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On April 10th 2017 at North Park Elementary a 53 year old man enter the school site armed and in look for his wife . It is said he the 2 children wounded/ killed were not the man's target. This man has had criminal background.

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After being admitted onto the campus of North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, a 53-year-old Riverside man went to his estranged wife's special education classroom and opened fire Monday, fatally shooting her and striking two students before killing himself, police said.

One of the students, an 8-year-old boy named Jonathan Martinez, died after being rushed to the hospital.

The teacher was identified as Karen Elaine Smith, 53. Her husband, the shooter, was identified as Cedric Anderson of Riverside, also 53.

Without saying anything, Anderson quickly opened fire with a large-caliber revolver, killing Smith and striking two students who were standing behind her, according to San Bernardino Police Department Chief Jarrod Burguan.

He reloaded at least once, the chief said.

Fifteen students between first and fourth grades were in the special education classroom, as were two adult aides.

Authorities responded to the elementary school, located at 5378 N. H St., to a report of an active shooter just before 10:30 a.m., according to San Bernardino City Unified School District spokeswoman Maria Garcia.

When officers arrived, they found a man and a woman dead in a classroom, as well as two injured students, Burguan said. The gunman was among those who were down, according to the chief, who said there was no further threat to the school.

The two students who received gunshot wounds were taken to Loma Linda University Medical Center's trauma center; both were initially listed in critical condition. Martinez died shortly after arriving at the hospital.

Burguan later said the surviving student was a 9-year-old boy who was in stable condition.

The motive for the shooting was not immediately known. The couple had only been married for a few months and had been separated for a month or so, Burguan said.

Anderson has a criminal history, including domestic violence, weapons and possible drug charges, according to the chief. It's not clear what charges, if any, Anderson has been convicted of.

Before the victims were identified, San Bernardino police Capt. Ron Maass said at an early afternoon news conference that the gunman had gone to the classroom to visit the adult female victim.

The children were not the gunman's targets, the captain said.

"We believe the two children were the unfortunate recipients of injuries by being in the proximity to the female at the time of the incident," Maass said.

The parents of both student victims have been notified.

"This is a tragic incident that has befallen our city," police Lt. Michael Madden said at the news conference.

Before going to the classroom, the shooter checked in at the school's front office, which is the only point of entry to the campus while classes are in session, school district Superintendent Dale Marsden said. About 500 students attend the school.

Burguan noted that it's not uncommon for a spouse to come onto campus and request to drop something off with a teacher, which is what Anderson did.

The elementary school does not have uniformed police officers or campus security, unlike the district's middle and high schools, according to Garcia.

"Our middle schools have campus security and all of our high schools have uniformed police officers," she said.

Garcia explained that the district re-examined its security measures after the Dec. 2, 2015, terror attack that left 14 dead at the Inland Regional Center, which is about 7 miles south of North Park. All district principals have had lockdown training and know "exactly what to do" if there's an active shooter report, she said.

"Especially after Dec. 2 we actually took a closer look at all of our campuses and what we can do to increase student security and campus safety. The majority of our principals have participated in lockdown training ... They know exactly what to do and what they need to do to keep students safe," Garcia said.

The first units arrived on scene within seven minutes of getting the call, Burguan said. Within minutes, eight officers were at the school.

The San Bernardino County Fire Department first confirmed there were multiple victims at approximately 10:45 a.m., but did not provide a count.

Students at Cal State University San Bernardino, which is not far from the elementary school, were asked to shelter in place amid the active shooter report, the university tweeted. The shelter in place order was removed about an hour later.

North Park parents and guardians were asked to go to Cajon High School and have a picture ID in order to pick up their students, the school district tweeted. Some parents expressed confusion after contradictory information was released about where students could be picked up.

"If parents are looking to reunite with their children, all kids are being transported to Cajon High School," Garcia said.

All students were evacuated from the North Park campus by noon, according to the district spokeswoman.

Some students may need to be interviewed by authorities, which could take up to three hours, authorities said. Police urged parents who were going to pick up their children to be patient.

The students are being "well cared" for at Cajon, according to police spokeswoman Lt. Vicki Cervantes. She tweeted that the children had snacks, played games and watched a Disney movie as they waited to go home.

In addition to North Park, Cajon Elementary School and Hillside Elementary School were also initially placed on lockdown, according to the school district.

North Park Elementary will be closed for at least the next two days. Parents with questions are urged to call the district office at 909-381-1100.

The county's Department of Behavior Health tweeted that it was monitoring the situation and was preparing to deploy health crisis teams to the school, as needed.

A team of 12 victim advocates are assigned to help parents and students, San Bernardino County District Attorney Mike Ramos said. Any parent who needs help should call the DA's victims' services department at 909-382-3846.
KTLA's Jennifer Thang, Anthony Kurzweil and Nisha Gutierrez-Jaime contributed to this story.

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san bernardino city unified school district

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San Bernardino School Shooting: Man Kills Wife Then Himself; 1 of 2 Students Wounded Has Died

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After being admitted onto the campus of North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, a 53-year-old Riverside man went to his estranged wife's special education classroom and opened fire Monday, fatally shooting her and striking two students before killing himself, police said.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Preventing and Preparing School Shootings

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Preventing and Preparing School Shootings

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Implement a threat assessment team, Develop an emergency management plan, Create a crisis communications plan, Train staff, Conduct site assessment,Form community partnerships, and Conduct drills and tabletop exercises.

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All acts of gun violence are tragic, but few events shock the nation like school shootings. Educational institutions are understandably seeking ways to prevent these attacks. While school shootings are difficult to predict, seven promising practices for prevention emerge from national studies.

Implement a threat assessment team. Studies show attackers often engage in behaviors that concern others prior to a shooting. Threat assessment teams seek to gather and assess information about these actions from sources across campus and intervene to manage a threat or connect the person of interest with helpful resources. The training and composition of an institution's threat assessment team is critical to its effectiveness. Schools should hire a threat assessment expert-often a mental health or law enforcement professional-to train and advise its team.

Develop an emergency management plan. The plan should address critical response practices, such as lockdowns, evacuations, parent-student reunification, and how to mobilize mental health services. Institutions should tailor their plans for different districts, campuses, and buildings instead of a one-size-fits-all approach. Regularly review and update emergency management plans to help correct deficiencies.

Create a crisis communications plan. Honest and timely communication when a school shooting occurs can improve public trust, protect the institution's reputation, and maintain financial stability. A crisis communications team should include personnel with expertise in communications and influential administrators who may be spokespersons in a crisis. Ensure the team receives media training and meets before a crisis to prepare a coordinated response.

Train staff. The first line of defense against school shootings is a vigilant staff trained to recognize and report potential indicators of violence and assist law enforcement or other first responders. The Department of Homeland Security offers free courses, materials, and workshops-many written for educational institutions-to prepare employees for an active shooter situation.

Conduct site assessment. Examine campus facilities and grounds to identify security weaknesses, such as:

Unlocked doors

Ineffective communications systems

Line-of-sight issues for surveillance cameras

Broken fences or gates

Traffic patterns that impede access by emergency responders

Form community partnerships. Strong relationships with community service providers, such as police, fire departments, emergency management, and local mental health experts, can help institutions craft and practice emergency plans, build a threat assessment team, and train staff. Experts recommend that educational institutions meet with their community partners at least two times a year. For example, many schools meet annually with local police and fire departments to provide blueprints of each campus building.

Conduct drills and tabletop exercises. A campuswide active shooter drill should be conducted periodically; many institutions do it annually. While full-scale drills are time and labor intensive, institutions should consider tabletop exercises as an alternative or supplement to live drills. The FBI recently published a set of tabletop exercises that address school shootings.

Resources

1. Department of Education: Campus Attacks - Targeted Violence Affecting Institutions of Higher Education

2. Department of Education: Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools - Active Shooter Situations

3. Department of Homeland Security: Active Shooter Preparedness Free Resources

4. Department of Homeland Security: Primer to Design Safe School Projects in Case of Terrorist Attacks and School Shootings

5. FBI: Mass Victimization - Promising Avenues for Prevention (Tabletop exercises on page 55)

6. Guide for Developing High-Quality Emergency Operations Plans for Institutions of Higher Education

7. K-12 Comprehensive School Safety Guide - Self Assessment Checklist (Appendix page 135)

8. National Association of School Resource Officers: Best Practice Considerations for K-12 Schools in Active Shooter and Other Armed Assailant Drills

9. National School Safety and Security Services - Best Practices for School Security and Emergency Preparedness Planning

10. School Security Design - Planning to Mitigate Risk and Avoid Liability

By Joe Vossen, risk management counsel

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Preventing and Preparing for School Shootings

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All acts of gun violence are tragic, but few events shock the nation like school shootings. Educational institutions are understandably seeking ways to prevent these attacks. While school shootings are difficult to predict, seven promising practices for prevention emerge from national studies. Implement a threat assessment team.

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School officials should: Undertake a comprehensive security assessment of the school grounds, buildings, safety policies and emergency procedures. Each school will have different results but a detailed review will help to highlight any holes in the policies or plans. Work with community resources including school resource officers, probation officers, and psychiatric professionals to access and monitor the students’ behavior and activities. Implement bully identification and prevention programs. Create conflict resolution seminars and plans to teach students positive and peaceful ways to deal with stressful instances of conflict before they can turn to violence.

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When it comes to child safety in school, law enforcement, school officials, and parents have all come to a similar conclusion-the best way to combat school shootings is to work toward preventing them altogether. A precluded event is far preferable than a rapid response to an active shooter situation. This, however, may be easier said than done. A recent study done by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, in conjunction with the International Association of the Chiefs of Police, highlights many of the causes and responses to school violence.

There is no one person or position that can effectively recognize and prevent potential violence in schools. It takes the entire community working together to identify the behaviors that can lead to violent incidents and school shootings. Here are some key points from the study above:

The Role of School Administrators, Teachers and Staff in Preventing School Shootings:

School officials should...

Undertake a comprehensive security assessment of the school grounds, buildings, safety policies and emergency procedures. Each school will have different results but a detailed review will help to highlight any holes in the policies or plans.

Work with community resources including school resource officers, probation officers, and psychiatric professionals to access and monitor the students' behavior and activities. These stakeholders should become a constant and regular face in these schools and should be trained on the different types of violence likely to occur in the school, and how to document and report concerning behaviors.

Create a climate that encourages students, staff, and parents to share potential threats with the school and take these threats seriously. Consider an anonymous confidential hotline in the district.

Implement bully identification and prevention programs. Statistics show that 75% of school shooters were bullied in school and 61% were motivated by revenge against these perceived persecutors.

Create positive incentives to reward anti-bullying behavior and create a culture of acceptance and good citizenship. Involve community leaders and law enforcement to publicly recognize these positive behaviors.

Create conflict resolution seminars and plans to teach students positive and peaceful ways to deal with uncomfortable or stressful instances of conflict before they can turn to violence.

Consider an alert system that would allow rapid response to a burgeoning threat of violence.

The Role of Parents:

Parents should...

Report any potentially threatening behavior if their child mentions it.

Be included in the implementation and design of the safety plans within the schools so they can reinforce many of these ideas at home.

Regularly discuss key topics, on an age appropriate level, that review the schools policies on bullying, tolerance and good citizenship. They should also make an effort to reach out to their child and stay active in their school activities, concerns and problems.

Be given resources to educate them on potentially dangerous materials in their home including prescription drugs, alcohol, and firearms, and how to spot the warning signs of dangerous or destructive behavior.

The Role of Law Enforcement:

Law enforcement officers should...

Work in tandem with schools to educate the stakeholders and address the issues that lead to school violence.

Create a school resource officer program, which will deter violence by being a visible presence in the school.

Serve on threat and disciplinary action teams with teachers, counselors, and school officials.

Initiate programs with schools and parents to address school truancy. Participate in programs for juvenile offenders to prevent repeat offences.

Maintain a constructive relationship with schools, students, and parents that will highlight the law enforcement officer's role as a problem solver and positive role model through training seminars, sponsored recreational activities, and general presence.

As you can see, there are countless paths to preventing school shootings. This list is only a fraction of the opportunities for school officials, parents, and community leaders to work in tandem with law enforcement to create a positive and safe environment for our students and our community. It is best to prevent these tragedies before they occur. When a school shooting does occur, we rely on our network of law enforcement officials to protect our schools and the Hero 911 app is one tool in that arsenal. For more information, learn about our mission.

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Preventing School Shootings | Hero911 Blog

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When it comes to child safety in school, law enforcement, school officials, and parents have all come to a similar conclusion-the best way to combat school shootings is to work toward preventing them altogether. A precluded event is far preferable than a rapid response to an active shooter situation.

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These are the actions and implementing programs designed to curb school violence by the school administrators: Physical surveillance, including weapons deterrence and the presence of security guards or officers on campus. School policies designed to prevent violence by punishing those who perpetrate violence. Instruction-based programs designed to address the precursors of violence, including bullying. Profiling of potentially violent individuals. Counseling at-risk students. Conflict mediation and resolution.

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School Violence: Prevalence, Fears, and Prevention

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While we are waiting for evaluations to be conducted, decisionmakers can make meaningful choices by matching their goals with the primary goals of the various approaches. School-based violence prevention approaches can address (1) outbursts of violent behavior (e.g., shootings), (2) the precursors of violence (e.g., hostile school climate, bullying), and (3) the fears and anxieties associated with each.

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They say that in order to reduce the prevalence of school rampages, we should also reduce the prevalence of bullying, and it should start in the elementary school years, when bullying peaks. Most states. including Massachusetts. now have anti-bullying statutes, but many such laws are less than effective

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In the aftermath of the tragic massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.., President Obama has called for a national conversation regarding the prevention of future attacks on America's children. Thus far, the possibility of eliminating semi-automatic weapons has taken center stage. Yet there are other possibilities - perhaps vastly more effective than any gun control measures - that should be considered in the coming weeks and months.

In our quest to reduce school murder, we ought to be sure that our efforts can be generalized beyond the most recent incident. Rampage killers usually do not target first-graders, as was the situation at Sandy Hook School in Newtown. The last episode of a massacre at an elementary school occurred in January 1989, when a 22-year-old man shot to death five children on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California.

Since then, the overwhelming majority of school rampages have been perpetrated by middle- and high-school students who - having being bullied, humiliated, or ignored on a daily basis--target their classmates. They feel like pariahs or outcasts, and decide to get even with the entire school or community.

As adults, even former students do not necessarily recover from their days being rejected by their peers. The Newtown killer had reportedly been a student in the school he targeted for his attack. Apparently, his negative experiences in the classroom never left his consciousness. Not unlike rampage murderers in Pearl, Mississippi in 1997 and Springfield, Oregon in 1998, the 20-year-old killer at Sandy Hook School first took the life of a parent and then opened fire at a school. The random selection of victims suggests that he sought revenge against society's most cherished members - its children.

If we want to reduce the prevalence of school rampages, we should also reduce the prevalence of bullying, and it should start in the elementary school years, when bullying peaks. Most states. including Massachusetts. now have anti-bullying statutes, but many such laws are less than effective. Schools should be held responsible for allowing such practices to continue unabated. Any school that fails to intervene should face tough sanctions.

Unfortunately, there are distressed individuals who were victimized during an earlier era when our schools were less enlightened. As adults, a few former outcasts may continue to think about getting even with teachers and classmates. At Virginia Tech in 2007, for example, the killer of 32 innocent college students and faculty chose to target a convenient and vulnerable set of victims on campus who acted as surrogates for his real enemies - his classmates in middle- and high-school who had humiliated him. The Newtown killer may have employed the same psycho-logic.

A particularly effective response to school shootings is to break the culture of silence that has characterized many of our schools. In the past, a student who overheard a threatening remark in the hallway would very likely ignore it. Snitching was regarded as uncool, even if it had the potential to save lives.

Since the Columbine massacre in 1999, however, students have been more willing to inform to a resource officer, a parent, or a teacher. As a result, a number of potential school massacres have been averted including incidents in Marshfield and New Bedford. We should do everything possible to make informing about a threatening peer as socially acceptable as possible.

Another effective measure would be to reduce the media coverage of school rampages to a reasonable extent. Of course, journalists have not only a right but a responsibility to inform the public regarding important news events. Also, the grieving residents of Newtown have received comfort from the extensive media attention.

But excessive publicity - 24-hour non-stop television coverage nationally over a long period of time - is what fuels the copycat phenomenon. The greater the amount of media attention given to a school shooting, the more likely it is that a similar mass murder will occur again in the short term.

Many students who attacked their classmates after April 1999, referred to the influence of the infamous Columbine massacre in their diaries, manifestos, and confessions. Americans suffered through a large number of multiple-victim school shootings during the mid-1990s. These rampages ended abruptly on September 11, 2001, when we stopped dwelling on school shootings and turned our attention to fight the war on terrorism. For several months following 9/11, there were no school shootings; we had robbed the copycat phenomenon of its inspiration-too much publicity.

In the next few weeks, the measures that I propose are bound to be ignored in favor of a national debate about gun control. Most school shootings have been committed by means of semi-automatic rifles, so it makes common sense to reduce their accessibility. Many rampage killers, in Newtown and elsewhere, obtained their weapons from their unsuspecting parents.

In the search for an answer, well-intentioned citizens will propose reinstating the ban on assault weapons that was in place on the federal level between 1994 and 2004. Sadly, the ban did not seem to have any impact on the string of multiple-victim school shootings that occurred from the mid-1990s through early 2001 in such obscure communities as Littleton, Moses Lake, Jonesboro, and West Paducah.

It would be wonderful if we could successfully stop assault rifles from getting into the hands of troubled Americans. If so, we might reduce the body counts in the few school rampages that occur annually. Fearful that the ban will now be re-imposed, thousands of gun advocates have already begun to stock up on AR-15s, the semi-automatic rifles recently used by rampage killers in Aurora, Colorado and Portland, Oregon, as well as Newtown. It will take a well-orchestrated movement to convince hunters, militia members, and other gun owners to give up their weapons of mass destruction.

The Newtown massacre is a national tragedy; it is depressing, disturbing, and needs to be addressed. But we should also not lose sight of the fact that more than 10,000 murders are committed yearly by means of small-caliber handguns, not semi-automatics. The typical homicide consists of one shot, one victim.

Let's not place the entire emphasis on protecting children on an extraordinary crime, and, in the process, ignore the enormous number of handguns that are so often employed to take lives. If we choose to move against assault weapons, we should also not neglect efforts to get handguns out of the reach of teenagers, criminals, and troubled individuals who, every year, harm thousands of children and adults.

Jack Levin is professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University and co-author of "Extreme Killing."

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How to prevent school shootings - The Boston Globe

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In the aftermath of the tragic massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.., President Obama has called for a national conversation regarding the prevention of future attacks on America's children. Thus far, the possibility of eliminating semi-automatic weapons has taken center stage.

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Some experts say that increasing a school’s physical security, such as adding metal detectors, is not a realistic solution. If an attacker is intent upon killing others, metal detectors present a relatively ineffective barrier. Instead, these experts say that schools would do better by addressing the root causes of violence: bullying, a lack of a respectful environment, and neglecting despair and depression in students.

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The American public is reeling after the horrific shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This latest attack follows campus shootings around the country, most recently in Ohio, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and at Virginia Tech.

Despite the recent violence, school shootings have been generally on the decline since the notorious 1999 attack at a high school in Colombine, Colorado, which left 12 students and one teacher dead. As the police investigation unfolds in Connecticut, the fact remains that school shootings are rare and that children are safer in schools than they are outside of them.

In the meantime, parents want to do what they can to ensure that their schools are safe. Some experts say that increasing a school's physical security, such as adding metal detectors, is not a realistic solution. If an attacker is intent upon killing others, metal detectors present a relatively ineffective barrier. Instead, these experts say that schools would do better by addressing the root causes of violence: bullying, a lack of a respectful environment, and neglecting despair and depression in students.

An exhaustive study of school shootings compiled in 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service and the U. S. Department of Education is available online. One document produced by the study, Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates includes an action plan for school leaders to make their schools safe. The final report issued by the study, called Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States, discusses the characteristics of school attackers.

For a succinct distillation of the information about school attackers, see Ten Myths About School Shootings.

Schools are safer than they were a decade ago

Every year the federal government issues what it calls a snapshot of school violence. This survey, called Indicators of School Crime and Safety, is a compilation of data from several government agencies, including the FBI, the Center for Disease Control and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The survey looks at victimization, bullying, student perceptions of school safety and many other topics.

The latest of these snapshots was released in 2006, using data from 2003 through 2006. This study, and others, indicate that:

Statistically, school is the safest place for children to be.

Students are more likely to be victims of violence outside of school than inside.

School-related violence is on the decline.

Some troubling indicators persist

While these numbers are encouraging, some indicators are troubling. When 24 percent of all students report gangs present at their school, and 25 percent of high school students say illegal drugs are available on school property, clearly there is still much work to be done to improve the safety of our schools.

What schools are doing

Schools responded to the Columbine shootings with "hard" programs: mandatory expulsion for bringing a weapon to school, zero tolerance policies, improved crisis response plans and random locker checks.

While hard programs have their place, some experts believe increased use of "soft" programs, a collective term for programs that teach conflict resolution, anti-bullying, anger management, and emotional intelligence is what will fundamentally improve school safety.

Lisa Bateman of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence, a North Carolina resource center dedicated to promoting school safety, notes that "our schools reacted to the major incidents with a couple of major trends. One was a move toward more physical prevention of violence, such as metal detectors and school security officers. The other was that schools are focusing on staff training on how to recognize warning signs and looking at equipping teachers and students in conflict management skills."

"But," she cautions, "while schools are doing a better job of keeping campuses secure, our schools mirror our society. If we have a violent society, we will have violent schools."

The latest trends in school violence prevention

Vigilance in implementing both hard and soft programs has resulted in more comprehensive approaches and, as a result, improved school safety.

While hard programs may avert some violent acts, they don't address the underlying issue that soft programs focus on, including teaching students to understand and control their emotions, particularly anger.

Alicia Santamaria, of the California-based Peninsula Conflict Resolution Center (PCRC), an organization that provides in-school conflict resolution training, believes that teaching children to talk it out and to negotiate is important in preventing violence.

Post-Columbine, PCRC received many more calls for anti-bullying training. Santamaria also notes that there is now a heightened awareness about the negative effects of epithets and put-downs.

"We hear terms like 'enrichment programs,' 'character education,' 'school safety initiatives,' but perhaps calling them 'soft' in a society that values strength and brawn isn't doing them enough justice," Santamaria says. "These programs and skills are extremely powerful and have the capability of transforming the climate in our schools."

