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"If we're really talking about prevention, my perspective is that we should go for the public health approach," This article talks about the mental health of school shooters and how we can prevent it from happening again.

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After Parkland, there have been many calls to make schools a "harder target" - for example, by arming teachers. But there's a decent amount of research out there on what actually makes schools safer, and most of it doesn't point to more guns.

On the Friday after the deadly shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Matthew Mayer, a professor at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, got an email during a faculty meeting.

The email was from Shane Jimerson, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Both specialize in the study of school violence.

That email led to nearly two weeks of long days, Mayer says, for some of the leading experts in the field. On conference calls and in Google docs they shaped a concise, eight-point "Call for Action To Prevent Gun Violence In The United States of America."

About 200 universities, national education and mental health groups, school districts, and more than 2,300 individual experts have signed on to support this document in the weeks since.

Their topline message: Don't harden schools. Make them softer, by improving social and emotional health.

"If we're really talking about prevention, my perspective is that we should go for the public health approach," says Ron Avi Astor at the University of Southern California, who also helped draft the plan.

A public health approach to disease means, instead of waiting for people to be rushed to emergency rooms with heart attacks or the flu, you go into the community: with vaccinations, screenings, fruits and vegetables, walking trails and exercise coaches. You screen and regulate environmental hazards, like a nearby polluting factory. You keep watch on reported cases of illness, to stop a new outbreak in its tracks.

A public health approach to school shootings, Astor explains, would be much along the same lines.

Instead of waiting for people to, again, be rushed into emergency rooms, you go into the community with preventive resources. You do your best to lower the background levels of bullying and discrimination. You track the data and perform what is called "threat assessments" on potential risks.

And, these experts say, you remove the major "environmental hazard" that contributes to gun violence: the guns. The eight-point plan calls for universal background checks, a ban on assault-style weapons, and something called Gun Violence Protection Orders: a type of emergency order that would allow police to seize a gun when there is an imminent threat.

What sets this call to action apart from other policy proposals is not gun control, however, but the research-based approach to violence prevention and response. This is a long haul, say the experts, not a quick fix.

"No matter what you try to do by just hardening the target, we've learned that having the armed officers isn't necessarily going to stop it," says Matthew Mayer at Rutgers. "Having the metal detector or the locked doors isn't going to stop it. The hard work is a lot more effort. You'd better start thinking in a more comprehensive manner about prevention instead of reacting."
Prevention: The first step
School climate may sound fuzzy or abstract. It means the quality of relationships among the students and the adults in a school. It's affected by the school's approach to discipline and behavior, the availability of professionals like counselors and social workers, as well as any social-emotional curriculum taught in the classroom.

School climate, in turn, affects students' mental and emotional health and academic success. And research by Astor and others has consistently found key factors that can make schools safer: cultivate social and emotional health, connect to community resources and respond, particularly, to troubled students.

Why does this matter? Well, for one thing, the very kids who bring weapons to school are more likely to report being bullied or threatened themselves. They may be fearful of gang violence and feel a need to protect themselves on the way back and forth to school.

Or, they may be individually ostracized and aggrieved. This is true not just in the United States, says Astor, but in "Kosovo, Canada, Chile, Israel, the kids who bring weapons to school are reporting tons of victimization."

So, if you devote resources to shutting down bullying, discrimination and harassment, there is a chance to de-escalate conflict before it starts.

And research shows that school climate measures really work. In fact, there has been a steady downward trend in bullying and harassment over the past decade, which Catherine Bradshaw at the University of Virginia attributes in part to evidence-based social and emotional measures.
The witnesses
There is a second reason a better school climate can cut down on violence. It's what Astor refers to as the role of the witness.

He again cites the example of California, which does a comprehensive annual survey. There, 20 to 30 percent of students above the elementary level consistently report seeing a weapon of some kind at school at least once during the year. That's conservatively more than half a million students, just in that one state.

Moreover, based on the survey, at least 125,000 of these students in California were actually threatened or injured by a weapon on school grounds. This includes things like knives and nunchuks as well as guns.

But what happens next?

If that witness, or that victim, has a strong relationship with an adult, they are more likely to report being menaced by a weapon. Whereas, if there is what Astor calls a "no snitching culture" in the school, or the witness fears for their safety, nothing will be done.

