology Arnold Spokane, whose research also

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"Generally, it is a long, slow build. They don’t tend to snap as people talk about it—“He’s a nice kid, I guess he snapped.” You don’t just wake up one day and become a mass murderer." Says Peter Langman

"The traumatized shooters—they come from dysfunctional families, poverty, abuse in the home, a number of them were sexually abused outside the home, parents are poor, kids bounce around between mom to dad to grandma, sometimes they are in and out of foster care, there is no stability. And eventually, the rage and depression build.The other two types come from essentially stable and intact families. One type is the psychopathic, someone who is narcissistic, doesn’t care about other people, no empathy, no remorse, no respect for laws and regulations or authority, they are going to do what they feel like doing. They are often sadistic, so they get a thrill over having the power over life and death." Says Peter Langman

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Cellphone Videos Reveal Florida School Shooting Suspect's Intentions: 'You All Will Die' | TIME

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I just feel as if there are very cruel people in this world or at the fact that he has no mercy. He brushes it off as if it was nothing.

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It is incredibly sad as you continue to just scroll and scroll to see all the incidents and all those innocent people.