Stan Adamson, a mental health counselor and anger management specialist at The Door, a Manhattan youth development agency, feels that a multipronged approach to violence prevention is best. "There should be no tolerance for serious infractions, but there should be a range of interventions available for behavior problems. A young person needs to learn how to use a social-skills response to a difficult situation rather than an aggressive response. When he experiences some success using these skills approaches to dealing with conflict, the student usually becomes motivated to learn more."

A move away from old-fashioned detention and suspension

Many principals are looking at alternatives to having children sit in rooms by themselves as punishment for misbehaving. This form of detention removes the student from the learning process and doesn't address the root of the behavior that landed him in detention in the first place. A more productive approach is to have the troublemaker see a counselor.

The same thought applies to suspensions and expulsions. Sending the student home often puts him on the streets where society as a whole has to deal with him.

Bateman suggests that throwing a student out of school only contributes to what has been called the school-to-prison pipeline. "States with high numbers of suspensions and expulsions also have high numbers in the juvenile justice system. This is because students who are suspended from school and released to a parent who works often are not supervised."

No Child Left Behind and persistently dangerous schools

Under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, a school may be labeled as "persistently dangerous" if it meets certain criteria established by each state. If a school is designated as persistently dangerous, the district must inform the school community. Parents may then ask for a transfer to another school.

Many feel that the criteria required to be listed as persistently dangerous is so restrictive that truly dangerous schools are not identified as such. In 2003 only 54 schools in the nation were labeled as persistently dangerous.

What parents can do to improve school safety

In 1998, in response to a school shooting, President Clinton asked the government to produce a guide for schools and parents on how to prevent school violence. As a result, two comprehensive guides were published: Early Warning, Timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools and Safeguarding Our Children: An Action Guide.

Components of safe schools

According to Safeguarding Our Children: An Action Guide, a safe school will have three major components:

A school-wide foundation for the well being and success of all students.

A system for identifying students with acute behavior problems.

A system for providing interventions and therapies for at-risk students.

Early warning signs

Both guides list warning signs, as do many other guides available to parents. However, any time there is concern about a student it is important to guard against judging or oversimplifying. Helping the child, and the entire school community, should be the paramount concern.

Below are some of the warning signs that a student may pose a threat to the school. If you observe any of these indicators in a student, report your concerns to school staff. A potentially violent student usually exhibits more than one of the following behaviors:

Difficulty eating or sleeping

Abuse of animals

Unusual attraction to violent entertainment

Withdrawal from social interaction

Feelings of rejection and/or persecution

Unusually intense or frequent violent content in personal writings or artwork

A pattern of bullying

Intolerance or prejudice against certain groups of people

Drug or alcohol abuse

Membership in a gang

Threats of serious violence

Imminent warning signs

Imminent warning signs require immediate intervention and may include:

Physical fighting with others

Destruction of property

Intense anger for minor reasons

Detailed threats of violence

Possession of weapons

Threats of suicide

Additional benefits of soft programs

Santamaria, of PCRC, feels that teaching conflict prevention always has unforeseen positive results. We often think of conflict resolution programs in terms of how they can contribute to a safer school climate, but the impact on the students involved in the training is tremendous, according to Santamaria.

"The difficult thing about evaluating prevention programs," she explains, "is that you don't know what would have happened without them. If two young people resolve their conflict in peer mediation, we will never know what would have happened if the conflict had been allowed to escalate. We would like to think that each conflict that gets resolved through kids using their conflict resolution skills is a success story.

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How can we stop school violence? | Parenting

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The American public is reeling after the horrific shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. This latest attack follows campus shootings around the country, most recently in Ohio, California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and at Virginia Tech.

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That information could be shared if there is a police report or restraining order," she said. "I believe if there is a situation where someone feels they could be harmed, they should make sure to notify the proper authorities to make sure not only they're safe, but the people around them are also safe.

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A day after a Riverside man shot and killed his estranged wife as she taught in a classroom, Ventura County school officials are asking employees to "remain vigilant" and continue to follow safety policies.

San Bernardino police say Cedric Anderson, 53, checked in at North Park Elementary School's administration office about 10:30 am. Monday and said he was dropping off something for his wife, Karen Elaine Smith, 53.

Anderson was then allowed to go to the classroom where his wife was teaching 15 special needs students in first through fourth grades, said San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan. Anderson opened fire without saying a word, Burguan said, killing his wife and shooting two students behind her before killing himself.

Jonathan Martinez, 8, was airlifted to a hospital, where he later died. A 9-year-old student who was injured is in stable condition as of Tuesday, said San Bernardino police spokeswoman Eileen Hards.

Stan Mantooth, Ventura County superintendent of schools, said the incident is another reminder for all school employees to always remain mindful of campus safety policy and procedures. While the California School Boards Association provides guidelines for campus visitors and safety, individual school districts create their own policies and procedures.

Although schools have such rules in place, Mantooth said it is impossible to predict incidents such as the shooting in San Bernardino unless staff members alert school authorities or law enforcement agencies about concerns they might have about particular individuals.

"People are going to be extra vigilant and mindful that just because you see a person every day or know the person, that you shouldn't take that for granted," Mantooth said. "It's easy to get a little bit lax with security when you see the same people coming and going every day. You can never tell what could happen in any given day. It's also a tough call because we also don't want our schools to become like prisons and not be welcoming to visitors, especially those parents, spouses and family members who volunteer and help in classrooms."
Read more:
San Bernardino police said surveillance cameras from the school show Anderson tried to enter the campus through several doors. When he could not enter, Anderson then walked to the school's front office and checked in, Hards said.

"He was the husband of a teacher, so it was not unusual for him to stop by," Hards said. "He has stopped by before, and he did follow the school's protocol and checked in with everyone that day. (Karen Smith) was very private about her life, and no one knew there had been any struggles between them. There was no indication that he would do that to anyone in that school."

Hards said it is unclear whether Karen Smith received a phone call from the school's front desk to alert her that her husband was on his way to the classroom.

In the Simi Valley Unified School District, teachers are notified of any visitors, including family members, by a call to the classroom, Superintendent Jason Peplinski said. Like on many campuses across the county, all visitors at Simi Valley schools must check in at the administration office. Guests are escorted to the classroom and are not allowed to wander the campus, Peplinski said.

After Monday's shooting, Peplinski sent out a districtwide email as a reminder of campus visitor policies and procedures.

"Every organization has practices and procedures, but to what extent it is followed on a daily basis is another question," Peplinski said. "That's why after a tragedy like this occurs, it is important to take the opportunity to remind our staff about what our policies are and things they should be mindful of."

Dawn Anderson, Ventura County Office of Education director of health and prevention programs, said school districts throughout the state are required to review their campus safety policies each year. She said some school districts in the county already have employee policies that discourage personal visits during class time unless the visit is prearranged.

At any given time, most elementary school campuses have more than a dozen parent volunteers daily, Dawn Anderson said. It is also not uncommon for teachers' spouses to volunteer in the classrooms, she said.

Rather than allowing individuals to drop off items at a classroom, some districts encourage teachers to pick items up at the front office, Dawn Anderson said.

Oak Park Unified School District Superintendent Tony Knight, however, said schools must be careful not to discourage parents, teachers' spouses or members of the community from continuing their involvement at schools.

"I think we all have to stay vigilant, be aware and use common sense," Knight said. "If there is any perceived threat at all, we act on it, but I can honestly say I don't know what else anyone could've been done to prevent that tragic situation at San Bernardino. Moving forward, we can tell staff to always alert us with any concerns they might have, but I think they already do that."

Knight said that over the years, Oak Park Unified has added campus security and cameras at campuses. In the past two years, doorknobs were replaced with knobs that lock from the inside in preparation for emergency lockdown situations, Knight said.

Knight said the district also has worked with Westlake Village-based National School Safety Center to assess their safety procedures and policies.

Ron Stephens, executive director of National School Safety Center, said any time a campus shooting happens, officials should look at the circumstances and see if there's anything to learn that could help in the future. He said employees and parents should be encouraged to talk to the school about any potential domestic disputes or custody issues.

"Have discussions about this at school board meetings, have discussions at PTA meetings and look for ways to do some fine-tuning of our own practices and policies," Stephens said.

In cases where there are family conflicts or divorce and a parent might be restricted from seeing a child, Dawn Anderson said schools also have a protocol to handle such issues if a parent should not be allowed on campus. However, Anderson said she is unaware of any human resource policies referring to school staff members. A concerned staff member or teacher must be willing to first share such information, she said.

"That information could be shared if there is a police report or restraining order," she said. "I believe if there is a situation where someone feels they could be harmed, they should make sure to notify the proper authorities to make sure not only they're safe, but the people around them are also safe."
Star staff writer Cheri Carlson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://www.vcstar.com/story/news/education/schoolwatch/2017/04/11/after-shooting-local-schools-revisit-safety-plans/100341352/

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After shooting, local schools revisit safety plans

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A day after a Riverside man shot and killed his estranged wife as she taught in a classroom, Ventura County school officials are asking employees to "remain vigilant" and continue to follow safety policies. San Bernardino police say Cedric Anderson, 53, checked in at North Park Elementary School's administration office about 10:30 am.

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Ways to improve school entrance security

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Ways to improve school entrance security

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Here are eight components of a secure front entrance:  Perimeter fences to deter trespassing, limit access to non-primary entrances and funnel pedestrian traffic to areas where persons can be observed and screened,  Single point of entry to channel your security resources in a cost effective manner,  Staff monitoring of arrival and dismissal times,  Strong visitor management, A reinforced vestibule, sally port or double entry door system,  Window glazing,  All exterior doors should be monitored electronically, and  Duress/panic buttons in the main office or administration area.

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Many school and university buildings in the United States have been constructed to achieve an inviting and open campus style, with multiple buildings, multiple entrances and exits, big windows and many opportunities for privacy.

Unfortunately, these design configurations are not conducive to security and lockdown. To address these protection challenges and deter broken windows, burglary and vandalism, school architecture went through a period of fortressing that resulted in schools with almost no windows and produced fortress-like enclaves.

Incorporating the principles and practices of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) in the design and remodeling of schools can contribute to the safety of the campus while reducing the target hardening and fortressing effects of a bunker mentality.
Learn more about CPTED and lockdown best practices at Campus Safety Conference Texas this summer!
Technologies like cameras, sensors, weapons screening, etc., can help contribute to the overall security of a school. Additionally, schools must recognize the importance of good maintenance, good construction, good design, and a fair and equal management style of school operation.

Many campus leaders are looking to enhance how people, goods and services enter their facilities. A secure entrance can prevent unauthorized entry, and when prevention fails, the entrance should mitigate an intruder's ability to enter the facility.

The goal of the secured entrance is to detect, deflect and deter the potential attack long enough so that law enforcement can be summoned and the campus can be locked down.

Here are eight components of a secure front entrance:

1) Perimeter fences to deter trespassing, limit access to non-primary entrances and funnel pedestrian traffic to areas where persons can be observed and screened. According to Brad Spicer's CS article 11 Components of a Secure School Front Entrance, "Fences should encourage entry to areas that are highly visible and well monitored, preferably under video surveillance. While fences by themselves do not prevent unauthorized access, they do make persons approaching the facility from unobserved or remote areas more obvious." Fences also make it more difficult to access the site. Fences and perimeter boundary definition serve as the first layer of security for persons to gain access to the main entrance.

2) Single point of entry to channel your security resources in a cost effective manner. "Effective access control requires that entry to and from a building be controlled," says Spicer. "Efforts to prevent forced entry and trespass are compromised if secondary points of entry or fire doors are unsecure or easily defeated and not seen."

While large school or university buildings may have multiple points of entry, the more entry points there are, the more expensive and duplicative the security efforts. The main point of entry should look and act like the primary entry point and not a fire egress door. It should be regulated with access control, surveillance and strong design features that resist breakage or compromise.

3) Staff monitoring of arrival and dismissal times. "Arrival and dismissal times in K-12 schools require a lower security posture due to the volume of student and staff movement," Spicer says. "Properly trained and equipped staff must be assigned to monitor activities during these staff periods. This involves training on intruder response, reverse evacuation and how to assist in the arrival of public safety vehicles, school buses, private vehicles and/or the media. Staff should be equipped with radio communications and have the ability to call 911."

4) Strong visitor management. Without properly screening visitors, schools are at risk of allowing people into their buildings who pose a threat to staff and students. After the Sandy Hook school attack, the security industry has noted a dramatic increase in the utilization of paper-based as well as computerized visitor management systems.
RELATED: Guarding the Front Door: School Visitor Management Best Practices
Although computerized systems cost more, they now are highly robust and offer features that paper-based systems cannot. Some computerized systems allow front office staff to check visitors against a national sex offender database by scanning government issued or school district issued identification. They also allow staff members to remotely flag visitors and cross check their system with larger databases at the state and federal levels.

At Campus Safety Conference Texas on June 12, Randy Atlas, the author of this article, will address emerging code changes as they relate to classroom locking systems intended to protect students and teachers during an active shooter situation. Register for Campus Safety Conference Texas TODAY!

5) A reinforced vestibule, sallyport or double entry door system. Besides acting as a weather vestibule, a double door system can greatly enhance security layering and screening. While a school vestibule is not up to the same level of security as an embassy or jail, the purpose is the same. The hardware should be designed to resist tampering and window glazing should resist glass breakage. The ability to electronically lock down greatly enhances the ability for quick response during an active shooter situation.

According to Spicer, "An intercom or video call box may be located on the outside door, and the main office or administrative area can screen a guest or vendor with this system while the guest is still outside. Ideally, visitors granted access through the primary entrance are required to pass through the main office. The office would allow visitors to enter the first entrance, but the secondary entrances or exits would remain locked and monitored."

6) Window glazing that supports natural surveillance and acts as a strong physical barrier. "Large windows, vision panels and glass swing or sliding doors are easily defeated," says Spicer. "Window glazing makes forced entry more difficult."

Glazing in modern buildings is now required to meet wind resistance standards, which also act as forced entry protection. Wind resistant glazing is typically laminated with interlayers that bond the glass and give it strong forced entry protection. However, forced entry or burglary protection is not bullet resistance. The attacker in the Sandy Hook school mass shooting used an automatic weapon to shoot his way through the entrance glass. Bullet resistant glass is very expensive and the architect must specify what level of bullet resistance they are designing for: pistols or rifles, in addition to the size and speed of the bullet. The risk assessment will determine if the entrances and glazing need to have some level of bullet resistance and, if so, how much. ASTM standards exist that address the level of bullet resistance based on the threat and level of protection needed.

If the primary entrance is designed to be made up of mostly glass and metal mullions, there should be some kind of barricade that could prevent or stop a vehicle entry. This bollard or barricade can be designed using CPTED concepts and be strong enough to stop a moving vehicle, yet attractive enough to look like it was designed as part of the door entrance system in a functional manner. Any barricades or bollards must comply with clearances of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

7) All exterior doors should be monitored electronically to determine if they are fully closed and locked. Door position switches (DPS) should be built into the doorframes and connect with contact switches in the doors. This can be accomplished at the top of the door, the door hinge, the door closer or within the door lock itself. A door that looks closed but isn't might be used to gain unauthorized entrance to the building and introduce weapons or a shooter, or at the very least allows all of the security efforts at the primary entrance to be undermined.

Door hardware choices will reflect the level of protection that is desired and determined by the risk assessment. The door hinges should be tamper resistant. If an exterior door has exposed door hinges, the pins must be non-removable. Commercial grade glass doors have interior built-in hinges that are not exposed to tampering. Secondary fire exit doors, however, are hollow core metal doors with an exterior hinge. These doors are vulnerable to attack and a removable hinge pin can easily compromise the door by lifting the hinge pins and swing the door out opposite of the door lock.

It is not a standard of care or best practice to recommend or approve keeping doors between buildings unsecured. However, practical limitations related to existing buildings and the flow of students can make it very difficult to secure all perimeter doors. This is especially true at a high school. Given that elementary and middle school students are more vulnerable, strong consideration should be made to securing all perimeter doors. Teachers can be trained to unlock these doors during class changes, or electronic access measures can be used to facilitate class changes and other access needs.

8) Duress/panic buttons in the main office or administration area. Another type of emergency communication technology that has been seeing much wider usage in recent years involves duress alarms. These systems allow school staff to rapidly and sometimes discreetly summon emergency assistance by pressing a button.

Although panic buttons are reactionary, they make it easier for school staff to notify police and call 911. Duress alarms allow for more communication efforts to be directed towards safeguarding students. If the school is totally dependent on front office staff to provide notification of an intruder, consider expanding the panic button system to a full intruder alarm that broadcasts a unique warning to the entire school.

While traditional systems have been mounted under desks of key personnel, there are now a variety of options such as duress buttons that can be worn on the person and pendant systems, which are part of the voice amplification systems in use in many classrooms.

These systems sometimes also allow people at a monitoring station to hear what is being said at the location where the duress button on the pendant has been activated. At least one vendor also offers a feature that allows emergency responders to hear the live audio feed and, if security cameras are in use, to see live video feed from the incident location. This could be an especially important feature for school office settings.

Prevention and design are the keys to making educational facilities safe and secure. Adopting these eight components in your front entry is a good start.
Randy Atlas Ph.D., FAIA, CPP is an architect / criminologist. He is president of Atlas Safety & Security Design Inc., based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Atlas has conducted risk vulnerability assessment security surveys for numerous K-12 and higher education campuses. This summer, on June 12 at Campus Safety Conference Texas, he will address emerging code changes as they relate to classroom locking systems intended to protect students and teachers during an active shooter situation. To register for Campus Safety Conference Texas, visit CampusSafetyConference.com.
Read Next: Examples of CPTED Concepts on Campus

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8 Ways to Improve School Entrance Security

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Many school and university buildings in the United States have been constructed to achieve an inviting and open campus style, with multiple buildings, multiple entrances and exits, big windows and many opportunities for privacy. Unfortunately, these design configurations are not conducive to security and lockdown.

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During 1643, in the state of Connecticut they made a law that one adult person per house should carry guns in public for protections against to the Native Americans. And also they have laws that immigrants should own guns in order to own a land or something that’s related to a property.

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Background of the Issue - Gun Control - ProCon.org

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A comprehensive background to should more gun control laws be enacted?

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Although there are deadly mass shootings in European countries like Russia, Israel, and other countries, America is the leading nation in the world for rampant school shootings across the nation. Although it would be nice to prevent troubled students from causing intense violent acts, there are no clear signs.

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5 things you need to know for your new day

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The Global Public Square is where you can make sense of the world every day with insights and explanations from CNN's Fareed Zakaria, leading journalists at TIME and CNN, and other international thinkers. Get informed about global issues, exposed to unique stories, and engaged with diverse and original perspectives. Amar C.

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The articles says that Barry began to get into dark things, such as writing dark poems and watching violent movies before all those things became his reality. His tragic planed  left a teacher and 2 classmates died , but also leaving all the rest of the algebra class traumatized.

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The beginning of a person's professional career is always a big deal.

When that experience comes to a close, it's a huge life transition.

Denece Lord has been teaching science a long time, 30 years to be exact.

She has spent the last few years at West High School.

Friday was Lord's last day as a teacher.

She, along with her husband, Russell, have some pretty active retirement plans.

But she says she will really miss her students.

"I dearly love the art of teaching. I enjoy putting together a good lesson. And I love interacting with the kids and watching them say, oh yeah. I get this. And then apply it to the real world. I still love that part. But there are some other things I want to do."

Lord says there are a lot of enthusiastic young teachers and it's their time to shine.

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Retiring teacher reflects on 30 years in the classroom

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The beginning of a person's professional career is always a big deal. When that experience comes to a close, it's a huge life transition. Denece Lord has been teaching science a long time, 30 years to be exact. She has spent the last few years at West High School.

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Six students were injured and one critically. This happened in Heritage High School on the last day for seniors  right before school started. According to the article the gunman’s girlfriends says that people had been saying he wanted to do that the whole school year, but waiting until that day .

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This article is talking about how Maryland lawmakers are debating on banning assault weapons after the Sandy Hook incident . They know that it would come to be under a legal challenge, but went ahead anyways.

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In this article the comprehensive strategies used in school to prevent shootings. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institution they state that building a supportive school environment can help prevent shootings from happening.

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Why do some States have more school shootings?

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Why do some States have more school shootings?

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Researchers at Boston University have analyzed data from school shootings from across the country and have realized that some states have more school shootings annually than others.Alaska, Connecticut,  Hawaii, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming had none, while the majority of states had at the very least 10 school shootings annually

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School shootings like the one that occurred at Sandy Hook elementary school four years ago this month leave the public grappling to make sense of how such horrific events could happen and struggling with questions about what can be done to prevent similar attacks.

But despite repeated calls to action, little progress has been made in deterring these tragic events. In fact, a new study shows the number of school shootings in the U.S. has skyrocketed in recent years - and the number keeps climbing.

The report, published online in the journal Injury Prevention, found there were 154 school shootings between 2013 and 2015. The number rose from 35 in 2013, to 55 in 2014, to 64 in 2015. This averages to more than one school shooting a week somewhere in the United States.

The researchers compared this to another study that showed 44 such instances during the years between 1966 and 2008 - equivalent to around one school shooting incident per year.

"I'm not sure you can just call that a jump," lead study author Dr. Bindu Kalesan, an assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine, told CBS News. "That is a leap."

In the absence of an official monitoring system, Kalesan and her team conducted a systematic analysis of media coverage of school shootings - defined as "an incident when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds, as documented in publicly reported news" - between 2013 and 2015.

They also looked at a number of state-level factors, including whether or not the state requires mandatory background checks for all gun and ammunition purchases; the extent of gun ownership; mental health expenditure; and spending on public school education (K-12).

"What we wanted to do is understand school shootings on a more detailed level," Kalesan said.

The analysis showed that over those three years, 39 states had at least one school shooting. Eleven states - Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming - had none.

The majority of states in which school shootings occurred had fewer than 10 incidents over the years studied.

But five states had more. Georgia had the greatest number, with 15 school shootings. Florida and Texas each had 14. There were 12 school shootings in North Carolina and 10 in Tennessee.

More than half of the shootings (nearly 55 percent) occurred in K-12 schools, while 45 percent happened at colleges. Nearly all of the shootings were carried out by males. About 75 percent took place in metro areas.

In all, 84 people - including 27 perpetrators - died, and another 136 were injured.

The researchers identified several factors that were associated with a lower risk of school shootings. They found that the number of school shootings was lower in states that had:

Mandatory background checks for gun and ammunition purchases.