He says he's not urging schools to punish or expel the kid who brought the weapon, but, instead, to use "education as an intervention."

This approach is applicable not only for mass shootings, he says, but for violence that arises from disputes between students or when gang violence in the community spills onto school grounds.

And, he says preventing gun violence also means looking at suicide. Suicide is just behind homicide as a leading cause of death for teenagers. When a weapon comes to school, self-harm may be the plan, and a school-climate approach addresses that threat as well.

The researchers' policy plan calls for assessing school climate nationwide; reducing "exclusionary practices" like suspension and expulsion; maintaining physically and emotionally safe schools; and staffing up with specialists like counselors, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, both in the school and in the community.
Emergency mode
While school climate is an ongoing background effort, the public health approach has an emergency mode when it comes to violence. It kicks in when someone does report a person bringing a weapon to school or talking about violence. It's called a "threat assessment."

After the Columbine shooting in 1999, the FBI and the Secret Service each conducted studies of school shootings and shared their knowledge with the nation's educators. They found that there was no one "profile" of a school shooter. But, almost all students who committed homicide had told someone of their intentions.

So, the two law enforcement agencies recommended that schools copy what the Secret Service does when someone makes a threat on a government official. Threat assessment has been required by law in Virginia's schools since 2013, and adopted in many other places.

A threat assessment team consists of the principal, school counselor, school psychologist and a school-based police officer. They talk to the people involved and any witnesses. They try to figure out if the threat is serious: Is it specific? Is there a detailed plan? Is there a weapon?

In a school, the next steps include notifying parents, taking steps to protect victims, and referrals to mental health and law enforcement if appropriate.

Threat assessments are not a fail-safe. A local ABC affiliate in Florida did report, based on school records, that a threat assessment was ordered for Parkland shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz, based on an incident that happened in January 2017, a year before the shooting.

But Dewey Cornell at the University of Virginia, another author of the Call to Action, says researchers have gathered good evidence to support the technique, when implemented fully as in Virginia. Among the positive impacts, he says, are "reduced suspensions and reduced bullying, students and teachers reporting that they feel safer, and students reporting a greater willingness to report threats of violence."

His research also shows that less than 1 percent of threats are ever carried out.

The researchers are hopeful that their Call to Action will break through the noise. But they've been here before, Mayer says. A group of his colleagues wrote something similar in 2012 after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and after a group of school shootings in 2006. Mayer hopes, this time, people will be paying attention.

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Here's How To Prevent The Next School Shooting, Experts Say

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After Parkland, there have been many calls to make schools a "harder target" - for example, by arming teachers. But there's a decent amount of research out there on what actually makes schools safer, and most of it doesn't point to more guns.

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This stat is crazy and it's weird that I haven't seen much change.
America has had 57 times the amount of school shootings to the next highest country. WE have had 288 shooting incidents since 2009.

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The US has had 57 times as many school shootings as the other major industrialized nations combined | CNN

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There have been at least 288 school shootings in the US since January 1, 2009. That's 57 times as many shootings as the other six G7 countries combined.

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This article relates school shootings and mental health together, mainly the parkland shooter.
“So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem."
If those people would've reported that he was a big problem then one of the worst shootings wouldn't have happened.

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Is anyone else just emotionally exhausted from dealing with mass shootings in our nation? What happened yesterday, when a young man killed 17 at a high school in Parkland, Florida, is starting to seem like a typical news story. To my mind, it is unbelievable how normative this kind of incident is becoming.

In a tweet speaking to this horror, Donald Trump said this:

"So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!"

So the president seems to be primarily placing blame on the fact that the killer was "mentally disturbed." The president does not mention gun control or much else in his preliminary statement on this incident.

As a professional behavioral scientist, I am disappointed by such a simple characterization of such a significant issue. As I have written about in detail before, nearly all human behaviors are the result of multiple factors (see: Multi-Factorial Causation and the Orlando Shootings). To say that mental instability is the only factor responsible for what happened yesterday in Parkland, Florida is an excessive oversimplification. As is the case with all of the mass shootings we are seeing in our nation these days, there are multiple causes at work.
Let's Assume for a Second that the Mental Health Issue Is the Primary Issue
For a second, for argument's sake, let's think about the implications of the it is a mental health issue perspective on mass shootings. From where I stand, if this were the case, this would be enormously unsettling for various reasons.