Higher spending on mental health.

Higher spending on K-12 education.

As of 2013, when the study began, the researchers said 14 states had some form of background checks for firearm purchase; five of those required background checks only for handguns but not for long guns or assault weapons.

School shootings were also less likely in states that had a higher percentage of residents living in urban areas.

Kalesan cautions that the findings are observational, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.

She also noted that certain details surrounding school shootings reported in the media turn out to be incomplete or inaccurate, which could affect their findings. Furthermore, since not every instance where a firearm is discharged on school grounds is reported, Kalesan believes the actual number of school shootings in the U.S. likely is even higher.

She said the research highlights the need for a national registry to monitor school shootings in order to better inform the debate over its causes and how to prevent these tragic events.

"We need the federal government to join hands with state governments to create a system of surveillance that includes school shootings," Kalesan said. "We need more granular data to dive into so we can find more concrete results, so that we can inform our politics better, so that we can implement policies and find places where there are more victims to provide more programs and interventions. So that we can help the communities get better and deal with the violence."

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Why do some states have more school shootings?

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School shootings like the one that occurred at Sandy Hook elementary school four years ago this month leave the public grappling to make sense of how such horrific events could happen and struggling with questions about what can be done to prevent similar attacks.

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To Teach or Not Teach Gun Safety In School

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To Teach or Not Teach Gun Safety In School

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School Districts and local government are working together to decide if they should start a gun safety program in Elementary School through Middle School or High School. Gun enthusiast and the districts both agree that it would be beneficial for a gun safety lesson for children and teenagers

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It may be the only issue people on both sides of the gun control debate can agree on.

Proponents and foes of gun control say they want gun education and avoidance programs taught in public schools from kindergarten through middle school or even high school.

And activists aren't the only ones supporting gun education. Spurred by the series of school shootings in recent years, school districts and state legislatures across the country are pushing for gun education in the classroom.

Three weeks after a first grade boy brought to school a gun he found at home and shot his 6-year-old classmate in Mount Morris Township, Mich., the state Legislature passed a gun safety education provision with strong bipartisan support.

But the political compromise tends to end there. It's much harder to agree on just what kids should be taught about gun safety or whether gun education programs have any affect at all, said Heidi Cifelli, manager of the National Rifle Association's Eddie Eagle Gun Safe Program, which is now taught in Michigan elementary schools.

While fewer kids are bringing guns to school, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the rate of firearms death among children younger than 13 remains 25 times that of the other top 25 industrialized nations combined.

"Gun education is not mandatory in any state as far as we know, but of course we think all schools should have it," said Cifelli. "Gun education is the best way to save young lives."

The NRA Approach

Cifelli says the NRA would like more schools to use its program, called "Eddie Eagle," which teaches kids in grades K-6 to "Stop. Don't Touch. Leave the Area. Tell an Adult," when they see a gun. The program uses the character of an American Bald Eagle, sometimes in the form of a live mascot, throughout its lessons for children.

In the past two years Wisconsin, Oregon, and New York state Legislatures have tried to pass bills that would have made Eddie Eagle a mandatory part of the school curriculum. None of the bills were successful.

So far the week-long Eddie Eagle program, which includes coloring books, a video and often a visit from a local police officer dressed in an Eddie Eagle costume, has reached 13 million kids since 1988, said Cifelli. Eddie Eagle is usually taught as a special program by local police departments. But some schools have incorporated it into their regular health curriculums along with drug and alcohol education and sex education - depending on the grade level.

Opponents Have Different Approach

"Eddie Eagle is often referred to as Joe Camel dressed up in feathers. The Eddie Eagle program tends to glamorize guns by making them seem like something you can only do when you're an adult - just like drinking and smoking. You know what happens when you tell a child something like that. They want to do it more than ever," said Nancy Hwa, a spokesperson for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, which offers its own gun safety education program called STAR.

STAR, or Straight Talk About Risks, is a K-12 program designed to be incorporated into school curriculums. It includes video and role playing activities to teach kids about anger management, conflict resolution and the possible consequences of handling a gun or using a firearm to resolve a conflict. Since its creation in 1992 it has been used in 80 school districts, which means more than 1000 schools nationwide.

The NRA in turn has criticized STAR by saying it teaches children that guns and gun owners are bad.

But critics of Eddie Eagle, STAR and the handful of lesser-known gun education programs for kids in school say there is no evidence that gun education alone reduces gun violence or gun-related injuries.

Critics Doubt Any Program Will Work

"The fact is that neither of these educational programs have ever been thoroughly evaluated and we don't really know if they work or not. But there is a need to do something and an education program is a more direct and less controversial way to address handgun violence and injuries," said Dr. Stephen Hargarten, chairman of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Despite the criticism, officials in Carroll County school district, Md., will be among the most recent to experiment with a gun-avoidance program in grades K-12, starting this fall. Their program is based on both Eddie Eagle and STAR, but has been "tailored to fit our community," said William Piercy, assistant supervisor of staff development and health for the district.

If the pilot program goes well, the school board plans to approve an official gun education program in the health curriculum by fall 2001.

"We think the best way to prevent accidents with guns and gun violence is through education. We live in a community where people do keep guns in their homes, people still hunt and there is still a farming community," Piercy said.

"Teachers and parents can't be with a child all the time so we need to educate them about the dangers of guns," he added. "We teach kids about bicycle safety and about alcohol and drugs and sex education so they will have a foundation they can take with them in all situations."

A few teachers were concerned the program may call for unloaded guns in the school for demonstrations. But there will be no guns in the classroom, Piercy said.

"It's amazing how people in the community on both sides of the political spectrum have supported this. Most people agree it's better to tackle the issue up front than try to avoid it," Piercy said.

However, Hargarten and his colleague at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Richard Withers, co-director of the college's Firearms Injury Center say they worry schools and parents will come to rely on education too much.

"I think education programs aren't harmful, but whether it's good for us to rely on them entirely is another question," said Withers, who supports federal and private research dollars going to develop safe gun technology rather evaluation of gun education programs.

Daniel Webster, a health policy researcher at The Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health said most child psychologists and pediatricians agree kids will be kids to a large extent. Often children don't hear what they don't want to hear.

"Guns still appear glamorous to them in films and television and among their peers," he said. "Education alone won't do it and it can sometimes make parents and teachers somewhat complacent," he said.

The Department of Education agrees that relying solely on education is not the answer.

"In schools the only thing that works to stop gun violence is some education combined with intervention, counselors in every school, parents getting involved, teachers being trained and involved and so on. Education is no silver bullet. It's not really proven to work at all," said Melinda Maliko, a department spokesperson.

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To Teach or Not Teach Gun Safety in School

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It may be the only issue people on both sides of the gun control debate can agree on. Proponents and foes of gun control say they want gun education and avoidance programs taught in public schools from kindergarten through middle school or even high school. And activists aren't the only...

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Due to school shootings on the rise since Sandy Hook. School boards in differents states is now starting mandatory gun training for staff and administrators. They say that safety drills and alerting the police is not cutting it anymore, they think that in order to be well prepared for when the day might come, a staff member will be ready to take on the shooter on the inside.

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Guns in Elementary and Secondary (K-12) Schools
Guns have no place in our nation's schools. The tragedies that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Columbine High School and Virginia Tech demonstrate the devastating effect guns have on schools and their surrounding communities. Calls to arm teachers and faculty at elementary and high schools and to allow college students to possess guns on campus will only lead to more gun deaths and injuries, not less. Federal and state laws that prohibit guns at schools and pose harsh penalties for gun possession, in contrast, help keep our children and educators safe.

School shootings shock us because schools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so frequent elsewhere. A joint report issued by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice found that in each school year from 1992 to 2006, at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5-18 occurred away from school than at school, and at least 140 times as many youth suicides were committed off school property than at school. Approximately 1% of all homicides among school-age children happen on school grounds or on the way to and from school or during a school sponsored event. During the 2010-2011 school year, there was approximately one homicide or suicide of a school-age youth at school per 3.5 million enrolled students.

Federal and state laws deeming schools gun-free zones have significantly reduced gun violence in these places. School-associated student homicide rates decreased significantly after the federal laws restricting guns in schools were adopted in the early 1990s, and fewer students are carrying guns.
Guns on College and University Campuses
Proposals offered by the gun lobby to repeal the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act and arm teachers as a solution to curb those rare instances of gun violence at school are dangerous and counter-productive. Teachers are not trained law enforcement officers - their purpose is to be educators and role models.

Gun violence prevention measures for our schools should focus on reminding gun-owning parents to safely own and secure firearms and ammunition, rather than on arming teachers. A study of 37 school shootings in 26 states found that in nearly two-thirds of the incidents, the attacker got the gun from his or her own home or that of a relative. For more information about the safe storage of firearms, see our summary on Safe Storage & Gun Locks.

As a result of these laws, few students have access to guns on campus, making campuses safe learning environments:

Less than 2% of college students report being threatened with a gun while at school.

There were 11,920 total gun homicides in the U.S. in 2003, but only 10 total murders or non-negligent homicides on the nation's college campuses.

Violent crime for college students age 18 to 24 declined significantly between 1995 and 2002. College students are less likely than non-students to be victims of crime: though crime rates declined for both students and non-students alike, by 2002 only 41 of every 1,000 students were victims of violent crime, while 56 out of 1,000 non-students were victimized that year. Students living on college campuses are less likely to be victimized than when living off-campus - over 90% of victimizations occur off-campus.

Gun-owning college students have a greater propensity for engaging in risky, sometimes violent, behavior than non-gun owning students. A 2002 study from the Journal of American College Health found that students who owned guns were more likely than non-gun-owning students to binge drink and then engage in risky activities "such as driving when under the influence of alcohol, vandalizing property, and having unprotected intercourse."

Allowing guns on campus would likely lead to more campus homicides and suicides. Young adults between the ages of 18-25 experience the highest rate of serious mental illness. Between 9% and 11% of college students seriously considered suicide in the previous school year, and about 1,100 college students commit suicide each year. When a gun enters this mix, a suicide attempt becomes considerably more lethal, as 85% of gun suicide attempts are fatal.

These facts belie any need for students, faculty and visitors to carry guns on campus for self-defense or any other reason. There is no credible statistical evidence to suggest that the presence of students carrying guns, particularly concealed handguns, will reduce violence on our college campuses.
The Gun-Free School Zones Act
Finally, forcing guns onto our college campuses would pose additional concerns, such as a greater likelihood of gun thefts, increased liability and public relations costs for colleges that lack institutional authority to restrict weapons, and inhibiting dialogue by making students and faculty feel less safe to freely express ideas and exchange information.

Two federal laws restrict the possession of firearms in or near K-12 schools: 1) the Gun-Free School Zones Act; and 2) the Gun-Free Schools Act.
The Gun-Free Schools Act
The federal prohibition against possessing a gun in a school zone does not apply, however:

To people licensed by the state or locality to possess the gun. This exception applies to many people licensed to possess firearms or to carry concealed firearms; see our summaries on Licensing Gun Owners or Purchasers and Carrying Concealed Weapons for more information about these licensing requirements.

If the firearm is unloaded and "in a locked container, or a locked firearms rack that is on a motor vehicle."

If the firearm is possessed for use in a program approved by a school, or in accordance with a contract entered into between a school and the individual or an employer of the individual.

The GFSA also requires that, in order to receive federal funds, each local educational agency must annually provide:
Federal Action for School Safety & Emergency Management

An assurance that the local educational agency is in compliance with the state expulsion law; and

A description of the circumstances surrounding any expulsions imposed under the state expulsion law.

Finally, the GFSA provides narrow exceptions to these prohibitions, permitting firearm possession where the gun is lawfully stored inside a locked vehicle on school property, or where the gun is possessed for an activity approved and authorized by the local educational agency, if the agency has adopted appropriate safeguards to ensure student safety. To date, the GFSA has not been challenged.

In the aftermath of the Newtown shootings, in 2013, President Obama issued a series of executive orders focusing on firearms and ammunition regulation, mental health issues and school safety. A few of these orders deal directly with public safety in schools:
Elementary & Secondary (K-12) Schools

The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have been directed to provide continuing federal training and security assessments for law enforcement, first responders and school officials on active shooter situations.

The Departments of Education, Justice, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services have developed emergency management planning guides for schools and institutions of higher education in the event of a school shooting that will provide these institutions a model for how to develop and implement their own reliable plans.

The Department of Justice's (DOJ) Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Grants are available to fund school resource officers, and DOJ has encouraged police departments to hire such officers by providing a preference for grant applications that support school resource officers. In September 2013, DOJ announced the awarding of 263 COPS Hiring Grants totaling approximately $125 million, including around $45 million to fund 356 new school resource officer positions.

As described below, almost all states and D.C. prohibit guns in K-12 schools, but only 39 states and D.C. apply this prohibition to people who have been granted a permit to carry a concealed weapon (CCW permit holders). Twenty states restrict firearms on college and university campuses: of those, 7 have banned both open and concealed carry of firearms, 9 have banned open carry but allow concealed, loaded firearms to be carried inside cars that are parked on campus, and 4 do not ban open carry on campuses, but may allow individual colleges and universities to do so. Most of the remaining states leave the question up to the college or university, but 10 states prohibit public colleges and universities from banning concealed carry of guns in some or all areas of campus, or by some individuals (e.g., staff or faculty) anywhere on campus. In some states, state colleges and universities are also subject to state statutes limiting the authority of political subdivisions to regulate firearms.

1. States Prohibiting Firearms in Elementary & Secondary (K-12) Schools

The vast majority of states - 48 of them - and the District of Columbia generally prohibit any person from carrying a firearm onto or possessing a firearm on school property, within safe school or gun-free school zones, on school-provided transportation, or at certain school-sponsored events.

Hawaii and New Hampshire do not generally prohibit the possession of a firearm in school-related locations. Hawaii has no relevant statute. New Hampshire only bans pupils from possessing a firearm in a safe school zone, and also imposes a possible penalty enhancement for unlawful possession of a firearm in a safe school zone.

Common exceptions to this prohibition include: 1) guns locked in vehicles on school property; 2) guns possessed for a hunter or firearm safety course; 3) guns possessed as part of a school-authorized sporting or recreational program; 4) military or peace officer training programs; 5) lawful possession within a residence, place of business, or other private property that lies within a school zone but is not part of the school grounds or property; 6) while hunting on school grounds or traversing school grounds to access hunting lands during a lawful hunting season on lands owned by the educational institution; and 7) where the possessor has obtained prior permission of the principal, school board, or chief administrative officer of the school or district.

2. States Prohibiting Concealed Weapons Permit/License Holders from Carrying on Elementary & Secondary School Property
Colleges, Universities and Other Postsecondary Educational Institutions
Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia prohibit concealed weapons permit or license holders from possessing concealed firearms in primary or secondary schools, within school zones, or on school-provided transportation. One notable exception common to these laws is where an adult is in lawful possession of a firearm, and the firearm is within a vehicle, when the adult is dropping off or picking up a student on school property. Note that even though Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming do not require a permit to carry a concealed firearm, these states ban the possession of firearms at school.

3. States Requiring Expulsion of Students from Elementary & Secondary Schools for Possessing Firearms

1. States Generally Prohibiting Firearms at Colleges & Universities

Twenty states, including the District of Columbia, currently have a statute or regulation that prohibits the possession of firearms in colleges, universities and other post-secondary educational institutions. Arkansas' law applies only to handguns. Of those twenty states, seven - California, D.C., Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, and New York - have banned both open and concealed carry of firearms. Nine states - Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina - have banned open and concealed carry in most campus locations, but allow loaded firearms to be carried inside motor vehicles on campus in specified circumstances (among certain other exceptions as well). Four states - Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Wyoming - restrict concealed carry, but do not actually ban open carry on public or private college or university campuses, though they may allow individual colleges and universities to exercise their own authority to ban open carry. Most of the states prohibiting both open and concealed carry of firearms at colleges and universities extend the prohibition to both public and private campuses. Specific information about each state in this category can be found in the chart above.

2. States with Specific Laws or Court Decisions Allowing Firearms on Campus

A growing number of states are allowing the possession of firearms, primarily concealed handgun possession by permittees or licensees consistent with state law, on many public areas of college and university campuses. Some of these states also restrict regulation of guns by colleges and universities at certain locations on campus. A number of states have passed specific "Campus Carry" laws mandating that concealed firearms be permitted on some or all areas of college and university campuses, while in other states, judicial decisions interpreting state concealed carry laws have had the same effect. In all but one of these states, laws or court decisions allowing firearms on campus have targeted public colleges and universities, reserving to private colleges and universities the authority to set their own rules for firearms on their property.

Colorado - Colorado courts have found that the Colorado General Assembly is the only entity that can regulate firearm possession on college and university campuses. Under the state's concealed handgun licensing statute, any person licensed to carry a concealed handgun in Colorado may carry a firearm on campus. Schools may institute policies regulating guns on campus, but do not have the authority to ban guns on campus.

Idaho - In 2014, Idaho enacted a law removing the authority of the governing bodies of higher education to regulate or prohibit the possession, carrying or transporting of firearms or ammunition by people licensed to carry a concealed handgun. These people may not carry a concealed firearm in a student dormitory or residence hall, however, or in a building of a public entertainment facility that has posted the proper sign prohibiting firearms.

Kansas - In 2013, Kansas enacted a law requiring that public colleges and universities allow concealed firearms on campus, unless the campus posts "armed personnel at public entrances" and installs "electronic equipment" such as metal detectors, and such security measures are sufficient to ensure that no weapons are brought into campus buildings. The law goes into effect in July 2017. In response to the law, the Kansas Board of Regents, with authority over Kansas public universities, adopted a new weapons policy that allows concealed carry starting in July 2017.

Mississippi - State law allows a person who has taken a voluntary course on the safe handling and use of firearms by a certified instructor to carry a concealed weapon on both public and private campuses. Applicants must be over age 21 and must pass a background check for the advanced permit.

Oregon - Concealed handgun license holders may possess firearms on campus, but are restricted in the locations where they may carry. In March 2011, the Court of Appeals of Oregon held that an Oregon State Board of Higher Education's rule imposing sanctions on persons who possessed or used firearms on university property was invalid because the rule was outside the Board's authority to regulate firearms and not expressly authorized by the legislative assembly. The court also concluded that the Board's broad scope of authority to control and manage its properties includes the ability to make rules regarding the conduct of visitors or members of the public on institutional properties. In 2012, the Board, using its authority, banned guns, including concealed carry, from classrooms, buildings, dormitories and sporting and entertainment events.

Tennessee - In 2016, Tennessee enacted a law allowing full-time faculty, staff and other employees of public colleges and universities who have handgun-carry permits to carry their guns on campus, as long as they notify the local law enforcement agency with responsibility for campus security (such as campus police). The University of Tennessee estimated that about 27,000 full-time employees are now eligible to carry guns.

Texas - In 2015, Texas enacted a law allowing individuals with concealed carry licenses to carry concealed handguns on the campuses of public colleges and universities. The "Campus Carry" law authorizes public colleges and universities to establish reasonable rules regarding the carrying of concealed handguns, as long as those rules do not generally prohibit license holders from carrying concealed handguns. Private colleges and universities remain free to regulate or prohibit concealed carry after consulting with their students, staff, and faculty.

Utah - In Utah, the state legislature assumed jurisdiction of the state's public universities in 2004. Universities now must permit the lawful possession or carrying of concealed firearms in most areas of their campuses, except in one area designated as a secure "hearing room."

Virginia - Colleges and universities may prohibit gun possession by the general public, including concealed carry permit holders, in the most vulnerable areas of campus ( e.g., academic buildings, administrative office buildings, student residence buildings, dining facilities, or while attending sporting, entertainment or educational events), and they may also regulate gun possession by students and employees. However, according to an opinion by the state Attorney General, public colleges and universities in Virginia must allow concealed carry permit holders who are members of the general public to possess guns on the open grounds of campus.

Wisconsin - Colleges and universities must generally allow concealed carry permit holders to carry on campus grounds. Schools may, however, prohibit any person, including a concealed weapons permit holder, from entering or remaining in any privately or publicly-owned building on the grounds of a university or college, if the university or college has notified the person that he or she may not enter or remain in the building while carrying a firearm.

3. States Not Explicitly Addressing Gun Possession on College Campuses, Leaving Weapons Possession Regulation to Public Colleges & Universities

In 21 states, the state either has expressly allowed colleges and universities to regulate guns, or is silent on the matter, leaving weapons possession regulation decisions up to the governing bodies of colleges and universities in the state. These states are: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.

Generally, in these states, the absence of state law addressing gun possession on college and university campuses gives the governing bodies of colleges and universities the authority to prohibit open and concealed carry of firearms. For example, in Iowa and Washington, each state's public higher education system has adopted an administrative rule officially prohibiting possession of firearms on campuses. In 3 other states - Kentucky, Maine, and Minnesota - public and private colleges and universities are expressly permitted to pass their own rules concerning guns on campus. And in Delaware, public institutions are required to develop security policies that include "regulations governing the possession and use of firearms on campus by employees, students and visitors."

However, developments in 4 of these 21 states have caused colleges and universities to go in the other direction. In Pennsylvania, the Governor's Office of General Counsel and the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education issued nonbinding guidance suggesting that an outright ban of firearms on campuses would violate the state constitution, causing some colleges to change their policies to allow concealed carry in some campus locations. And in Arizona, Kentucky, and Minnesota, state laws appear to prevent colleges and universities from prohibiting firearms inside private vehicles, even though firearms may be prohibited elsewhere on campus.

The features listed below are intended to provide a framework from which policy options may be considered. A jurisdiction considering new legislation should consult with counsel.

Establish a gun-free school zone that prohibits the possession or carrying, whether openly or concealed, of any firearm within an elementary or secondary school building, on school property, or within a set distance of school property (District of Columbia)

Prohibit the possession or carrying, whether openly or concealed, of any firearm within a school bus or other school-provided transportation

Prohibit concealed weapons permit holders from possessing in school buildings, on school property, or within a set distance from school property

Prohibit the possession or carrying, whether open or concealed, of any firearm on public and private college or university campuses, including in campus open areas, in parking lots and vehicles on campus, in buildings and residences, and at sporting events

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Guns in Elementary and Secondary (K-12) Schools Guns have no place in our nation's schools. The tragedies that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Columbine High School and Virginia Tech demonstrate the devastating effect guns have on schools and their surrounding communities.

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According to The American Health Association gun violence should be treated like a public health crisis. The article does references some of the biggest shootings in school in history Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and Columbine. Data provided by the Centers for Disease Control or 2015 found that more than one million years of life are lost each year to gun violence.

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Patterns and Warning Signs in School Shooting

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Patterns and Warning Signs in School Shooting

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This article is a compilation of statistics for school shootings. Over 60% of school shootings happen in suburban small towns, despite big urban places having higher gun violence on the streets.

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How could it happen here? This is the question plaguing residents of Newtown, Conn., a picture-perfect country town with good schools, quiet streets and a strong sense of community. But small towns like Newtown are where 60% of rampage school shootings in the United States occur. Far from big urban centers where gun violence is common, these communities are generally very safe. But more often than not, they are the places where this kind of tragedy strikes.

My research team spent two years trying to understand rampage school shootings. We spent several months in Kentucky and Arkansas, in two towns that had been the scenes of shootings in the late 1990's. We interviewed the shooters' neighbors, friends, instructors, coaches and Sunday school teachers. We talked to people who had observed the shooters in jail cells right after the shootings, and years later in prison. We combed the records of every shooting of this kind in the U.S. from the 1970s onward, looking for patterns. And while each tragedy has its own anatomy, a picture emerged that makes sociological sense and probably has some bearing on the Newtown case.

Rampage shootings are never spontaneous. They are planned, often for months in advance. We don't know yet whether the Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, gave any warnings, but in the episodes we studied, shooters commonly told their peers -- often in a veiled and ambiguous fashion -- what they had in mind.

One reason shooters tip their hands is that they are trying to solve a problem. Though they are often intelligent, high-performing boys, their peers tend to see them as unattractive losers, weak and unmanly. In a school culture that values sports prowess over academic accomplishment, they face rejection. The shooters are rarely loners, but tend instead to be failed joiners, and their daily social experience is full of friction. Since they are almost always mentally or emotionally ill, those rejections -- so common in adolescence -- take on greater importance and become a fixation. Rebuffed after trying to join friendship groups, they look for ways to gain attention, to reverse their damaged identities.

The shooting is the last act in a long drama: a search for acceptance and recognition. The earlier acts fail miserably. But once a shooter starts to talk about killing people, ostracism can turn to inclusion. Suddenly, he is getting the attention he has been craving. Michael Carneal, who killed three high school girls and paralyzed a fourth when he was a freshman in a Kentucky high school, pulled pranks, told loud silly jokes and stole CD's in an attempt to impress. None of it worked. But the day he started talking about shooting people, that began to change. The Goth group he desperately wanted to join wheeled in his direction for the first time.

Carneal never thought about how his actions would destroy lives or send his neighbors into a lifetime of angry mourning. Interviewed after the shooting, he said he thought that those boys would at last become his friends. He would be asked over to their houses and they would visit him. He would be cool. He was a skinny 13-year-old with glasses, a bright boy fond of reading and terrible at football -- all he was after was another identity.

Look at photos of Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter at Virginia Tech who murdered 32 people, and you will see eerie echoes of what Lanza reportedly wore: mask, military fatigues, multiple guns in assault position. Many of these young men are trying to cast themselves as stars of a movie that ends in a blaze of suicidal gunfire and notoriety. Our research on earlier shootings showed the attack is on a school because that is the center stage in a small town, where the young men can rivet the entire community

If so many clues are out there, why don't more people see them? High-school teachers see students less than an hour a day, and rarely compare notes with other teachers, even after witnessing troubling behavior. They often do not document infractions, preferring to address problems in their own classrooms.

Peers, on the other hand, do hear things. Why don't they come forward?

First, the signal is noisy. Michael Carneal was always saying goofy things. He explained to his would-be friends that they would see who "lived or died on Monday." Mitchell Johnson, who, together with Andrew Golden, killed four kids and a teacher in an Arkansas middle school, told his friends that he would be "running from the cops." They recognized in hindsight that he was telegraphing his intentions. But at the time, most didn't know what to make of these comments. A few students took Michael Carneal's warnings so seriously that they didn't go to school that fateful Monday. But none of the dozens of kids in either school who heard veiled threats reported them to adults.

They didn't know how to interpret the signals. In the context of goofball comments they were used to, how could they know these were real warnings? Crossing the DMZ that separates kids from adults in early adolescence is socially dangerous. Why risk being deemed a tattletale or teacher's pet when you don't know whether those crazy asides actually mean anything?

This quandary is the root of preventing rampage shootings in schools. Law enforcement will never be able to respond fast enough to stop shootings that often end in seconds. This is why we have to find ways for people who hear troubling rumors or threats to report them to people who can investigate and intervene. And while we do not know enough now to tell whether anyone had a clue about Adam Lanza's murderous intentions, it will not come as a shock if it turns out there were people in his social orbit who had an inkling, fuzzy and incredible as that inkling might be. It would fit the pattern of what we saw in virtually all of the other rampage shootings in American schools.

Would gun control help? Yes and no. Yes, because anything that thwarts the efforts of a Carneal or a Johnson to get their hands on guns will make it harder to perpetrate a massacre and will deter the ambivalent. If Adam Lanza had had to go to greater lengths to get his hands on weapons, he might have run out of psychic energy to do this terrible deed. It appears he had little trouble, though, because the guns belonged to his mother, were registered and legally owned. Why in the world we enable civilians to own such lethal instruments baffles millions of citizens and will be the subject of a searching debate if our politicians can get over the barriers that have prevented serious reform.

But gun control is not enough. A determined person will find a way. Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson took a blow torch to a safe to try to get at the guns they knew were hidden there. That failed, so they found wire clippers and managed to cut their way through the cables that were supposed to keep Golden's grandfather's gun collection out of the wrong hands. People who are this intent on getting their hands on weapons are very difficult to stop. That is not an argument against gun control because thousands of unbalanced young men are not quite that determined; they are ambivalent. That is why gun control is a necessary but not sufficient step.

Although we will not be able to stop all of these tragedies, we can cut down on their number by insuring that adults make themselves available to kids in completely confidential settings, reassuring them of their privacy when they take that risky step to come forward. We can provide opportunities for "round pegs" like Michael Carneal, a bright, intellectually inclined kid, to find a social space that doesn't depend on athletic prowess or a handsome face.

If the reports of his childhood acquaintances prove to be correct, Adam Lanza may have been through a similar experience. Kids can be very cruel and they are not always courageous enough to own up to their culpability for ostracism, particularly since they don't know -- and cannot be held responsible -- for the extreme consequences of emotional damage they may be causing.

In the end, though, there will be troubled boys and some of them will become killers. To the extent that we can capture the warning signals they send out to their peers, we can do our best to stop them in their tracks, even if we do not always succeed.

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In school shootings, patterns and warning signs

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How could it happen here? This is the question plaguing residents of Newtown, Conn., a picture-perfect country town with good schools, quiet streets and a strong sense of community. But small towns like Newtown are where 60% of rampage school shootings in the United States occur.

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A new law that is taking effect this year, would allow literally anyone to grab a gun, carry it, and never have to fire it unless the person thinks it’s absolutely necessary, without any education or proper training with firearms.

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Republicans in Missouri and Ohio have pushed through expansive access to guns for the new year

The new year means new legislation, and Republicans in at least two states have gifted their constituents with laxer gun restrictions to kick off 2017.

Although fatal shootings are already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents, a new law allows anyone 19 or older who owns a gun to carry it in public, concealed, without getting training or a permit.

"This law would allow anybody to go get a gun, carry it, and never have to fire the weapon until they think it's necessary to use it, without any education whatsoever," Sheriff Mike Sharp of Jackson County, who was among several law enforcement officers opposed to the law, NBC News' Pete Williams.

Despite a veto from Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon last year, the Republican-led legislature voted to override the blockade. The new measure allows owners to avoid a state-approved training course previously required in obtaining a permit to carry. Owners of firearms will be able to conceal and carry them anywhere in Missouri. Some public places, such as courtrooms and jails, are still off limits to concealed carry, but breaking that rule will be considered a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

"We're lowering the standard. We are creating the perfect storm," former State Representative Kim Gardner warned her colleagues during the veto session last yea r. The National Rifle Association was jubilant, calling the override "a great day for freedom in Missouri."

Kevin Ahlbrand, legislative director for the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, expressed concern that despite the NRA's glee, the new law would place undue burdens on already overstrained law enforcement.

"Our biggest fear is criminals who have not been convicted of a felony but are engaged in criminal activity will be legally carrying guns, and we're now going to have to assume everyone is armed," Ahlbrand told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "When we show up to a scene and there are five guys with their guns out, what do we do? "

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said the new law "will leave (citizens) less safe, and make the job of law enforcement more difficult and put our officers in danger."

The new gun laws took affect January 1. Missouri now joins Idaho, West Virginia and Mississippi as one of four states to adopt "permitless carry" in 2016, bringing the total number of U.S. states to 12.

Beyond lifting the rule about permits, the law also expands the state's castle doctrine and creates a controversial stand-your-ground right. The new law no longer requires people to attempt to back away from trouble in public, as in a tavern parking lot, before using deadly force if there is fear of bodily harm.

Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a lawmaker from Ferguson, which erupted in protests after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, warned that enacting the stand-your-ground standard would mean another "bad Samaritan like Zimmerman." She was referring to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin , an unarmed black teenager, by George Zimmerman in Florida four years ago.

Over in Ohio, Republican Gov. John Kasich signed into law a new measure that allows service members to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, and shrinks gun free zones in the state.

The new law allows concealed carry permit holders to bring firearms inside school safety zones as long as the guns are in their vehicles. That means that gun-owners in Ohio can legally carry hidden, loaded handguns near daycare centers and on some college and university campuses.

"Governor Kasich ignored the concerns of law enforcement, business leaders, gun violence survivors, moms, daycare providers, campus stakeholders and students," Michelle Mueller, of the Michael Bloomberg gun safety group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said in a . "By signing Senate Bill 199, Governor Kasich is siding with gun lobby interests over public safety."

Ohio is increasing the number of places where concealed carriers can legally carry. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Ohio and 23 other states allow some form of campus carry.

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Armed for 2017: New state gun laws shrink "gun-free zones," expand access to concealed carry without training or permit

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The new year means new legislation, and Republicans in at least two states have gifted their constituents with laxer gun restrictions to kick off 2017. Although fatal shootings are already a more common cause of death in Missouri than car accidents, a new law allows anyone 19 or older who owns a gun to carry it in public, concealed, without getting training or a permit.

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In the United States out of 50 states there are 36 of them where a person has no legal requirement to register a firearm, need a permit, nor need a license to purchase and own a firearm. Firearms include, rifles, shotguns, or handguns. According to the Congressional Research Service to there is an estimated 310 million firearms across the country, according to a 2012 estimate.

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> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 30.6 (6th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:24.5 (18th highest)
2. Alaska
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: No

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 22.6 (11th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:47.0 (the highest)
3. Arkansas
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 28.9 (8th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:31.6 (8th highest)
4. Colorado
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 17.4 (23rd highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:18.3 (20th lowest)
5. Delaware
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 5.6 (3rd lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:14.4 (15th lowest)
6. Florida
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 16.1 (24th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:14.7 (16th lowest)
7. Georgia
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 22.1 (13th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:17.4 (18th lowest)
8. Idaho
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 37.0 (5th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:32.5 (6th highest)
9. Indiana
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 20.0 (17th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:20.7 (23rd lowest)
10. Kansas
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: No

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 16.0 (24th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:25.9 (16th highest)
11. Kentucky
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 18.7 (19th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:27.9 (10th highest)
12. Louisiana
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?:Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 22.8 (10th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:20.8 (24th lowest)
13. Maine
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: No

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 11.7 (13th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:24.2 (19th highest)
14. Mississippi
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 10.7 (10th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:26.7 (13th highest)
15. Missouri
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 12.5 (15th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:35.3 (5th highest)
16. Montana
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 16.0 (25th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:42.2 (3rd highest)
17. Nevada
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 29.4 (7th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:22.8 (23rd highest)
18. New Hampshire
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 21.8 (14th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:31.9 (7th highest)
19. New Mexico
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 56.3 (2nd highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:26.5 (15th highest)
20. North Dakota
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 14.2 (19th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:26.8 (12th highest)
21. Ohio
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 15.1 (20th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:20.3 (22nd lowest)
22. Oklahoma
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 19.9 (18th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:27.1 (11th highest)
23. Oregon
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 15.7 (21st lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:23.1 (20th highest)
24. Pennsylvania
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 22.3 (12th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:21.2 (25th lowest)
25. Rhode Island
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 4.8 (2nd lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:21.8 (25th highest)
26. South Carolina
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 18.2 (21st highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:21.9 (24th highest)
27. South Dakota
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 18.7 (20th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:31.2 (9th highest)
28. Tennessee
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 16.0 (23rd lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:26.6 (14th highest)
29. Texas
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 20.3 (16th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:19.4 (21st lowest)
30. Utah
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 37.9 (4th highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:17.9 (19th lowest)
31. Vermont
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: No

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 8.3 (8th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:25.9 (17th highest)
32. Virginia
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 41.5 (3rd highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:23.0 (21st highest)
33. Washington
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 12.5 (16th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:16.2 (17th lowest)
34. West Virginia
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 16.0 (22nd lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:40.6 (4th highest)
35. Wisconsin
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 11.2 (11th lowest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:22.9 (22nd highest)
36. Wyoming
> License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No

> Permit needed to carry handgun?: No

> Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 278.2 (the highest)

> Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:43.1 (2nd highest)

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License, registration, or permit required to buy gun?: No > Permit needed to carry handgun?: Yes > Registered guns per 1,000 adults: 30.6 (6th highest) > Federal firearm licensees per 1,000 establishments:24.5 (18th highest) 2.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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The articles says that Barry began to get into dark things, such as writing dark poems and watching violent movies before all those things became his reality. His tragic planed left a teacher and 2 classmates died , but also leaving all the rest of the algebra class traumatized.

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SPOKANE, Wash. - School shootings were still a relatively unheard of when 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis walked into Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake in 1996 dressed as a wild west gunslinger and armed with several guns and 89 rounds of ammunition.

The aftermath of his evil plan left a teacher and 2 of his classmates dead and all those in his algebra class traumatized for life.

It's been 18 years since the horrible tragedy occurred. Barry is now in his mid-30's, serving two life sentences and an additional 205 years in Clallam Bay Prison.

KHQ's Stephanie Vigil had the opportunity to talk with former math teacher and wrestling coach Jon Lane, who subdued Loukaitis and saved the rest of the algebra class from Barry's wrath.

Jon may never know what drove Barry Loukaitis to act on his plot, but he has an idea.

"Barry started to get into very dark things. Writing dark poems and watching dark movies and violent videos and so on. I think pretty soon that became his reality. He thought he was avenging something. I don't know what it was. Whether he'd been bullied or not, it never came up in the trial there's always a lot of speculation about that. I suspect their could have been. I never even found out. I never talked to Barry since it happened," Lane said as he remembered that day.

When asked if he would like to talk with Barry today, Lane thought and said, "A lot of time has passed and I think i would. He as much as anybody lost his life that day."

Although Lane isn't exactly sure what he would say to Barry.

"I don't know. I don't know how I would handle it. I'm not mad at Barry. I'm not bitter at him. If anything I'm sad for him."

While Lane feels sorry for Loukaitis, he also feels for his victims.

"I cant imagine the terror those kids had when he came into the classroom and started shooting and they saw people die in front of their eyes. I didn't see people die, but I saw the aftermath of that carnage."

Carnage that Lane says is still very vivid in his mind.

"He said he was going to take me hostage and take me out of the classroom and put the gun in my mouth," Lane recalled.

Despite that horrible day, Lane has been able to move forward in his life.

"I talked about it a lot. I have a great family support and I'm strong in my faith, at least I think I am. I didn't hold it in really, and that was the right thing to do."

Jon may never end up talking with Loukaitis, but as a parent and teacher for more than three decades, he's got a message he'd like to share.

"Parents need to be good parents, they need to supervise their kids. They need to love their kids. They need to be involved in their lives. Kids go through a lot of difficult times and its not easy."

18 years later and school violence has only gotten worse. John believes it's because there is a breakdown in societal values, religious values, and a breakdown in the family. He even blamed the media.

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THEN AND NOW: Teacher Who Subdued School Shooter Barry Loukaitis Recalls That Day

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SPOKANE, Wash. - School shootings were still a relatively unheard of when 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis walked into Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake in 1996 dressed as a wild west gunslinger and armed with several guns and 89 rounds of ammunition.

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This article is a summary of the earliest school shooting in american history . I believe it’s important because even though it happened years ago it is still helpful to find articles from 1760's about school shootings.

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The Pennsylvania Center for the Book - Enoch Brown School Massacre

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The massacre of Enoch Brown was not the first attack on English settlers by Indians in Pennsylvania, but it was, however, the most gruesome. Indian resistance began to increase as more white settlers immigrated into Pennsylvania during the 1750s. Pioneers in Antrim Township fell victim to many of these Indian raids.

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In this massacre Hamilton shot 105 bullets, as a result he killed 17 people and 32 were wounded all under 4 minutes, but that was not all the 106th bullet he shot was for himself.

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Once or twice over the past 20 years, driving north into the Scottish Highlands, I've taken a small detour. After hesitating at a roundabout on the A9, and wondering briefly if this is really what I want to do, I've taken then the B8033 road marked Dunblane.

Past the small town's railway station, I've slowed down into Doune Road. Why I've ended up stopping at the small sign on the low stone wall that reads "Dunblane Primary School", I'm not sure. Journalists, by nature, are not deferential observers, but this place is different.

I don't stay long. Less than a minute. But even in these few seconds, I've felt uneasy about intruding. On departing, I've felt only increasing respect for a community that - despite the nightmares that unfolded here - found the resilience to survive.

How deep are the wounds? They don't get much deeper. Just after 9.30am on 13 March, 1996, a local former Scout leader, Thomas Hamilton, drove into Dunblane Primary's car park, got out of his van, and tried to block the phone lines of the school by cutting cables on a telegraph pole.

He entered the north-west side of the school, which gave access to the gym and the main hall, carrying four handguns - two Browning pistols and two Smith & Wesson .357 Magnums. He had 743 rounds of ammunition, enough to wipe out the entire school. Dressed in black, with holsters strapped to his body and wearing two body pouches, his ears were protected by specialist muffs familiar to anyone who frequents gun clubs. There is evidence to suggest that Hamilton, 43, may have been planning what happened next for years, and that his target was the lower-school assembly, attended by every child aged between five and eight.

He had run boys clubs in and around Dunblane for three or four years, regularly questioning one nine-year-old about the way into the gym, directions to the main hall, routes from the central entrance and when the assembly started.

By 9am most pupils had arrived for the school day. There was a thin layer of frost and snow on the ground.

Before he entered the gym, where teacher Gwen Mayor had just taken the 28 pupils of her P1 class for their weekly runaround, Hamilton had fired two shots at the assembly stage and nearby girls toilets.

When he entered the gym he was confronted by PE teacher Eileen Harrild. He fired into her arms and chest. Ms Mayor was then shot and killed quickly. Another teaching assistant, Mary Blake, was shot in the head and legs. Hamilton had fired off almost 30 bullets within seconds of entering the gym. Children were hit, some killed outright. Mrs Harrild and Mrs Blake, bleeding from their wounds, managed to steer some pupils towards a store cupboard to hide from the mayhem. Standing in the centre of the gym hall, Hamilton fired off further shots. Children, some already wounded, were being hit multiple times at point-blank range. An adult and an older pupil who heard the noise from outside the gym hall, were fired at as they tried to look inside. When he first left the gym, Hamilton fired off more rounds, towards the library cloakroom. Others were hit. A bullet passed through one of the temporary Portakabin classrooms outside, as teachers shouted to children to get down and lie on the floor.

When Hamilton went back inside the gym, he dropped the gun he was using and selected the Smith & Wesson. He put the barrel in his mouth and fired. He was blown off his feet, and landed surrounded by a pool of blood.

Hamilton had used his Browning pistol 105 times; 17 people were dead, 32 sustained gunshot wounds, all under just four minutes. The 106th bullet was for himself.

Not all of this detail was known when the first drip-feed of information from the massacre began to appear across news wires. I was in The Independent's former home in Canary Wharf, and began preparing to fly to Scotland, gathering what information I could before leaving. I'd only recently become a father, my son Sebastian just a few months old. When the beautiful picture of Class P1 became public, and names were put to the small, smiling faces of those dead, I remember struggling to take everything in. I also appreciated that if I felt like this, then how must the parents of the victims feel?

Along with Gwen Mayor, 16 children were slaughtered, all of them just five or six years old. Victoria, Emma, Melissa, Charlotte, Kevin, Ross, David, Mhairi, Brett, Abigail, Emily, Sophie, John, Joanna, Hannah and Megan.

There was criticism of the way parents were kept in the dark about what had happened. They were initially taken to one of the large Victorian houses near the school, and then brought to the main school building. One by one the full room emptied as parents were reunited with their children - until suddenly dawned on those remaining that only bad news was left.

To the credit of The Independent's then editor, Charlie Wilson, there was no newsroom pressure on his reporters to confront or doorstep grieving parents, families or friends. Those who wanted to talk, I listened to. That was it. "Get what you get, do it your way," he quietly told me.

After those first days, I began investigating Hamilton's motives, his background; I spoke to those who felt they missed warning signals that could have stopped him; and looked at the weakness of gun laws that operated in Hamilton's favour. His Scout warrant was withdrawn in 1974 because of "suspicions on his moral intent towards boys". Official complaints lodged by Hamilton suggested he believed he was persecuted, and blamed the community for his isolation and business failures. A convenient front for paedophilia? Yes, no doubt.

There were also unanswered questions about his "income" - as someone unemployed, how he could afford his expensive photography and gun hobbies? There were also his unclear connections to homeless men in Edinburgh doss-houses. Police questioned me about what I'd written, and the sources of my information, but their interest faded relatively quickly.

Documents released almost 10 years after the killings revealed Hamilton had been investigated by child protection officers, and had been reported to Scotland's prosecution authorities who had considered 10 charges against him (never acted upon), including assault.

The political fall-out was substantial. John Major's government reacted quickly by promising a nationwide gun amnesty, with orders to Lord Cullen to set up a judicial inquiry and "report as soon as practicable".

Dunblane's grieving parents could have retreated from the front line, and no one would have blamed them for doing so. But there was no retreat, only defiance and a determination to ban private gun ownership, and ensure no other parent would witness the slaughter of innocents.

Parliament wasn't quite sure what action it should take. There was an appetite for restricting gun ownership, but a full ban was deemed draconian and unnecessary. On the road to John Major's government banning all cartridge ammunition handguns except .22 single shot weapons, with the Blair administration later banning the remaining .22 guns, there were key events that altered the climate in Westminster.