Largely, this would be concerning because mental health problems have pretty much been skyrocketing in our nation across the past few decades (see Twenge, 2015). In fact, in a powerful Psychology Today post from 2015, my colleague Jean Twenge provides a mountain of data speaking to the facts that (a) a broad array of psychological disorders, including depression and anxiety, have increased in frequency since the 1980s and (b) this observed pattern is not exclusively the result of over-diagnosis. In short, our nation is getting less and less mentally healthy with time. And yes, this is a problem.

While this pattern is problematic for many reasons, I'd like you to join me in thinking about the implications regarding the future of senseless violence in this country. A simple assessment of this situation is pretty grave. If mass shootings are the result of mental health problems, and if mental health problems are on the rise, then we can only expect the trend in such events as mass shootings to increase. Think about that.
What Can We Do About It?
To my mind, this constellation of facts is truly grim and gives me great concern regarding our future. Of course, action is ultimately what is needed here. And in a democracy like ours, action often takes the form of embracing the First Amendment and by engaging in the electoral process. We can do things such as writing letters to elected officials, writing letters to the local newspaper, meeting with elected officials and holding them to task, electing officials into office who have a record of taking action on the issues at hand to make a positive difference, and even running for office.

If the problem is all about increases in psychological disorders in our nation, then we need to support programs in the fields of psychology and mental health. And we need to particularly support programs that have been demonstrated, through rigorous empirical research, to actually work. And we need to support our colleges and universities with teams of researchers who are studying this topic with the most cutting-edge scientific methods.

However, given the fact that each mass shooting is likely caused by a broad array of factors, then if we are really serious about increasing the safety of our nation, we need to address each of these factors.

A great deal of research has shown a connection between the unique gun laws in the U.S. and the excessively high rate of mass shootings in our nation. The connection is beyond what would be expected by chance. And, in statistical terminology, the effect size is enormous. So while it seems likely that the guy in Florida was mentally unstable, it is also clear that he legally purchased extremely dangerous firearms that ended up being used in the incident. There are at least two foundational causes as to why this event occurred. If we really care about our future, then we need to address both of these issues.
Bottom Line
When I hear about another case of needless violence and carnage, I get upset. I have always liked to believe that the U.S. is a great nation. It's hard to see things that way when there's a mass shooting nearly every day in this country and it seems that our hands are tied as to how to deal with it.

One cause of this problem that is often cited pertains to mental health problems. Sure, a lot of these killers have histories of being mentally unstable. But mental health problems are on the rise in this country. So if we really think that the issue of mental health is the primary issue at hand here, then we are in big trouble moving forward. Just saying "be vigilant" is not going to solve the problem.

Further, a landslide of evidence has shown that the unique gun culture and gun laws in the U.S. are very strongly connected with the high level of mass shootings in our nation. It seems, then, given all of these factors taken together, that substantially modified gun laws at this time in our history, while mental health issues are on the increase, would be a good idea. For our shared future.

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Is anyone else just emotionally exhausted from dealing with mass shootings in our nation? What happened yesterday, when a young man killed 17 at a high school in Parkland, Florida, is starting to seem like a typical news story. To my mind, it is unbelievable how normative this kind of incident is becoming.

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I like some of the ideas to prevent school shootings like arming schools.
"The shooters know that the people there will have no way of defending themselves and that is why these tragedies are happening in these zones. We need to give the teacher's defense so it will discourage these psychopaths from shooting there."
It obvious something has to change and this option is the best option. Not every will like this idea but if trained then it is the safest option.

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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?

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After 17 people were killed in Florida, could these measures stop US school shootings?

1. Don't name the shooter

In January 2014, Dr Sherry Towers went to a meeting at Purdue University, Indiana. On the same day, elsewhere on campus, Cody Cousins shot dead Andrew Boldt, a fellow student.

After the killing, the meeting was cancelled. But Dr Towers - a statistician from Arizona State University - started thinking about shootings, and the relationship between them.

"It was the third school shooting I heard about in a 10-day period," she says. "And that seemed - even for the US - an unusually large number."