With some MPs convinced there shouldn't be a reflex reaction to Dunblane, the campaign set up by grieving Dunblane parents - the Snowdrop Petition - was at a crossroads in late July. One of the lead campaigners was Pamela Ross. Her daughter Joanna had been killed in the gymnasium.

Journalists can sometimes function the way a lawyer does, by offering a coherent, dispassionate voice to someone at the epicentre of a crisis. I spoke to Pamela at length a week before MPs were due to debate changes to the UK's gun laws in August 1996. She was worried about being asked on to BBC's Newsnight. I listened to her and knew she was more than capable of offering unchallengeable insight that would disarm hesitant politicians of any side.

Together we drafted an open letter aimed directly at MPs. She knew everything she wanted to say, and how she wanted MPs to react. Her letter was published on 1 August on the front page of The Independent. The reaction was instant. The Sun newspaper chose to follow it up by reprinting Pamela's letter in full the following day.

It was incredibly powerful, telling MPs to "listen" to her, to ask themselves how they would feel if a gunman barged into the Commons and slaughtered the Prime Minister and 16 MPs. If they thought that could never happen, she said she felt the same way about the school in Dunblane. She told them Joanna has a little sister, Alison, and when she starts school they should, if they fail to ban handguns, all come to Scotland and explain to her the reasons. She accused them of valuing sport over life and of being influenced by powerful pro-gun lobbyists.

The Firearms (Amendment) Act was passed in 1997, with another stronger version passed later the same year.

As I've driven away from Doune Road, once catching sight of the distinctive red sweatshirts that belong to the primary school's pupils, I've felt the urge to call Pamela, to ask about her life since that day in March 1996 when snowdrops were trying to push through her garden lawn. But I've never called. There is no need to.

The town's memories, 20 years on, of that horror-filled day, are perhaps by now carefully filed, though I suspect they will never go away. All of Dunblane's parents demanded they be listened to - and as I've driven back on to the A9, I know they were.

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Remembering the Dunblane school massacre 20 years on

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Once or twice over the past 20 years, driving north into the Scottish Highlands, I've taken a small detour. After hesitating at a roundabout on the A9, and wondering briefly if this is really what I want to do, I've taken then the B8033 road marked Dunblane.

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In Townville Elementary School they have already started to upgrade security around the perimeter. They included a system where in order to get in people would have to buzz in at the office in order to enter.

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Boy, 6, dead in wake of teen's gunfire

A shooting at an elementary school rocked Townville, S.C., leaving a 6-year-old dead and two other students and a teacher injured.

But school leaders say the situation that unfolded late last month could have been worse if not for practices that limited the alleged 14-year-old shooter's access to the building and the students inside. Those included self-locking external doors, visibility inside the building, and staff members prepared to respond to an active shooter, Anderson District 4 Superintendent Joanne Avery said in a letter to parents.

The shooter, who police say shot and killed his father before arriving at the 285-student Townville Elementary School, began firing from the playground as children were coming outside for recess.

"Immediately upon those shots being fired, our students were led to safe locations by the teachers," Avery said. "The doors were secured, and the shooter was denied access to the building and our students. Administrators and teachers at Townville Elementary followed all district procedures by immediately placing the school on lockdown and taking children to secure locations."

In the aftermath of school shootings, public debate often focuses on such issues as arming teachers, increasing police in schools, or investing in costly security infrastructure. That's the case now in Anderson County, where some leaders have proposed placing school resource officers in every elementary school or allowing teachers to carry guns.

But many school safety experts say more basic efforts to limit schools' exterior access, boost visibility indoors, and train teachers and staff about how to respond to an intruder are some of the most important steps schools can take.

"We need to reinforce or reintroduce these basic fundamentals," school security consultant Kenneth Trump said. "We have a number of people in the post-Sandy Hook era who've been focused on questionable, over-the-top tactics," he said, referring to the 2012 shooting at the Newtown, Conn., school that took the lives of 20 students and six staff members.

The Shooting

The family of 6-year-old Jacob Hall, who died after several days in critical condition, laid the kindergartner to rest in Townville last week after a superhero-themed service.

The alleged shooter awaits trial on two counts of murder and two counts of attempted murder. He never made it into the building, officials said.

A volunteer firefighter, who arrived on the scene, restrained him until law-enforcement officials arrived seven minutes after the shooting started.

The school canceled classes for several days before planning to return last week. Teachers were to return a day early to prepare to address the issue in classes, and the district planned to provide counselors and therapy dogs for students to help them process the events emotionally, the superintendent said.

The school took "additional safety precautions" as students were scheduled to return, including an increased police presence to calm parents' fears, Avery wrote in a message to families before school was set to resume.

"We want our children to feel safe, but we don't want the additional police presence to scare them," Avery wrote. "We are attempting to find a healthy balance."

It's not unusual for educators and policymakers to explore upgraded safety measures in the aftermath of an attack, and those conversations often extend beyond district and even state boundaries as parents around the country respond to news reports with fear and anxiety.

The "fundamentals" of school safety training and controlling exterior access were stressed at schools across the country after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, which dramatically changed practices, said Trump, who is based in Cleveland.

Emotional Topic

But the safety of vulnerable children is an understandably emotional topic, so members of the public often look for quick fixes like untested response plans and expensive gadgets, he said.

"There's been this sort of mantra of do something, do anything, and do it fast," Trump said.

Townville Elementary School and the entire Anderson County district had made a number of safety upgrades in the last six years, Avery said. Those included locked entry vestibules in all schools, systems that require visitors to buzz for entry, cameras to improve visibility in hallways, and regular safety drills with students and staff members, she said.

Trump said it's important for schools to focus on such "human elements" of safety such as training and teaching staff members about proper protocols because even the most sophisticated door lock won't keep a school safe if that door is propped open against school rules.

"The nuts and bolts things that need to be done take as much time as they do money," Trump said.

Published in Print: October 12, 2016, as Shooting Reignites Safety Concerns
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Shooting Reignites School Safety Concerns

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A shooting at an elementary school rocked Townville, S.C., leaving a 6-year-old dead and two other students and a teacher injured. But school leaders say the situation that unfolded late last month could have been worse if not for practices that limited the alleged 14-year-old shooter's access to the building and the students inside.

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This is our civic action project that we came up with.

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A list of articles that either talk about guns or talks about shootings in general.

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The title says all. This website is a debate of why guns should be banned or not.

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Like any subject that weaves its way round corpses, gun control discussions easily ignite the worst parts of us. Whether it's descent into name-calling, insults, ad hominems and similar lazy, childish tactics, or a dismissal of anyone other than those on "our" side, attempts at objectivity are often scarce. However, many of us, including myself, are in the advantageous position of ignorance: it is advantageous, since it means we have no excuse not to encounter and contemplate the best arguments on both "sides" of the debate.

To that end, I want to highlight two potent arguments I've encountered from two individuals who, more than likely, would disagree to large extents on gun control in the US.

I say "sides" because I'm very hesitant to portray sides in debates: important discussions are often more complicated than such a binary placement asserts. No one wants more innocent people dead; no one wants more children firing off guns in their home, killing family members. The difference depends on specific items of policy. These arguments highlight precisely this and, I hope, will show that indeed the "other side" do not comprise a set of evil, irrational individuals (there might be a few, but we'd be bad thinkers to assert that everyone who wants less gun control is a crazy, sky-shooting cowboy).
Argument 1.1: Guns Undermine Liberty
I've previously argued that individual liberty only has meaning if one is allowed to, basically, willingly destroy one's own body. That means, as long as you are not harming non-consenting others, you should be free to smoke, drink, even amputate your limbs - and, indeed, kill yourself. All of these come with caveats, of course: we might be ignorant to the extent such self-destruction might really have (on others). However, the larger point is not the encouragement for adult citizens to slowly destroy their bodies but the recognition that this civil society respects your autonomy, your personhood, to the point that, if you wish to harm yourself, such respect remains.

Freedom of speech similarly applies: we should be able to express even the most offensive of speech, without worry that mere offence is sufficient reason to stifle us (there might be other, better reasons to prevent it, based on legitimate concerns of harm). Under the guise of PC or "public morality", citizens are prevented from writing, acting, or expressing themselves, undermining the freedom not only of these artists, but of the audience too, in that their freedom to decide to be an audience is already prevented.

When the State starts deciding what is and isn't good for you, when it begins acting upon paternalistic grounds, then we ought to start worrying. Freedom only means something when we're free to act stupidly (again, all with caveats), when we're free to express ourselves.

Guns, however, change this dynamic entirely.

In the New York Times, Firmin DeBrabander argues that individual liberty is completely undermined by allowing citizens to wield guns.

"Guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name - that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech."

Those who long for a gun on every citizen would encourage an enforced "polite" society "precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening." We would "walk gingerly - not make any sudden, unexpected moves - and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend." A person who brandished a weapon would already be communicating that the conversation is over: there can be no discussion with such a person at all. The fullstop is in the barrel and he's willing to show you, if you decide to challenge him.

Free speech and expression can only exist with the knowledge that non-violence will be the response. But guns, by definition, would change that. DeBrabander asks us to imagine what would have happened had the non-armed Zuccoti Park protestors carried weapons when the police stormed.
Argument 1.2: Guns Poison Power
Against such powerful points, gun control advocates assert that by undermining our ability to arm, we allow complete government despotism a greater chance of reality. By being armed, we can stand up to a regime of control. But this encourages an extreme individualism, not a coherent community - since we are not asking for a select group of trained individuals to be the only and trusted bearers of arms, but everyone. This is a distrust of community, since gun control advocates are saying as soon as we allow one group guns (army, police, etc.), the rest of us open up to servility under their armed hands, pulled by the strings of their master (the government).

Citing Foucault, DeBrabander points out that "nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism". After all, this makes it easier to take control, since instead of a large opposing group, you have many disparate, self-regarding opponents. Thus, instead of aiding liberty against a powerful state, it aids a powerful state in taking more liberty.

But there is reason to consider the importance of being armed, as Sam Harris highlights.
Argument 2.0 Guns Can Protect in a Violent World
A popular argument from gun rights advocates it that if you make gun ownership a crime, then only criminals will have guns. This means only "bad" guys would have guns, while good people would by definition be at a disadvantage. There are various responses to this: who decides who's a "good" or "bad" guy; even in the hands of innocent people, guns can escalate a crime situation unnecessarily; due to the insane nature of attacks, robberies, etc., one will not act like a John McClane but more like a quivering mess, which is the worst mindset to be in when holding a powerful weapon.

Thus, would it not be better to regulate guns more effectively, instead of getting rid of them altogether? Criminals will get hold of guns - indeed, by definition, if guns are outlawed, one becomes a criminal just by acquiring one - and leave non-criminals more vulnerable than ever. I'm not certain outlawing all guns is the solution, because of this. It doesn't, however, mean we should all be armed, but I don't know how to square that at the moment.

But Sam Harris goes further and correctly so: He doesn't wish for a world without guns at all. According to him, people who wish for this do not understand violence or its nature. "A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene." The Kitty Genovese case comes to mind, where bystanders only watched while a young woman was brutally murdered. Would a gun have helped? Perhaps.

Harris undermines the rebuttal that these situations are sudden, shocking and thus would mean good people shooting recklessly.

"The liberal commentariat seems to have no awareness of what "well-trained" signifies. It happens to include an understanding of what to do and what not to do when the danger of shooting innocent bystanders exists. The fact that bystanders do occasionally get shot, even by police officers, does not prove that putting guns in the hands of good people would be a bad idea. Gun-control advocates seem always to imagine the worst possible scenario: legions of untrained, delusional vigilantes producing their weapons at a pin drop and firing indiscriminately into a crowd."

Harris here is calling for better and more training; better laws, not all-encompassing and totally restrictive ones.

As many have pointed out, this still doesn't undermine the data indicating guns increase chances of death - even when kept at home - and so on. The usual retort that risk is everywhere might be boring to hear, but remains true. Yes, guns are "designed" for killing whereas knives are not, but that doesn't mean you can't have incidents of knife-attacks. Guns can level the playing field, especially for women - who are often the targets of violent crimes from more powerful opponents. Says Harris: "A world without guns... is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?"
Conclusion
I do not know where I stand. However, assuming Harris' data is correct, that only "good" people acquired guns, were well-trained, regularly checked on by independent bodies (the same way we are tested for drivers, etc.), and such, I see little problem with gun ownership. But, the problem is deciding who should and should not own guns; the undermining of liberty if it is given to all citizens; the danger to free speech and liberty when held by anyone; that even "good" people can become enraged, drunk, etc., and easy access to a gun can escalate a mere drunken brawl to a murder spree.

This is a complex topic, but we ought not to dismiss arguments because they do not square with our gut feelings - regardless of whether we want more or less guns, more or less laws. By outlining two important arguments, we can see that reason does exist. Even if both are wrong, we can show this without recourse to name-calling, Strawmanning and caricature. A debate and discussion must be had, since discussion can aid us in achieving the goal we all want: a world with less violence or, more realistically, one where fewer innocent people die. If guns aid or hinder that goal, we will figure that out by having a proper conversation, not a mud-slinging contest, regardless of which "side" you are on.
Image Credit: Andrija Markovic / Shutterstock

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Two Important Arguments from Both 'Sides' of the Gun Debate

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Like any subject that weaves its way round corpses, gun control discussions easily ignite the worst parts of us. Whether it's descent into name-calling, insults, ad hominems and similar lazy, childish tactics, or a dismissal of anyone other than those on "our" side, attempts at objectivity are often scarce.

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California Gun Sales up ahead of New Gun Control

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California Gun Sales up ahead of New Gun Control

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It shows that the gun sales increases. And people were demanding to have a new guns after they see what the married couple did in San Bernardino, they killed 14 people and 22 wounded people. Some people said that they wanted a new guns because the terrorist inspired them to have one.

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SACRAMENTO - With six new gun control bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in July, sales of semi-automatic rifles have more than doubled in California over last year.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports (http://bit.ly/2iaHvru ) that the California Department of Justice shows 364,643 semi-automatic rifles had been sold by Dec. 9 whereas 153,931 rifles were sold last year.

Rifles with bullet buttons for the quick swap of ammunition magazines and other soon-to-be banned features have also skyrocketed. Statewide sales are up 40 percent by early December.

The new gun controls reclassified semi-automatic rifles that have certain features as assault weapons. The features added to the prohibited list include a protruding or forward pistol grip, a thumbhole stock, a folding stock or a flash suppressor. Assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989.

Nearly one million firearms were purchased in California as of Dec. 9, the most recent state data available, compared to more than 700,000 guns sold in all of 2015. Sales have likely soared beyond one million guns since then, the newspaper reported.

Steven Serna came into Pacific Outfitters sporting goods store in Ukiah last week to buy a semi-automatic rifle before new gun control legislation limits the gun's features in California.

Reading this on your iPhone or iPad? Check out our new Apple News app channel here.

He wanted to purchase an AK-47 rifle but there were none to be found at the store. The deer hunter lamented that he should have purchased one earlier this year.

Todd Lyly also visited the store last week to talk with his friends behind the gun sales counter about the new laws.

Lyly said he will convert his weapons so they are compliant with the new regulations, most likely by installing a fixed stock. But he said it's a superficial change that he expects will mostly impact law-abiding people and not violent criminals already disinclined to follow the law.

"It's frustrating," Lyly said.

California lawmakers pushed for the new gun controls after a mass shooting in San Bernardino last year. A married couple who were armed with AR15 rifles and 9mm pistols shot and killed 14 people and wounded 22 others at a county health department holiday party. Authorities said they were inspired by foreign terrorist groups.

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California gun sales up ahead of new gun control limits

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SACRAMENTO - With six new gun control bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in July, sales of semi-automatic rifles have more than doubled in California over last year. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports (http://bit.ly/2iaHvru ) that the California Department of Justice shows 364,643 semi-automatic rifles had been sold by Dec.

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Opinions of people in America about Gun Control

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Opinions of people in America about Gun Control

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On this site it also shows how many percent of people wanted to control guns and gun rights. Additionally, it demonstrate on how the people and the place changed when they got involved in school shooting. After a year, some opinions of people got changed and some of it are not changed.

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America's Complex Relationship With Guns

Americans have broad exposure to guns, whether they personally own one or not. About seven-in-ten say they have fired a gun at some point and 42% currently live in a gun-owning household.

Gun Rights vs. Gun Control

Explore 20 years of data on public opinion about gun control vs. gun rights.

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Americans have broad exposure to guns, whether they personally own one or not. About seven-in-ten say they have fired a gun at some point and 42% currently live in a gun-owning household. Explore 20 years of data on public opinion about gun control vs. gun rights.

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It talks about ownership of guns, and shows which type of group of people has the highest percent portion owning a gun. It also discussed crime and self-defense, background checks and criminal sources of guns, right to carry laws, etc.

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Comprehensive and meticulously documented facts about gun control. Learn about ownership rates, crime, background checks, accidents, politics, and more.

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In this site it shows how many people supported gun rights or gun control, and what race has the highest rank that supported gun rights and gun control.

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Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

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The Pew Research Center has tracked shifting public attitudes about guns over the past 20 years. Explore our polling data below to public opinion on guns across demographic groups and read the latest report on these findings.

Question: What do you think is more important - to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?

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The Pew Research Center has tracked shifting public attitudes about guns over the past 20 years. Explore our polling data below to public opinion on guns across demographic groups and read the latest report on these findings. Question: What do you think is more important - to protect the right of Americans to own guns, OR to control gun ownership?

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Comments between 2 sides about Gun Control

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Comments between 2 sides about Gun Control

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This site is from debate.org. It shows that there are 47 % of people agreed to have a stricter laws for gun control. And 53% of people didn't agreed to have a stricter gun control.

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Does there need to be stricter laws for gun control?

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Give your thoughts and hear the opinions of others about stricter gun control and whether or not changes need to be made.

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Preventing and Preparing for Critical Incidents In School 

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Preventing and Preparing for Critical Incidents In School 

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Explains on what schools can do to keep their environment safe. The article mostly talks about school shootings.

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Ten years ago, on a sunny day in April, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colo., and began shooting. They killed 13 people and wounded 21 others before turning the guns on themselves. The events of that spring day mark one of the most devastating school shootings in U.S. history.[1]

Statistically, shootings and other homicides are a rare event in U.S. schools - they represent less than one percent of the homicides among children aged 5-18. From 1999 to 2006, 116 students were killed in 109 school-associated incidents.[2]

But as those in Jefferson County know all too well, school shootings can be a very real and very frightening part of school violence in this country. Each attack has a terrible and lasting effect on the students, school and surrounding community - and on the nation as a whole. Even one school shooting is too many.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is working to help people who work in and around schools create safe environments for teaching and learning. The Institute develops and distributes tools to aid teachers, administrators, staff and law enforcement in preventing, preparing for and responding to critical incidents in schools.

A Closer Look at School Shootings

A 2002 study by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education - funded in part by NIJ - took a closer look at 37 incidents of targeted school violence in the United States between December 1974 and May 2000.[3] "Targeted violence" - a term developed by the Secret Service - refers to any incident of violence where a known (or knowable) attacker selected a particular target prior to the attack. The study explored the behavior of the student-attackers in the 37 incidents in an effort to identify information that could help communities prevent future school attacks.

The study found that these were rarely sudden impulsive acts. In 95 percent of the cases, the attacker had developed the idea to harm the target before the attack. Most had access to and had used weapons prior to the incident. More than two-thirds of the attackers obtained the guns used in the attack from their own home or that of a relative.

There is no accurate profile of a "school shooter," according to he study. The shooters came from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds and ranged in age from 11 to 21 years. Some came from intact families with ties to the community; others came from foster homes with histories of neglect. Their academic performance ranged from excellent to failing. Few had been diagnosed with any mental disorder prior to the incident, and less than one-third had histories of drug or alcohol abuse. Almost three quarters of the attackers (71 percent) had felt bullied, persecuted, threatened, attacked or injured by others.

The National Institute of Justice contributed to the funding of a study by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education that examined 37 incidents of targeted school violence in the United States between December 1974 and May 2000. Here is what researchers learned about the attackers in those incidents:

Developed idea to harm target before attack

95 percent

Behaved in a way pre-incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help

93 percent

Told friend, schoolmate or sibling about idea before incident

81 percent

Felt bullied, threatened, attacked by others

71 percent

Obtained gun used in attack from own (or relative's) home

68 percent

Had a known history of weapon use

63 percent

Had a known history of drug/alcohol abuse

24 percent

Previous diagnosis of mental health or behavior disorder

17 percent

Academic performance

Ranged from excellent to failing

Source: The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States, Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education, May 2002.

Prior to the incident, 93 percent of the attackers behaved in a way that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. In fact, in more than three-fourths of the cases examined, the attacker had told a friend, schoolmate or sibling about his idea before taking action. But rarely did the person who was told about the impending attack - in nearly all of the cases, a peer - bring the information to an adult's attention. A 2008 follow-up study by the Secret Service and Education Department explored how students with prior knowledge of attacks made decisions about what steps, if any, to take after learning the information. The study found that the school's culture and misjudgments about the likelihood and immediacy of the planned attack influenced whether the students came forward with the information.[4]

Read an NIJ Journal article on the 2002 study, " Preventing School Shootings (pdf, 6 pages)." Read the complete findings from the 2008 follow-up study (pdf, 15 pages).

How Prepared Are Schools?

Many of the critical incidents examined in the Secret Service and Education Department study lasted no more than 20 minutes. In fact, 47 percent lasted 15 minutes or less from the beginning of the shooting to the time the attacker was apprehended, surrendered, stopped shooting, left the school or committed suicide; one-quarter were over within five minutes. Given the short duration of most school attacks, it is crucial for schools to have prevention efforts and critical incident response plans in place.

But how prepared are schools?

According to a 2006 national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 95 percent of school districts had a comprehensive plan to address crisis preparedness, response and recovery. Of these districts, about 82 percent provided funding for training or offered training on the plan to faculty and staff during the two preceding years. As for individual schools, 97 percent had a crisis preparedness, response and recovery plan, and among these schools, 87 percent provided training on the plan to faculty and staff.[5]

School districts with a comprehensive plan to address crisis preparedness, response and recovery

95 percent*

Among school districts with comprehensive plans, those that provided funding for training or offered training on the plan to faculty and staff during preceding two years

82 percent*

Schools with a crisis preparedness, response and recovery plan

97 percent*

Among schools with plans, those that provided training on plan to faculty and staff during preceding two years

87 percent*

School-based police officers who said emergency plans were not adequate

51 percent†

School-based police officers who said emergency plans were not practiced on a regular or ongoing basis

67 percent†

* School Health Policies and Programs Study 2006[5].
† School Safety Left Behind? School Safety Threats Grow as Preparedness Stalls & Funding Decreases[6].

Yet in a national survey of more than 750 school-based police officers, about half of the officers said the emergency plans for their schools were not adequate. More than 66 percent indicated that their emergency plans were not practiced on a regular or ongoing basis.[6]

Helping Schools Prepare and Respond

NIJ makes tools and training programs available to help schools and school districts resolve conflict, manage critical incidents and prevent school violence.

See "The Larger Scope of School Violence."

The tools and programs were developed with evidence-based practices and the recommendations of experts in NIJ's School Safety Technology Working Group in mind, said Mike O'Shea, program manager for the Institute's school safety portfolio. "These resources - all of which are free - can help teachers, administrators, staff and law enforcement officers prepare and respond to any type of critical incident in their school," O'Shea said.

Here are some of these resources:

School Crime Operations Package
This NIJ-funded software allows school-based police officers, administrators and security officers to map and analyze crime incidents that occur in and around schools. They can enter a daily log of incidents of school violence and crime, quickly display incidents involving a particular student and produce graphics showing school "hot spots" or year-to-year trends. For example, a map can show where bullying incidents have occurred on a school campus. This software can help schools establish policies for school safety, target school violence and prepare for future threats.

School Safety Plan Generator
Law enforcement officers and school staff can use this to create a document that helps prepare the school and serves as a reference guide for all first responders during critical incidents. The document can include the school's demographics, members of the critical incident planning team, roles and responsibilities, emergency locations, supplies and equipment on hand, and critical lines of communication.

A Critical Incident: What to Do in the First 20 Minutes
Developed by the North Carolina Office of the Attorney General and Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, this video shows a school shooter scenario. Viewers watch the school's response to the shooting and then discuss what went right, what went wrong and how they can use the lessons learned to improve their own critical incident plans.

Incident Commander
Incident Commander uses electronic gaming software to mimic a school shooting, a chemical spill, the aftermath of a severe storm and similar incidents so managers can practice what to do in the event any of these situations occurs. Users take the role of the incident commander, who manages the command team. They can act alone or coordinate with a team to employ emergency and public services. Developed by BreakAway, Ltd., with funding from NIJ, this computer simulation program also allows users to download maps of their city, county or state, so the scenario is played where they would respond to a real-life critical incident. (For more information, see www.incidentcommander.net.)

Active Shooter
This NIJ-funded program - scheduled to be released later this year - will train local police on how to respond to a school shooting. An emergency response system known as Rapid Response is first installed in a local school. The system takes surveys, videos and photographs of the school, and creates a Web-based tool that police officers can then use in a crisis. Officers can access the tool on their patrol car computers, get an electronic view of the school, and identify hazards, exits and vantage points for a fast, accurate response.

To obtain any of the tools discussed in this article, e-mail NIJ program manager Mike O'Shea, or contact the Rural Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center at 866-RURAL LE (866-787-2553).

Protecting Students

In the decade since Columbine, other communities across the country - such as Blacksburg, Va.; Lancaster County, Pa.; and Red Lake, Minn. - have experienced similar tragedies.

Schools should be places of learning and development - not violence and fear. Keeping students and schools safe should continue to be at the top of every school administrator's and police department's agenda. NIJ's ongoing efforts will help them achieve that goal.

NIJ Journal No. 262, March 2009
NCJ 225765

About the Author

Beth Schuster is an award-winning writer and editor with more than eight years of experience in technical writing and editing, mainly in the area of education policy. She is the managing editor of the NIJ Journal. Back to the top.

[note 1]"Columbine Tragedy and Recovery," Denver Post Online.

[note 2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, " School-Associated Student Homicides - United States, 1992-2006," MMWR Weekly 57 (02) (January 18, 2008): 33-36.

[note 3] Vossekuil, B., R.A. Fein, M. Reddy, R. Borum, and W. Modzeleski,The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States (pdf, 63 pages), Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education, May 2002.

[note 4] Pollack, W.S., W. Modzeleski, and G. Rooney,Prior Knowledge of Potential School-Based Violence: I​nformation Students Learn May Prevent a Targeted Attack (pdf, 15 pages), Washington, DC: U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education, May 2008.

[note 5]School Health Policies and Programs Study 2006, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[note 6] Trump, K.S., School Safety Left Behind? School Safety Threats Grow as Preparedness Stalls & Funding Decreases, NASRO 2004 National School-Based Law Enforcement Survey (pdf, 21 pages), February 2005.

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Preventing, Preparing for Critical Incidents in Schools

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Ten years ago, on a sunny day in April, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colo., and began shooting. They killed 13 people and wounded 21 others before turning the guns on themselves. The events of that spring day mark one of the most devastating school shootings in U.S.

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In U.S there are 300 million people are related to firearms, while there are 85 million people own guns. A lot of people died that causes gun related deaths. Like suicide, homicide and some of it are accidents.

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A list of reasons why Guns should either be BANNED or NOT BANNED.

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Should More Gun Control Laws Be Enacted?

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A list of past school shootings starting from a long time ago, the 1700s.

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1700s
The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indian entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only two children survived.

1800s
* November 2, 1853 Louisville, Kentucky A student, Matthew Ward, bought a self-cocking pistol in the morning, went to school and killed Schoolmaster Mr. Butler for excessively punishing his brother the day before. Even though he shot the Schoolmaster point blank in front of his classmates, he was acquitted.

An April 30, 1866 editorial in the New York Times argued against students carrying pistols, citing "...pistols being dropped on the floor at balls or being exploded in very inconvenient ways. A boy of 12 has his pantaloons made with a pistol pocket; and this at a boarding-school filled with boys, who, we suppose, do or wish to do the same thing. We would advise parents to look into it, and learn whether shooting is to be a part of the scholastic course which may be practiced on their boys; or else we advise them to see that their own boys are properly armed with the most approved and deadly-pistol, and that there may be an equal chance at least of their shooting as of being shot."

* June 8, 1867 New York City At Public School No. 18, a 13 year old lad brought a pistol loaded and capped, without the knowledge of his parents or school-teachers, and shot and injured a fellow classmate.

* December 22, 1868 Chattanooga, Tennessee A boy who refused to be whipped and left school, returned with his brother and a friend, the next day to seek revenge on his teacher. Not finding the teacher at the school, they continued to his house, where a gun battle rang out, leaving three dead. Only the brother survived.

* March 9, 1873 Salisbury, Maryland After school as Miss Shockley was walking with four small children, she was approached by a Mr. Hall and shot. The Schoolmaster ran out, but she was dead instantly. Hall threw himself under a train that night.

* May 24, 1879 Lancaster, New York As the carriage loaded with female students was pulling out of the school's stables, Frank Shugart a telegraph operator shot and severely injured Mr. Carr, Superintendent of the stables.

* March 6, 1884 Boston, Massachusetts As news of Jesse James reached the east coast, young kids started to act in the same manner. An article from the New York Times reads, "Another "Jesse James" Gang - "Word was brought to the Fifth Police Station to-night that a number of boys were using the Concord-street School-house for some unknown purpose, and a posse of officers was sent to investigate. The gang scattered at the approach of the police, and in their flight on drew a revolver and fired at Officer Rowan, without effect, however. William Nangle, age 14, and Sidney Duncan, age 12, were captured, but the other five or six escaped, among them the one who who did the shooting. The boys refused to disclose the object of their meeting, but it is thought that another "Jesse James" organization has been broken up."

* March 15, 1884 Gainsville, Georgia In the middle of the day, a group of very drunk Jackson County farmers left the Jug Tavern drinking and shooting their revolvers as they headed down the street driving people into their homes. As they approached the female academy, the girls fled the schoolyard into the school where the gang followed swearing and shooting, firing several rounds into the front door. No one was hurt.

* July 4, 1886 Charleston, South Carolina During Sunday school, Emma Connelly shot and killed John Steedley for "circulating slanderous reports" about her, even though her brother publicly whipped him a few days earlier.

* April 12, 1887 Watertown, New York Edwin Bush, a student a the Potsdam Normal School committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

* June 12, 1887 Cleveland, Tennessee Will Guess went to the school and fatally shot Miss Irene Fann, his little sister's teacher, for whipping her the day before.

* June 13, 1889 New Brunswick, New Jersey Charles Crawford upset over an argument with a school Trustee, went up to the window and fired a pistol into a crowded school room. The bullet lodged in the wall just above the teacher's head.

The first known mass shooting in the U.S. where students were shot, was on April 9, 1891, when 70 year old, James Foster fired a shotgun at a group of students in the playground of St. Mary's Parochial School, Newburgh, New York, causing minor injuries to several of the students. The majority of attacks during this time period by students on other students or teacher, usually involved stabbing with knives, or hitting with stones.

1900-1930s
There are very seldom reports of mass or multiple school shootings during the first three decades of the 20th Century, with the three most violent attacks on schools involving either arson or explosions.

February 26, 1902 Camargo, Illinois teacher Fletcher R. Barnett shot and killed another teacher, Eva C. Wiseman, in front of her class at a school near Camargo, Illinois. After shooting at a pupil who came to help Miss Wiseman and wounding himself in a failed suicide attempt he waited in the classroom until a group of farmers came to lynch him. He then ran out of the school building, grabbed a shotgun from one of the farmers and shot himself, before running away and leaping into a well where he finally drowned. The incident was likely sparked by Wiseman's refusal to marry Barnett.
February 24, 1903 Inman, South Carolina Edward Foster, a 17-year-old student at Inman High school, was shot and fatally wounded by his teacher Reuben Pitts after he had jerked a rod from Pitts' hands to resist punishment. According to the teacher, Foster struck the pistol Pitts had drawn to defend himself, thus causing its discharge. Pitts was later acquitted of murder.
October 10, 1906 Cleveland, Ohio Harry Smith shot and killed 22-year-old teacher Mary Shepard at South Euclid School after she had rejected him. Smith escaped and committed suicide in a barn near his home two hours later.
March 23, 1907 Carmi, Illinois George Nicholson shot and killed John Kurd at a schoolhouse outside of Carmi, Illinois during a school rehearsal. The motive for the shooting was Kurd making a disparaging remark about Nicholson's daughter during her recital.
March 11, 1908 Boston, Massachusetts Elizabeth Bailey Hardee was shot to death by Sarah Chamberlain Weed at the Laurens School, a finishing school in Boston. Weed then turned the gun on herself and committed suicide.
April 15, 1908 Asheville, North Carolina Dr. C. O. Swinney shot and fatally wounded his 16-year-old daughter Nellie in a reception room at Normal and Collegiate Institute. He then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
February 12, 1909 San Francisco, California 10-year-old Dorothy Malakanoff was shot and killed by 49-year-old Demetri Tereaschinko as she arrived at her school in San Francisco. Tereaschinko then shot himself in a failed suicide attempt. Tereaschinko was reportedly upset that Malakanoff refused to elope with him.
January 10, 1912 Warrenville, Illinois Sylvester E. Adams shot and killed teacher Edith Smith after she rejected his advances. Adams then shot and killed himself. The incident took place in a schoolhouse about a mile outside of Warrenville after the students had been dismissed for the day.
March 27, 1919 Lodi Township, Michigan 19-year-old teacher Irma Casler was shot and killed in her classroom at Rentschler school in Lodi Township, Michigan by Robert Warner, apparently because she had rejected his advances.
April 2, 1921 Syracuse, New York Professor Holmes Beckwith shot and killed dean J. Herman Wharton in his office at Syracuse University before committing suicide.
May 18, 1927 Bath, Michigan School treasurer Andrew Kehoe, after killing his wife and destroying his house and farm, blew up the Bath Consolidated School by detonating dynamite in the basement of the school, killing 38 people, mostly children. He then pulled up to the school in his Ford car, then blew the car up, killing himself and four others. Only one shot was fired in order to detonate dynamite in the car. This was deadliest act of mass murder at a school in the United States.
February 15, 1933 Downey, California Dr. Vernon Blythe shot and killed his wife Eleanor, as well as his 8-year old son Robert at Gallatin grammar school and committed suicide after firing three more shots at his other son Vernon. His wife, who had been a teacher at the school, had filed for divorce the week before.
September 14, 1934 Gill, Massachusetts. Headmaster Elliott Speer was murdered by a shotgun blast through the window of his study at Northfield Mount Hermon School. The crime was never solved.
December 12, 1935 New York City, New York, Victor Koussow, a Russian laboratory worker at the School of Dental and Oral Surgery, shot Prof. Arthur Taylor Rowe, Prof. Paul B. Wiberg, and wounded Dr. William H. Crawford at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, before committing suicide.
April 27, 1936 Lincoln, Nebraska, Prof. John Weller shot and wounded Prof. Harry Kurz in a corridor of the University of Nebraska, apparently because of his impending dismissal at the end of the semester. After shooting Kurz Weller tried to escape, but was surrounded by police on the campus, whereupon he killed himself with a shot in the chest.
June 4, 1936 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Wesley Crow shot and killed his Lehigh University English instructor, C. Wesley Phy. Crow went to Phy's office and demanded that Mr. Phy change his grade to a passing mark. Crow committed suicide after shooting Phy.
September 24, 1937 Toledo, Ohio 12-year-old Robert Snyder shot and wounded his principal, June Mapes, in her office at Arlington public school when she declined his request to call a classmate. He then fled the school grounds and shot and wounded himself.

May 6, 1940 South Pasadena, California. After being removed as principal of South Pasadena Junior High School, Verlin Spencer shot six school officials, killing five, before attempting to commit suicide by shooting himself in the stomach.
May 23, 1940: New York City, New York Infuriated by a grievance, Matthew Gillespie, 62-year-old janitor at the junior school of the Dwight School for Girls, shot and critically wounded Mrs. Marshall Coxe, secretary of the junior school.
July 4, 1940: Valhalla, New York Angered by the refusal of his daughter, Melba, 15 years old, to leave a boarding school and return to his home, Joseph Moshell, 47, visited the school and shot and killed the girl.
September 12, 1940 Uniontown, Pennsylvania, 29-year-old teacher Carolyn Dellamea is shot to death inside her third grade classroom by 35-year-old William Kuhns. Kuhns then shot himself in the chest in a failed suicide attempt. Kuhns had reportedly been courting Dellamea for over a year but the relationship was ended when Dellamea discovered that Kuhns was already married.
October 2, 1942: New York City, New York "Erwin Goodman, 36-year-old mathematics teacher of William J. Gaynor Junior High School, was shot and killed in the school corridor by a youth...
February 23, 1943: Port Chester, NY Harry Wyman, 13-year-old, shot himself dead at the Harvey School, a boys' preparatory school.
June 26, 1946: Brooklyn, New York A 15-year-old schoolboy who balked at turning over his pocket money to a gang of seven Negro youths was shot in the chest at 11:30 A.M. yesterday in the basement of the Public School 147 annex of the Brooklyn High School for Automotive Trades.
November 24, 1946: New York City A 13-year-old student at St. Benedict's Parochial School, shot and fatally wounded himself while sitting in an audience watching a school play.
December 24, 1948: New York City A 14-year-old boy was wounded fatally by an accidental shot from the .22-caliber rifle of a fellow-student ... the youth was shot in the head when he chanced into range where Robert Ross, 17, of Brooklyn, was shooting at a target near a lake on the school property.
March 11, 1949: New York City A 16-year-old student at Stuyvesant High School was accidentally shot in the arm by a fellow student who was 'showing off' with a pistol in a classroom.
November 13, 1949 Columbus, Ohio, Ohio State University freshman James Heer grabbed a .45 caliber handgun from the room of a Delta Tau Delta fraternity brother and shot and killed his fraternity brother Jack McKeown, 21, an Ohio State senior.

July 22, 1950 New York City, New York A 16-year-old boy was shot in the wrist and abdomen at the Public School 141 dance... during an argument with a former classmate.
November 27, 1951 New York City, New York David Brooks, a 15-year-old student, was fatally shot as fellow-pupils looked on in a grade school.
April 9, 1952 New York City, New York A 15-year-old boarding-school student shot a dean rather than relinquish pin-up pictures of girls in bathing suits.
July 14, 1952 New York City, New York Bayard Peakes walked in to the offices of the American Physical Society at Columbia University and shot and killed secretary Eileen Fahey with a .22 caliber pistol. Peakes was reportedly upset that the APS had rejected a pamphlet he had written.
September 3, 1952 in Lawrenceville, Illinois After 25-year-old Georgine Lyon ended her engagement with Charles Petrach, Petrach shot and killed Lyon in a classroom at Lawrenceville High School where she worked as a librarian.
November 20, 1952 New York City, New York "Rear Admiral E. E. Herrmann, 56 years old, superintendent of the Naval Post-Graduate School, was found dead in his office with a bullet in his head. A service revolver was found by his side.
October 2, 1953 Chicago, Illinois 14-year-old Patrick Colletta was shot to death by 14-year-old Bernice Turner in a classroom of Kelly High School in Chicago. It was reported that after Turner refused to date Colletta he handed her the gun and dared her to pull the trigger, telling her that the gun was "only a toy." A coroner's jury later ruled that the shooting was an accident.
October 8, 1953: New York City, New York Larry Licitra, 17-year-old student at the Machine and Metal Trades High School, was shot and slightly wounded in the right shoulder in the lobby of the school while inspecting a handmade pistol owned by one of several students.
May 15, 1954 Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Putnam Davis Jr. was shot and killed during a fraternity house carnival at the Phi Delta Theta house at the University of North Carolina. William Joyner and Allen Long were shot and wounded during the exchange of gunfire in their fraternity bedroom. The incident took place after an all-night beer party. Mr. Long reported to the police that, while the three were drinking beer at 7 a.m., Davis pulled out a gun and started shooting with a gun he had obtained from the car of a former roommate.
January 11, 1955 Swarthmore, Pennsylvania After some of his dorm mates urinated on his mattress Bob Bechtel, a 20-year-old student at Swarthmore College, returned to his dorm with a shotgun and used it to shoot and kill fellow student Holmes Strozier.
April 17, 1956 New York City, New York 18-year-old Henry Smith, a student at a Bronx vocational high school, is stabbed to death by 16-year-old Randolph Lawrence, a fellow student. The stabbing was reportedly sparked over a dispute about a basketball game.
May 4, 1956 in Prince George's County, Maryland, 15-year-old student Billy Prevatte fatally shot one teacher and injured two others at Maryland Park Junior High School in Prince George's County after he had been reprimanded from the school.
October 20, 1956: New York City, New York A junior high school student was wounded in the forearm yesterday by another student armed with a home-made weapon at Booker T. Washington Junior High School.
October 2, 1957: New York City, New York "A 16-year old student was shot in the leg yesterday by a 15-year old classmate at a city high school."
March 4, 1958: New York City, New York "A 17-year-old student shot a boy in the Manual Training High School."
May 1, 1958: Massapequa, New York A 15-year-old high school freshman was shot and killed by a classmate in a washroom of the Massapequa High School.
September 24, 1959: New York City, New York Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx last night as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teenager Monday at Morris High School.

February 2, 1960 Hartford City, Indiana Principal Leonard Redden shot and killed two teachers with a shotgun at William Reed Elementary School in Hartford City, Indiana, before fleeing into a remote forest, where he committed suicide.
June 7, 1960 Blaine, Minnesota Lester Betts, a 40-year-old mail-carrier, walked into the office of 33-year-old principal Carson Hammond and shot him to death with a 12-gauge shotgun.
April 20, 1961 Chicago, Illinois Teacher Josephine Keane, 45, is sexually assaulted and stabbed to death inside a storeroom at Lewis-Champlin elementary school in Chicago. Lee Arthur Hester, a 14-year-old student, is later convicted of the murder and sentenced to 55 years in prison.
October 17, 1961 Denver, Colorado Tennyson Beard, 14, got into an argument with William Hachmeister, 15, at Morey Junior High School. During the argument Beard pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and shot at Hachmeister, wounding him. A stray bullet also struck Deborah Faith Humphrey, 14, who died from her gunshot wound.
August 1, 1966 University of Texas Massacre Charles Whitman climbs atop the observation deck at the University of Texas-Austin, killing 16 people and wounding 31 during a 96-minute shooting rampage.
November 12, 1966 Mesa, Arizona Bob Smith, 18, took seven people hostage at Rose-Mar College of Beauty, a school for training beauticians. Smith ordered the hostages to lie down on the floor in a circle. He then proceeded to shoot them in the head with a 22-caliber pistol. Four women and a three-year-old girl died, one woman and a baby were injured but survived. Police arrested Smith after the massacre. Smith had reportedly admired Richard Speck and Charles Whitman.
January 30, 1968 Miami, Florida 16-year-old Blanche Ward shot and killed fellow student Linda Lipscomb, 16, with a .22-caliber pistol at Miami Jackson High School. According to Ward, she was threatened with a razor by Lipscomb during an argument over a fountain pen, and in the ensuing struggle the gun went off.
February 8, 1968 Orangeburg, South Carolina In the days leading up to February 8, 1968, about 200 mostly student protesters gathered on the campus of South Carolina State University, located in the city of Orangeburg, to protest the segregation of the All Star Bowling Lane. The bowling alley was owned by the late Harry K. Floyd. That night, students started a bonfire. As police attempted to put out the fire, an officer was injured by a thrown piece of banister. The police said they believed they were under attack by small weapons fire. The officers fired into the crowd, killing three young men: Samuel Hammond, Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, and wounding twenty-seven others.
May 22, 1968 Miami, Florida Ernest Lee Grissom, a 15-year-old student at Drew Junior High School, shot and seriously wounded a teacher and a 13-year-old student after he had been reprimanded for causing a disturbance.
January 17, 1969 Los Angeles, California Two student members of the Black Panther Party, Alprentice Carter and John Huggins, were fatally shot during a student meeting inside Campbell Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. The motive of the shooting regarded who would own the school's African American Studies Center. The shooter, Claude Hubert, was never to be found but three other men were arrested in connection with the shooting.
November 19, 1969 Tomah, Wisconsin Principal Martin Mogensen is shot to death in his office by a 14-year-old boy armed with a 20 gauge shotgun.

1970s
The two most notable U.S. school shootings in the early 1970s were the Jackson State killings in May 1970, where police opened fire on the campus of Jackson State University and the Kent State shootings also in May 1970 where the National Guard opened fire on the campus of Kent State University.

The mid to late 1970s is considered the second most violent period in U.S. school history with a series of school shootings, most notably were;

* December 30, 1974 Olean, New York, Anthony Barbaro, a 17-year-old Regents scholar armed with a rifle and shotgun, kills three adults and wounds 11 others at his high school, which was closed for the Christmas holiday. Barbaro was reportedly a loner who kept a diary describing several "battle plans" for his attack on the school.

* June 12, 1976 California State University, Fullerton massacre, where the school's custodian opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in the library on the California State University, Fullerton campus killing 7, and wounding 2.

* February 22, 1978 Lansing, Michigan After being taunted for his beliefs, a 15-year-old self-proclaimed Nazi, kills one student and wounds a second with a Luger pistol.

* January 29, 1979 Grover Cleveland Elementary School Shootings, California, where a 16yr old girl opened fire with the rifle, a gift from her father, killing 2 and wounding 9.

1980s
The early 1980s saw only a few multi-victim school shootings including;

* January 20, 1983 St. Louis County, Missouri the Parkway South Middle School, eighth grader brought a blue duffel bag containing two pistols, and a murder/suicide note that outlined his intention to kill the next person heard speaking ill of his older brother Ken. He entered a study hall classroom and opened fire, hitting two fellow students. The first victim, was fatally shot in the stomach, and the second victim received a non-fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen. Then he said, "no one will ever call my brother a pussy again" then committed suicide.

According to the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, in the United States, from September 1986 to September 1990 (four year period):

At least 71 people (65 students and 6 school employees) had been killed with guns at school.
201 were severely wounded by gun fire.
242 individuals were held hostage at gunpoint.

According to a 1987 survey conducted by the American School Health Association," 3% of the boys reported having carried a handgun to school at least once during the school year; 1% reported carrying a handgun on a daily basis."

The late 1980s began to see a major increase in school shootings including;

* September 4, 1985 Richmond, Virginia At the end of the second day of school from the East End Middle School a 12yr old boy shot a girl with his mother's gun.

* October 18, 1985 Detroit, Michigan During halftime of the homecoming football game between Northwestern High School and Murray-Wright High School. A boy who was in a fight earlier that day, pulled out a shotgun and opened fire injuring six students.

* November 26, 1985 Spanaway, Washington A 14yr old girl shot two boys dead then kills herself with a .22-caliber rifle at the Spanaway Junior High School.

* December 9, 1985 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania At the Archbishop Ryan High School for Boys, a 22yr old Mental health patient took 6 students hostage with what ended up being a starter pistol. No one was hurt in the ordeal.

* December 10, 1985 Portland, Connecticut At the Portland Junior High School, the Principal was having a heated discussion with a 13-year-old male eighth-grader when he locked the boy inside an office. The student then pulled out a 9mm assault rifle and opened fire. The bullet shattered the glass door and struck the left forearm of the secretary and the glass injured the Principal. The boy fled for the 2nd floor, were he encountered the janitor, and he shot him in the head. The boy then took a seventh-grader hostage. The boy's father and another family member came to the school and talked to him over the intercom system. After 45 minutes, he tossed the gun out a school window and was taken into custody.

* May 16, 1986 The Cokeville Elementary School hostage crisis In a ransom scheme, David and Doris Young, both in their forties, took 150 students and teachers hostage on this spring day. Their demand for $300 million dollars came to an abrupt end when Doris accidentally set off a bomb, killing herself and injuring 78 students and teachers. David wounded John Miller, a teacher who was trying to flee, then killed himself.

* March 2, 1987 Missouri an honours student Nathan Ferris, 12, killed a classmate and then himself.

* May 20, 1988 Winnetka, Illinois 30yr old Laurie Dann shot and killed one boy, and wounded five other kids, in an elementary school, then took a family hostage and shot a man before killing herself.

* September 26, 1988 Greenwood, South Carolina In the cafeteria of the Oakland Elementary School 19 year-old James William Wilson Jr., shot and killed Shequilla Bradley, 8 and wounded eight other children with a 9-round .22 caliber pistol. He went into the girls restroom to reload where he was attacked by Kat Finkbeiner, a Physical Education teacher. James shot her in the hand and mouth. He then entered 3rd grade classroom and wounded six more students.

* December 16, 1988 Virginia Beach, Virginia Nicholas Elliott, 15, opened fire with a SWD Cobray M-11 semiautomatic pistol on his teachers at the Atlantic Shores Christian School. His first shots struck teacher Karen Farley in the arm; when she went down he killed her at point blank range. Nicholas then injured Sam Marino. He turned the Cobray toward his classmates, but the gun jammed and he was quickly subdued by M. Hutchinson Matteson, a teacher, before he could fire another round.

* January 17, 1989 Cleveland School massacre of Stockton, California where 5 school children were killed and 29 wounded by a single gunman firing over 100 rounds into a schoolyard from an AK-47

1990s
From the late 1980s to the early 1990s the United States saw a sharp increase in gun and gun violence in the schools. According to a survey conducted by The Harvard School of Public Health "15% said that they had carried a handgun on their person in the past 30 days, and 4% said that they had taken a handgun to school in the past year." a sharp increase from just five years earlier. By 1993, the United States saw some of the most violent time is school shooting incidences.

* May 1, 1992 Olivehurst, California Eric Houston, 20, killed four people and wounded 10 in an armed siege at his former high school. Prosecutors said the attack was in retribution for a failing grade.

According to the National School Safety Center, since the 1992-1993 U.S. school year there has been a significant decline in school-associated violent deaths (deaths on private or public school property for kindergarten through grade 12 and resulting from schools functions or activities):

1992-1993 (44 Homicides and 55 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1993-1994 (42 Homicides and 51 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1994-1995 (17 Homicides and 20 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1995-1996 (29 Homicides and 35 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1996-1997 (23 Homicides and 25 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1997-1998 (35 Homicides and 40 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1998-1999 (25 Homicides from school shootings in the U.S.)
1999-2000 (25 Homicides from school shootings in the U.S.)

According to the U.S. Department of Education, in the 1998-1999 School Year, 3,523 Students (57% High School, 33% Junior High, 10% Elementary) were expelled for bringing a firearm to school.

The late 1990s started to see a major reduction in gun related school violence, but was still plagued with multiple victim shootings including;

* October 12, 1995 Blackville, South Carolina A suspended student shot two math teachers with a .32 caliber revolver.

* November 15, 1995 Lynnville, Tennessee A seventeen-year-old boy shot and killed a student and teacher with a .22 rifle.

* February 2, 1996 Moses Lake, Washington Two students and one teacher killed, one other wounded when 14-year-old Barry Loukaitis opened fire on his algebra class.

* February 19, 1997 Bethel, Alaska Principal and one student killed, two others wounded by Evan Ramsey, 16.

* October 1, 1997 Pearl, Mississippi Two students killed and seven wounded by Luke Woodham, 16, who was also accused of killing his mother. He and his friends were said to be outcasts who worshiped Satan.

* December 1, 1997 West Paducah, Kentucky Three students killed, five wounded by Michael Carneal, 14, as they participated in a prayer circle at Heath High School.

* December 15, 1997 Stamps, Arkansas Two students wounded. Colt Todd, 14, was hiding in the woods when he shot the students as they stood in the parking lot

* March 24, 1998 Jonesboro, Arkansas Four students and one teacher killed, ten others wounded outside as Westside Middle School emptied during a false fire alarm. Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, shot at their classmates and teachers from the woods

* April 24, 1998 Edinboro, Pennsylvania One teacher, John Gillette, killed, two students wounded at a dance at James W. Parker Middle School. Andrew Wurst, 14, was charged.

* May 21, 1998 Springfield, Oregon Two students killed, 22 others wounded in the cafeteria at Thurston High School by 15-year-old Kip Kinkel. Kinkel had been arrested and released a day earlier for bringing a gun to school. His parents were later found dead at home

* June 15, 1998 Richmond, Virginia One teacher and one guidance counselor wounded by a 14-year-old boy in the school hallway

* April 20, 1999 Littleton, Colorado 14 students (including shooters) and one teacher killed, 27 others wounded at Columbine High School in the nation's deadliest school shooting. Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, had plotted for a year to kill at least 500 and blow up their school. At the end of their hour-long rampage, they turned their guns on themselves.

* May 20, 1999 Conyers, Georgia Six students injured at Heritage High School by Thomas Solomon, 15, who was reportedly depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend

2000s - Present
2000-2001 (19 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2001-2002 (4 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2002-2003 (14 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2003-2004 (29 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2004-2005 (20 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2005-2006 (5 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2006-2007 (38 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2007-2008 (3 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2008-2009 (10 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
2009-2010 (5 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)

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History of School Shootings in the United States

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1700s The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indian entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary).

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There's a graph on this site that will show you the different area here in the United States that was involved in School Shooting.

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In this site there are different ways on how to protect yourself from the bad guys that does have a guns and cause shooting in school. It also talks about what would do if the bad guys is approaching you and planning to shot you.

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How to Survive a School Shooting: Fighting Back

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Security tactics for Surviving a SCHOOL SHOOTING. School shootings are on the increase, but do so many children actually have to die? Here's how teachers and students can take down a school shooter using security tactics.

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It's about a guy named Adam Lanza killed 28 people, including himself and his mother named Nancy Lanza. This was happened in Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

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NEWTOWN, Conn.--A shooting rampage in this small Connecticut town on Friday morning left 28 people dead, including 20 children killed inside their elementary school, authorities said.

The dead included the suspected gunman, whom law enforcement sources identified as Adam Lanza, 20. Police said that Lanza first apparently killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at the home they shared in Newtown. Then he drove in her car to Sandy Hook Elementary, the school at which Nancy Lanza taught kindergarten.

In the car, authorities said, were three guns: a .223 caliber "Bushmaster" rifle and two pistols, a Sig Sauer and a Glock.

At the school, authorities said, Adam Lanza shot and killed six adults - including the school's principal - and 20 children. They were shot in two different rooms of the school, police said.

Police were called to the school after 9:35 a.m., and officers searched the classrooms for a shooter. When they found the gunman, however, he was dead by his own hand. No officer fired a shot.

One other person was injured in the shooting, but survived.

Friday's shooting became the second-deadliest in U.S. history, after the rampage that killed 32 students at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va. It happened in a country that had grown darkly accustomed to public shootings: just five months before, another gunman had killed 12 in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., in July.

But the sheer scale of Friday's killing - and the nature of its victims, small children shot in the sanctuary of a school - deepened its horror, and unleashed a shaking kind of grief.

President Obama, in one of his most emotional speeches as president, wiped away tears as he spoke about the shooting from the White House's briefing room. "Our hearts are broken today," Obama said. He promised "meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this," but did not say specifically what he might do.

"I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between five and 10 years old," Obama paused, seemingly unable to continue for a few moments. "They had their entire lives ahead of them - birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own."

Dorothy Hanson, who is the suspect's grandmother and Nancy Lanza's mother, said in a brief phone interview Friday that she could not fathom the violence that ended their lives.

"I just can't cope with it right now," Hanson said through tears. "She was my daughter, and a beautiful girl and I loved her. I just can't make any more comments than that right now."

Among the dead was the school's principal, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, according to law enforcement sources. Press reports said Hochsprung had been the school's principal since 2010, and had been a schools administrator for 12 years before that. Local news organizations reported that she was married, with two daughters and three stepdaughters.

"She was always enthusiastic, always smiling, always game to do anything," said Kristin Larson, a former secretary of the school's Parent-Teacher Association. In a phone interview, Larson choked up as she recalled Hochsprung hugging students at the start of the school year. "She wanted them to do well in school," Larson said, "but she also wanted them to have fun."

Earlier on Friday, law enforcement sources had misidentified the shooter as Adam's brother Ryan Lanza, 24. Based on reports from those sources, The Washington Post and many other news outlets also identified Ryan Lanza as the suspected shooter.

Ryan Lanza was taken into custody near his home in Hoboken, N.J. on Friday; news reports showed him being escorted in handcuffs by police. But authorities said they do not believe he was involved in the crime. It was unclear what caused the initial confusion between the brothers.

Beth Israel, who lived for a time on the same street as the Lanzas, recalled Adam Lanza as withdrawn, but not threatening in any way.

"Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don't know, shy and quiet. Didn't really look you in the eye," Israel said in a telephone interview Friday night. "Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can't tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so]," she said.

But there was still something that troubled her about Adam Lanza. When Israel heard that Ryan Lanza - Adam's brother - had been described by law enforcement sources as the shooter, she felt they had the wrong brother: "It has to be Adam, not Ryan," Israel wrote on Twitter.

Police described the school itself as one of the most horrific crime scenes that many had ever encountered, and officials said the first-arriving responders would be given counseling.

Children who were evacuated from the school said later that they had been told to keep their eyes closed until they were outside.

Police said that as the day went on, they had accounted for every child who attended the school, tracking down even those who were absent because of illness. All had been accounted for, they said.

Perhaps the closest echo of this rampage, in the dark history of American massacres, might be a 1989 shooting in Stockton, Calif., where a drifter with an assault rifle opened fire on a schoolyard. Five children died, and 29 others were wounded before the gunman killed himself.

That episode served as a catalyst for a string of laws restricting the use and importation of assault weapons.

The guns used in Friday's shootings were believed to have been purchased legally, and registered to a family member of Adam Lanza's, a law enforcement source said.

Police said they were summoned to the school by a number of 911 calls. Both state and local police converged on the school, according to Connecticut State Police Lt. L. Paul Vance, and "began a complete active shooter search of the building."

Meredith Artley, managing editor of CNN.com, described interviewing a woman who was at the school about 9:30 or 9:35 a.m. The woman was in a meeting with the principal, vice principal and school psychologist when they heard shots from the hall. The three school officials went into the hallway, and the vice principal came crawling back, shot in the foot, Artley said.

The witness, who was not identified but has a 7-year-old at the school, told Artley that she later passed the principal and the psychologist lying in the hallway, surrounded by pools of blood.

In this small town near the New York border, police cars began screaming toward the school. At Berkshire Motors, owner Jim Marcucilli thought he saw 40 police cruisers. He had been working on a car, but its owner, frantic, demanded back the keys. "Oh my God," she said, according to Marcucilli. "I have to get my kid!"

Later, Marcucilli learned that he had a connection to the Lanza family: he had helped Nancy Lanza with dead batteries over the years, and had even bought a car from her. Such connections are common in a small place like Newtown, he said.

"You can't get any closer to home" than an attack at the school, he said. "It's definitely going to affect this community terribly."

Students inside the school were evacuated to a nearby firehouse, where television reporters saw parents tearfully reuniting with their children.

Students recounted hearing police officers on the roof, and classmates so frightened they became sick to their stomachs.

In interview with New York's WABC television, student Brendan Murray said he was in the gym when he heard a banging sound. Students at first thought a custodian had knocked something over, but then they heard a scream.

"Then a police came in and was like, 'Is he in here?' Then he ran out," Murray said. "And then somebody yelled, 'Get to a safe place!' So we went to the closet in the gym."

Eventually, he said, police escorted the students out of the school and to the firehouse, where they reunited with their classmates.

"We sat in our classes," he said. "And were all really happy that we were all alive."

Parent Stephen Delgiadice told the AP that his 8-year-old daughter heard two big bangs and teachers told her to get in a corner. His daughter was fine.

"It's alarming, especially in Newtown, Connecticut, which we always thought was the safest place in America," he said.

The superintendent's office said the district had locked down schools in Newtown. Schools in neighboring towns also were locked down as a precaution.

A photo posted by The Newtown Bee newspaper showed a group of young students - some crying, others looking visibly frightened - being escorted by adults through a parking lot in a line, hands on each other's shoulders.

Mergim Bajraliu, 17, heard the gunshots echo from his home and raced to check on his 9-year-old sister at the school. He told the AP his sister, who was fine, heard a scream come over the intercom at one point. He said teachers were shaking and crying as they came out of the building.

"Everyone was just traumatized," he said.

Richard Wilford's 7-year-old son, Richie, is in the second grade at the school. His son told him that he heard a noise that "sounded like what he described as cans falling."

The boy told him a teacher went out to check on the noise, came back in, locked the door and had the kids huddle up in the corner until police arrived.

"There's no words," Wilford said, according to the AP. "It's sheer terror, a sense of imminent danger, to get to your child and be there to protect him."

Also Friday, White House press spokesman Carney told reporters that it was not the time to discuss gun control legislation.

"We're still waiting for more information about the incident in Connecticut," Carney replied when asked if the massacre raised questions about gun policy. "As we do, I think it's important, on a day like today, to view this as I know the president, as a father, does, and others who are parents certainly do, which is to feel enormous sympathy for families that are affected and to do everything we can to support state and local law enforcement and to support those who are enduring what appears to be a very tragic event."

He concluded, "I'm sure [there] will be rather a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don't think today is that day."

Pressed on when that discussion would happen, the spokesman said it would - but not as we were still figuring out how the tragic massacre occurred.

"I think that day will come, but today's not that day, especially as we are awaiting more information about the situation," he said.

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Sandy Hook Elementary shooting leaves 28 dead, law enforcement sources say

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NEWTOWN, Conn.--A shooting rampage in this small Connecticut town on Friday morning left 28 people dead, including 20 children killed inside their elementary school, authorities said. The dead included the suspected gunman, whom law enforcement sources identified as Adam Lanza, 20. Police said that Lanza first apparently killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, at the home they shared in Newtown.

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Pros and Cons arguments about how can a violent Video Games affects the minds of Youth while playing it. For pros, they believed that violent video games causes aggression, fighting, bullying. While for cons, they assume that playing violent video games can't affect the kids to do mass shooting in school.

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Do violent video games contribute to youth violence?

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Between 2013-15, there were 160 school shooting happened across 38 states. College campuses have 47 percent of school shooting take place, while K-12 campuses have 53 percent of school shooting done. Within each ear it's possible that school shooting will rise up each year

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Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund seeks to improve our understanding of the causes of gun violence and the means to reduce it - by conducting groundbreaking original research, developing evidence-based policies, and communicating this knowledge to the American public.

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It talks a boy that named John LaDue , who was planning to make a bomb and explode it in the school where he comes. It is also talks about on how he was planning to kill his own family too, because he just wanted to

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On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a young man walking through her back yard. He was wearing a backpack and carrying a fast-food bag and was headed in the direction of the MiniMax Storage facility next to her house. Something about him didn't seem right. Why was he going through her yard instead of using the sidewalk? He walked through puddles, not around them. He fiddled with the lock of Unit 129 as if he were trying to break in. She called the police. A group of three officers arrived and rolled up the unit's door. The young man was standing in the center. He was slight of build, with short-cropped brown hair and pale skin. Scattered around his feet was an assortment of boxes and containers: motor oil, roof cement, several Styrofoam coolers, a can of ammunition, a camouflage bag, and cardboard boxes labelled "red iron oxide," filled with a red powder. His name was John LaDue. He was seventeen years old.

One of the officers started to pat LaDue down. According to the police report, "LaDue immediately became defensive, stating that it is his storage unit and asked what I was doing and pulling away." The officers asked him to explain what he was up to. LaDue told them to guess. Another of the officers, Tim Schroeder, said he thought LaDue was making bombs. LaDue admitted that he was, but said that he didn't want to talk about it in the storage locker. The four went back to the Waseca police station, and LaDue and Schroeder sat down together with a tape recorder between them. "What's going on today, John?" Schroeder asked. LaDue replied, "It's going to be hard for me to talk about." The interview began at 7:49 P.M. It continued for almost three hours.

He was making Molotov cocktails, LaDue said, but a deadlier variant of the traditional kind, using motor oil and tar instead of gasoline. From there, he intended to move on to bigger and more elaborate pressure-cooker bombs, of the sort used by the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon bombing. "There are far more things out in that unit than meet the eye," he told Schroeder, listing various kinds of explosive powder, thousands of ball bearings, pipes for pipe bombs, fifteen pounds of potassium perchlorate, nine pounds of aluminum powder, and "magnesium ribbon and rust which I use to make thermite, which burns at five thousand degrees Celsius."

Schroeder asked him what his intentions were.

"I have a notebook under my bed that explains it," LaDue replied.

Schroeder: "O.K. Can you talk to me about those intentions that are in the notebook?"

LaDue: "O.K. Sometime before the end of the school year, my plan was to steal a recycling bin from the school and take one of the pressure cookers I made and put it in the hallway and blow it up during passing period time. . . . I would detonate when people were fleeing, just like the Boston bombings, and blow them up too. Then my plans were to enter and throw Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs and destroy everyone and then when the SWAT comes I would destroy myself."

In his bedroom, he had an SKS assault rifle with sixty rounds of ammunition, a Beretta 9-mm. handgun, a gun safe with an additional firearm, and three ready-made explosive devices. On the day of the attack, he would start with a .22-calibre rifle and move on to a shotgun, in order to prove that high-capacity assault-style rifles were unnecessary for an effective school attack.

Schroeder: "Do you have brothers and sisters?"

LaDue: "Yes, I have a sister. She's one year older than me."

Schroeder: "O.K. She goes to school too?"

LaDue: "Yes."

Schroeder: "She's a senior?"

LaDue: "She is."

Schroeder: "O.K. So you would have done this stuff while she was at school as well?"

LaDue: "I forgot to mention a detail. Before that day, I was planning to dispose of my family too."

Schroeder: "Why would you dispose of your family? What, what have they done?"

LaDue: "They did nothing wrong. I just wanted as many victims as possible."

On February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington, a fourteen-year-old named Barry Loukaitis walked into Frontier Middle School dressed in a black duster and carrying two handguns, seventy-eight rounds of ammunition, and a hunting rifle. He killed two students and wounded a third before shooting his algebra teacher in the back. In the next two years, there were six more major incidents, in quick succession: sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey, in Bethel, Alaska; sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham, in Pearl, Mississippi; fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal, in West Paducah, Kentucky; thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson and eleven-year-old Andrew Golden, in Jonesboro, Arkansas; fourteen-year-old Andrew Wurst, in Edinboro, Pennsylvania; and fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel, in Springfield, Oregon. In April of 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold launched their infamous attack on Columbine High, in Littleton, Colorado, and from there the slaughter has continued, through the thirty-two killed and seventeen wounded by Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech, in 2007; the twenty-six killed by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012; and the nine killed by Christopher Harper-Mercer earlier this month at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon. Since Sandy Hook, there have been more than a hundred and forty school shootings in the United States.

School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

Evan Ramsey, who walked into his high school with a 12-gauge shotgun and killed two people, had a chaotic home life. His mother was an alcoholic who lived with a series of violent men. In one two-year stretch, he lived in ten foster homes and was both sexually and physically abused. When Evan was six, his father sent an ad to the local newspaper which it declined to publish, so he packed two guns, chained the door of the newspaper, set off smoke grenades, and held the publisher at gunpoint.

But Kip Kinkel, who shot his parents, then killed two others and wounded twenty-five at his high school, had not been traumatized. He had a loving family. He was the child of schoolteachers so beloved that seventeen hundred people came to their memorial service. Kinkel was psychotic: he thought the Chinese were preparing to attack the United States, that Disney had plans for world domination, and that the government had placed a computer chip inside his head.

Meanwhile, the architect of the Columbine killings, Eric Harris, was a classic psychopath. He was charming and manipulative. He was a habitual lawbreaker: he stole, vandalized, bought guns illegally, set off homemade bombs, and at one point hacked into his school's computer system. He wrote " Ich bin Gott "-German for "I am God"-in his school planner. His journals were filled with fantasies about rape and mutilation: "I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to their heart." A school shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or someone who imagined that the world brutally abused him or someone who wanted to brutally abuse the world himself.

The LaDue case does not resolve this puzzle. LaDue doesn't hear voices. He isn't emotional or malicious or angry or vindictive. Schroeder asks him about violent games, and he says he hasn't been playing them much recently. Then they talk about violent music, and LaDue says he's been playing guitar for eight years and has little patience for the "retarded" music of "bands like Bullet for My Valentine or Asking Alexandria or some crap like that." He likes Metallica: solid, normal, old-school heavy metal. "I was not bullied at all," LaDue tells Schroeder. "I don't think I have ever been bullied in my life. . . . I have good parents. I live in a good town."

When the interview is concluded, the police drive over to see LaDue's parents. They live a few minutes away, in a tidy two-story stucco house on a corner lot. The LaDues are frantic. It is 10:30 P.M., and their son is never out past nine on a school night. His mother is trying to track him down on her laptop through his cell-phone account. They are calling all the people he has most recently texted, trying to find him. Then the police arrive with the news that their son has threatened to kill his family and blow up Waseca High School-and the LaDues are forced to account for a fact entirely outside their imagining. No, his son has never been diagnosed with mental illness or depression, David LaDue, John's father, tells the police. He isn't taking any medication. He's never expressed a desire to hurt anyone. He spends a lot of time in front of his computer looking at YouTube videos. He likes to experiment with what his father calls his "interesting devices." He wears a lot of black. Isn't that what teen-agers do? David LaDue is desperate to come up with something-anything-to make sense of what he has just been told. "David told me that after his son had stayed with his brother for a couple of months at the beginning of last summer, he had returned proclaiming to be an atheist, stating that he no longer believed in religion," the police report says.

Then:

David LaDue also spoke of an incident when Austin Walters and John LaDue had gone deer hunting. John had reportedly shot a deer that had not died right away and had to be "finished off." David LaDue stated that he heard that Austin's cell phone was used to make a video of the deer that he felt was inappropriate, although he had never seen the video. David LaDue showed me a photo on his laptop of John LaDue leering, holding a semi-automatic rifle next to a deer that had been killed. David LaDue pointed to the picture stating that "this" was the facial expression he was talking about that he thought was concerning.

It is the best he can do.

It was the best anyone could do that night. Waseca is a community of some ten thousand people amid the cornfields of southern Minnesota: one high school, a Walmart, a beautiful lake just outside town. Minneapolis is well over an hour away. There was simply no room, in anyone's cultural understanding, for the acts John LaDue was describing. By the end, a kind of fatigue seemed to set in, and the normal codes of Midwestern civility reasserted themselves. All that the interrogation or confession or conversation-whatever it was-between Schroeder and LaDue seems to have established is that we need a new way to make sense of the school-shooting phenomenon.

Schroeder: "Until we can figure out, ah, what exactly is where we are all at, we're just going to take you up and, um, put you in a cell, or holding cell for the time being, until we can get it figured out."

LaDue: "O.K."

Schroeder: "O.K."

LaDue: "Hmm, hmm."

Schroeder: "I'll let you put your shoes on. Yah, I'll hold on to your phone for now. . . . All right. Before we, I'll let you put your shoes on."

LaDue: "I'm wearing contacts by the way. What should I do with them?"

Schroeder: "You can keep them in."

LaDue: "O.K. . . . Are you going to handcuff me?"

Schroeder: "I am going to cuff ya."

LaDue: [inaudible]

Schroeder: "I'm going to double pat you down again."

Then, almost apologetically, he adds, "I know I already did once."

In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: "situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences." What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone's beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds-which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero-instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator's accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that-and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. "Most did not think it 'right' to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so," he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. "But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy." You can't just look at an individual's norms and motives. You need to look at the group.

His argument has a second implication. We misleadingly use the word "copycat" to describe contagious behavior-implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.

Finally, Granovetter's model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it's time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model-to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant's action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?

The first seven major shooting cases-Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel-were disconnected and idiosyncratic. Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King's novel "Rage" (written under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner's "Liebestod" aria over and over. Evan Ramsey's father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal's victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie "The Basketball Diaries."

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the "cultural script" for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their "basement tapes." Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to "kick-start a revolution." Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

Along the same lines, the sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. "School shooters explicitly name or represent each other," she writes. She mentions one who "refers to Cho as a brother-in-arms"; another who "points out that his cultural tastes are like those of 'Eric and Dylan' "; a third who "uses images from the Columbine shooting surveillance camera and devotes several videos to the Columbine killers." And she notes, "This aspect underlines the fact that the boys actively take part in associating themselves to a group."

Larkin and Paton are describing the dynamics of Granovetter's threshold model of group behavior. Luke Woodham, the third in this progression, details in his journal how he and a friend tortured his dog, Sparkle: "I will never forget the howl she made. It sounded almost human. We laughed and hit her hard." A low-threshold participant like Woodham didn't need anyone to model his act of violence for him: his imagination was more than up to the task.

But compare him to a post-Columbine shooter like Darion Aguilar, the nineteen-year-old who last year killed two people in a skate shop in a Maryland shopping mall before killing himself. Aguilar wanted to be a chef. He had a passion for plant biology. He was quiet, but not marginalized or bullied. "He was a good person. He always believe[d] in inner peace," a friend of his told the Washington Post. "He was just a really funny guy." In the months before the shooting, he went to a doctor, complaining of hearing voices-but his voices were, according to police, "non-specific, non-violent and really not directing him to do anything." The kid who wants to be a chef and hears "non-specific, non-violent" voices requires a finely elaborated script in order to carry out his attack. That's what Paton and Larkin mean: the effect of Harris and Klebold's example was to make it possible for people with far higher thresholds-boys who would ordinarily never think of firing a weapon at their classmates-to join in the riot. Aguilar dressed up like Eric Harris. He used the same weapons as Harris. He wore a backpack like Harris's. He hid in the changing room of the store until 11:14 a.m. -the precise time when the Columbine incident began-and then came out shooting. A few months later, Aaron Ybarra walked onto the campus of Seattle Pacific University and shot three people, one fatally. Afterward, he told police that he could never have done it without "the guidance of, of Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho in my head. . . .Especially, Eric Harris, he was a, oh, man he was a master of all shooters."

Between Columbine and Aaron Ybarra, the riot changed: it became more and more self-referential, more ritualized, more and more about identification with the school-shooting tradition. Eric Harris wanted to start a revolution. Aguilar and Ybarra wanted to join one. Harris saw himself as a hero. Aguilar and Ybarra were hero-worshippers.

Now imagine that the riot takes a big step further along the progression-to someone with an even higher threshold, for whom the group identification and immersion in the culture of school shooting are even more dominant considerations. That's John LaDue. "There is one that you probably never heard of like back in 1927 and his name was Andrew Kehoe," LaDue tells Schroeder. "He killed like forty-five with, like, dynamite and stuff." Ybarra was a student of Virginia Tech and Columbine. LaDue is a scholar of the genre, who speaks of his influences the way a budding filmmaker might talk about Fellini or Bergman. "The other one was Charles Whitman. I don't know if you knew who that was. He was who they called the sniper at the Austin Texas University. He was an ex-marine. He got like sixteen, quite impressive."

LaDue had opinions. He didn't like the "cowards" who would shoot themselves as soon as the police showed up. He disapproved of Adam Lanza, because he shot kindergartners at Sandy Hook instead of people his own age: "That's just pathetic. Have some dignity, damn it." He didn't like some "shaking schizophrenic dude you'd look at in class and move away from." He preferred a certain subtlety, "someone you'd say, I never knew he would do something like that. Someone you would not suspect." One person fit the bill: "My number one idol is Eric Harris. . . . I think I just see myself in him. Like he would be the kind of guy I'd want to be with. Like, if I knew him, I just thought he was cool."

John LaDue was charged with four counts of attempted murder, two counts of damage to property, and six counts of possession of explosives. It did not take long, however, for the case to run into difficulty. The first problem was that under Minnesota law telling a police officer of your plans to kill someone does not rise to the level of attempted murder, and the most serious of the charges against LaDue were dismissed.

The second problem was more complicated. The prosecution saw someone who wanted to be Eric Harris and plainly assumed that meant he must be like Eric Harris, that there must be a dark heart below LaDue's benign exterior. But the lesson of the Granovetterian progression, of course, is that this isn't necessarily true: the longer a riot goes on, the less the people who join it resemble the people who started it. As Granovetter writes, it is a mistake to assume "that if most members of a group make the same behavior decision-to join a riot, for example-we can infer from this that most ended up sharing the same norm or belief about the situation, whether or not they did at the beginning." And this June, at a hearing where the results of LaDue's psychiatric evaluation were presented, it became clear just how heterogeneous the riot had become.

The day's testimony began with the forensic psychologist Katheryn Cranbrook. She had interviewed LaDue for two and a half hours. She said she had examined many juveniles implicated in serious crimes, and they often had an escalating history of aggression, theft, fighting at school, and other antisocial behaviors. LaDue did not. He had, furthermore, been given the full battery of tests for someone in his position-the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth ( SAVRY), the youth version of the Psychopathy Checklists (PCL), and the Risk Sophistication Treatment Inventory (R.S.T.I.)-and the results didn't raise any red flags. He wasn't violent or mentally ill. His problem was something far more benign. He was simply a little off. "He has rather odd usage, somewhat overly formal language," Cranbrook said. "He appears to lack typical relational capacity for family members. . . .He indicates that he would have completed the actions, but he doesn't demonstrate any concern or empathy for the impact that that could have had on others." The conclusion of all three of the psychologists who spoke at the hearing was that LaDue had a mild-to-moderate case of autism: he had an autism-spectrum disorder (A.S.D.), or what used to be called Asperger's syndrome.

The revelation turned the case upside down. The fact that LaDue confessed to Schroeder so readily made him sound cold-blooded. But it turns out that this is typical of people on the autism spectrum in their encounters with police: their literal-mindedness leads them to answer questions directly. LaDue was fascinated-as many teen-age boys are-by guns and explosions. But he didn't know the acceptable way to express those obsessions. "John has a tendency to say sort of jarring things without much ability to gauge their impact on people," Mary Kenning, another of the psychologists who examined him, said at the hearing. He spoke without empathy when he discussed killing his family, which made him sound like a psychopath. But the empathy deficits of the people on the autism spectrum-which leaves them socially isolated and vulnerable to predation-are worlds apart from those of the psychopath, whose deficits are put to use in the cause of manipulation and exploitation.

Much of what is so disturbing about LaDue's exchanges with Schroeder, in fact, is simply his version of the quintessential A.S.D. symptom of "restricted range of interests." He's obsessive. He insists on applying logic and analysis to things that most of us know we aren't supposed to be logical and analytical about. What should he wear? The standard uniform for school shooters is a duster. But it didn't make sense to wear a duster to school, LaDue explained, "because that's a bit suspicious." He'd store it in his locker. Where should the bombs go? Harris and Klebold had chosen the cafeteria. But LaDue felt that was too obvious-and, logistically, placing them in the hallway by the water fountains made more sense. When should he attack? April made the best sense, "because that's the month that all the really bad tragedies happened like . . . Titanic, Columbine, Oklahoma City bombing, Boston bombing." And what went wrong at Columbine, anyway? It was supposed to be a bomb attack. So why didn't the devices planted by Harris and Klebold explode? "They were trying to create a circuit which would ignite some gasoline to hit the propane and cause a BLEVE -which is a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion . . . which is basically the same thing as say a pipe bomb except with, like, gases," LaDue patiently explained to Schroeder, before launching into a long technical digression on the relative merits of hydrazine, ammonium perchlorate, Cheddite, nitroglycerin, and flash powder. He was even more scathing about the Boston bombers' use of pressure-cooker bombs. He thought they made a "crappy design of it." They used nails and black powder from fireworks. It would have made far more sense to use flash powder and ball bearings, LaDue thought, because "spherical shrapnel" are "superior to nails in damage." LaDue tells Schroeder that he has two YouTube channels devoted to his work. But anyone who watches the assembled videos expecting to see something macabre will be disappointed. They are home movies of LaDue testing whether tiny fuses will ignite when placed inside a plastic water bottle, or whether he can successfully blow a quarter-size hole in the side of a plastic playground slide. In the world before Columbine, people like LaDue played with chemistry sets in their basements and dreamed of being astronauts.

The idea that people with autism-spectrum disorders can stumble into patterns of serious criminality has a name: counterfeit deviance. It has long been an issue in cases involving A.S.D. teen-agers and child pornography. "They are intellectually intact people, with good computer skills but extraordinary brain-based naïveté, acting in social isolation, compulsively pursuing interests which often unknowingly take them into forbidden territory," the lawyer Mark J. Mahoney writes in a recent paper. They come upon an online image that appeals to their immature sexuality and don't understand its social and legal implications. The image might be "marked" for the rest of us, because the child is in some kind of distress. But those kinds of emotional signals are precisely what A.S.D. teen-agers struggle to understand. They start to obsessively collect similar images, not out of some twisted sexual urge but simply because that's the way their curiosity is configured. What gets these young adults into trouble with the law "is not abnormal sexual desires," Mahoney writes, "but their tendency to express or pursue normal interests in a manner outside social conventions."

Was John LaDue's deviance counterfeit? He told Cranbrook that he would have gone ahead with his plan had he not been stopped, and she believed him. The second of the psychologists to examine him, James Gilbertson, also felt that LaDue's threat was real: his obsessive preparation had created a powerful momentum toward action. But at every turn his reluctance and ambivalence was apparent: he was the ninety-ninth person in, warily eying the rock. At one point, Schroeder asked him why, if April-as the month of Titanic, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine-was so critical symbolically, he hadn't attacked the school already. It was April 29th, after all. LaDue, who had been a model of lucidity throughout, was suddenly flustered. "Um, I wanted to do it around April, but I decided not to do it April 19th because I think, no, April 19th wouldn't work, because that was a Saturday, I think April 14th was it, because, um, I figured I didn't want to do it April 18th because I figured, because 4/20 was coming up"-4/20 being national marijuana day-"and I figured maybe they would have some dogs there, and find the stuff I had planted in the hallway. . . .But that's not the case now, cause now it's May and I just wanted to get it done before school was out."

He had planned every aspect of the attack meticulously, except for the part where he actually launches the attack. He was uncomfortable. When Schroeder pressed him further, he came up with more excuses. "I had a cooker to buy," he said, meaning he had yet to purchase the central component of his bombs. And then: "I had to steal a shotgun too." He had been stalling, prolonging the planning, delaying the act. Then the two of them started talking about ammunition, and LaDue came up with a third excuse: he had bought twenty clips, but "they didn't fit on the bolt because they were too wide and they had a feeding problem going in there."

The low-threshold shooters were in the grip of powerful grievances. But LaDue doesn't seem to have any real grievances. In his notebooks, instead, he seems to spend a good deal of effort trying to manufacture them from scratch. School-shooter protocol called for him to kill his parents. But he likes his parents. "He sees them as good people, loving him, caring about him," Gilbertson said. "But he has to take their life, according to [his] manifesto, to prove that he's up to the task, to prove he has no human feelings anymore, that he's scrubbed out." After he set off a minor explosion at a local playground, he wrote a letter to the police. "I guess you guys never found it," he said of the letter. "Did you? I put it in someone's mailbox and told them to give it to you guys, but they never did." He seems well aware that his obsession has put him on a dangerous course. "O.K, um, first, I'd like a check from a psychiatrist or something," he says at one point. And then again: "I just want to find out what's wrong with me actually"; "I more just want a psychiatric test and that's really it, though"; "I wanted to ask [for a psychologist] many times, but, obviously, I didn't want my parents knowing about it, because I wanted to keep it under the radar." When the three policemen showed up at his storage locker, it must have been a relief. "I figured you guys would be looking for me," he later told police.

The John LaDue case took a final turn last month. The hearing was at the Waseca County Courthouse, a forbidding Gothic building on the main downtown strip. LaDue, dressed in an orange jumpsuit with "Waseca County Prison" stencilled on the back, was led by two marshals. He had spent the previous seventeen months in a few different juvenile facilities before being transferred, in July, to the local prison. His hair was longer. He wore thick black-framed glasses. He didn't look at any of the spectators who had come to the hearing. The prosecutor and LaDue's attorney announced that they had reached a new plea agreement. LaDue would plead guilty to explosives charges in exchange for an extended course of psychiatric treatment and five to ten years of probation. The judge walked him through the particulars of the plea deal, and he answered every question in a deep, oddly adult voice. He was respectful and polite, except when the prosecutor asked him if he understood the difference between an incendiary device and an explosive device. An explosive device, she added, as if she were talking to a child, was something that could "go boom." When he answered ("Yep"), a brief flare of irritation entered his voice: Are you kidding me?

After the hearing, David LaDue stood on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and answered questions. He is shorter and stockier than his son, forceful and direct. He said that in order to meet with John the previous evening-and discuss the plea deal-he had to work two sixteen-hour shifts in succession. He was exhausted. He was there, he said, "because I love him, I can't let go and walk away and forget about it and put it out of my mind." He wanted to remind the world that his son was human. "He had love," LaDue said. "He liked affection like anybody else. I saw the expression on his face when he talked to his sister. I saw things in him that he would, certainly at that time, would have denied." He talked about how difficult it was for men-and for teen-age boys in particular-to admit to vulnerability. "You know, he graduated at the top from Prairie Lake," he continued, proudly, referring to the juvenile-detention facility where his son had finished his final year of high school. "He got an A in calculus. We were mailed his diploma. . . . There's no way I could have done that."

In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It's worse. It's that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts. ♦

An earlier version of this article erroneously stated that Evan Ramsey killed his mother. It also misstated Kehoe's first name.

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On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a young man walking through her back yard.

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A political cartoon of what brings kids into violence that are the common causes of School Shootings. In this case, the child in the background is playing a violent video game, has a weapon sitting next to him, and just by assumption of his head, he is mentally ill.

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The shooting was lead by two teenager boys named Dylan Klebold a 17 year old, and Eric Harris an 18 year old boy. They killed 13 people in school and there were more than 20 people were wounded. After they done shooting, they killed themselves.

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At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S. history and prompted a national debate on gun control and school safety, as well as a major investigation to determine what motivated the gunmen, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris

At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in trench coats, began shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School, located in a suburb south of Denver. The pair then moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library.

By approximately 11:35 a.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 other people. Shortly after 12 p.m., the two teens turned their guns on themselves.

Investigators later learned Harris and Klebold had arrived in separate cars at Columbine around 11:10 on the morning of the massacre. The two then walked into the school cafeteria, where they placed two duffel bags each containing a 20-pound propane bomb set to explode at 11:17 a.m.

The teens then went back outside to their cars to wait for the bombs to go off. When the bombs failed to detonate, Harris and Klebold began their shooting spree.

She Said 'Yes'

In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims.

It initially was reported that one student, Cassie Bernall, was asked by one of the gunmen if she believed in God. When Bernall allegedly said, "Yes," she was shot to death. Her parents later wrote a book titled She Said Yes, honoring their daughter.

However, it later was determined the question was not posed to Bernall but to another student who already had been wounded by a gunshot. When that victim replied, "Yes," the shooter walked away.

Columbine Shooting Investigation

Subsequent investigations determined Harris and Klebold chose their victims randomly, and the two teens originally had intended to bomb their school, potentially killing hundreds of people.

There was speculation that Harris and Klebold committed the killings because they were members of a group of social outcasts called the Trenchcoat Mafia that was fascinated by Goth culture. It also was speculated that Harris and Klebold had carried out the shootings as retaliation for being bullied.

Additionally, violent video games and music were blamed for influencing the killers. However, none of these theories was ever proven.

Through journals left behind by Harris and Klebold, investigators eventually discovered the teens had been planning for a year to bomb the school in an attack similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Investigative journalist Dave Cullen, author of the 2009 book Columbine, described Harris as "the callously brutal mastermind," while Klebold was a "quivering depressive who journaled obsessively about love and attended the Columbine prom three days before opening fire."

Did you know? The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place on April 16, 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself at Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Columbine Massacre Aftermath

In the aftermath of the shootings, many schools across America enacted "zero-tolerance" rules regarding disruptive behavior and threats of violence from students. Columbine High School reopened in the fall of 1999, but the massacre left a scar on the Littleton community.

Mark Manes, the man who sold a gun to Harris and bought him 100 rounds of ammunition the day before the murders, was sentenced to six years in prison. Another man, Philip Duran, who introduced Harris and Klebold to Manes, also was sentenced to prison time.

Some victims and families of people killed or injured filed suit against the school and the police; most of these suits were later dismissed in court.

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At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S.

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There were 186 schools that was involved in shootings in America.

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There have been more than 180 shootings on school campuses that resulted in an injury or death in the U.S. since Dec. 14, 2012, when 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn. Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on campus, as documented in news accounts. This data is from to Everytown For Gun Safety, an advocacy group, and includes events that did not target students or teachers, like suicides, misfires and other activity.

One or more victims killed

One or more victims injured

All school shootings

Select a state

Sources: Everytown for Gun Safety, Times reporting

More from the Los Angeles Times

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Since Sandy Hook, a gun has been fired on school grounds nearly once a week

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There have been more than 180 shootings on school campuses that resulted in an injury or death in the U.S. since Dec. 14, 2012, when 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

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This website is from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia from the Research and Prevention center . This gives the people an understanding and way to try to prevent shootings.

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In this site there are different types of ways to prevent school shooting. Like strengthen gun laws, arm the schools, improve school security, improve mental health care, focus on parenting, and etc.

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10 ways to put brakes on mass shootings in schools - cnn

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10 ways to put brakes on mass shootings in schools - CNN

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A shooting Friday in a Connecticut elementary school was one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. What can be done now?