Dr Towers and her team got to work, and found that school shootings and mass killings had an average "contagious period" of 13 days.

That is - when one school shooting or mass killing happens, another becomes more likely.

Dr Towers does not want the media to ignore mass killings. "People have a right to know," she says.

And, as a scientist, she cannot prove that withholding the killer's name will reduce contagion. "It would be impossible [to prove] - there has never been a case where the killer wasn't named."

But she thinks that focusing on victims - rather than "lurid" details of the killer - could make shootings less likely.

"When I talk publicly, or to the media, I don't name the perpetrator unless there is a specific reason why," she says.

Dr Towers' research has been used by Alerrt, a team at Texas State University that studies "active shooter response". They have a campaign called Don't Name Them.

"A lot of shooters - not all of them - are driven by this desire for notoriety," says Dr Pete Blair from Alerrt. "If we know that's one of the motivations, why are you giving them the reward?"

Dr Blair doesn't want a ban on naming shooters. But he thinks the media should focus on "heroes, the community, and - where appropriate - the victims".

Some US journalists - such as CNN's Anderson Cooper - and websites now choose not to name mass killers.

2. Let teachers carry guns

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in December 2012, was reported to police at 9.35am. Officers arrived less than four minutes later; within a minute, they heard the gunman shoot himself.

He had already killed 20 children and six adults inside the school.

"If schools' only solution is to rely on outside help, it will never get any better than we saw at Sandy Hook," says Joe Eaton.

Eaton is from the Buckeye Firearms Association, a gun-owners' group in Ohio. After Sandy Hook, they set up Faster - a programme that trains teachers to respond to mass shootings.

The programme includes first aid, moving through crowds, and firearms training - that is, how to kill a school gunman.

So far, Faster has trained 1,300 school staff, mostly on three-day courses. "Teachers, administrators, superintendents, bus drivers, even the lunch lady," says Eaton.

In the US, 10 states ban guns in schools, outright. Another eight allow them only in locked cars. But in the other 32 states, it is possible for teachers to carry guns, if the school allows it.

Faster has trained staff from 225 districts in 12 states. Another 200 to 400 will be trained this year.

"Inside of every school, there are certain teachers who will willingly run towards the sound of gunfire," says Eaton.

"The schools identify these people, and tell them: 'Whatever tool and training you're comfortable with, we're going to give it to you'."

Eaton accepts that it's sad for teachers to need guns.

"When they started their teaching career, they never would have imagined carrying firearms to protect kids - or having their schools ask them to," he says.

"But I bet if you ask every airline pilot, they would have answered the same way until 9/11 happened [ some pilots in the US carry guns].

"Sandy Hook was the teachers' 9/11."

Is it time for US teachers to carry guns?

3. Two doors in every classroom

When the gunman attacked Stoneman Douglas High School last week, David Hogg took shelter in a cooking classroom.

While hiding in the dark, the 17-year-old noticed the L-shaped room had two doors. "If he [the gunman] came in one," he thought, "we could go out the other."

His thinking - and his logic - is supported by experts.

"Attacks with high casualty counts [tend to have] people trapped in a small area, unable to protect themselves," says Dr Pete Blair from Alerrt.

"Simple things, like designing classrooms with another exit, could help. It might not necessarily stop the attack from happening - although it could - but it might mitigate the damage done."

He also suggests having locks on every door. "I'm not big on trying to legislate things, but it's certainly something that would make sense," he says.

4. Remove guns from people 'in crisis'

In May 2014, Elliot Rodger - a London-born 22-year-old - killed six people in Isla Vista, California. The local sheriff called him " severely mentally disturbed".

Four months later, Californian lawmakers approved Gun Violence Restraining Orders. They allow family members, housemates, or police, to ask a judge to remove guns from people "in crisis".

In California, there are three types of order - two of them last 21 days, while another lasts a year. In the first year, 86 orders were issued.

Federal law already stops people with mental health histories buying guns - but the bar is lower.

To buy a gun from a licensed dealer in the US, the purchaser must pass a background check. If they have been judged "mentally defective", or committed to a mental institution, they fail.

Between November 1998 and January 2018, there were 33,569 denials for mental reasons - 2% of the total number of denials.

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence wants California's scheme to be introduced nationwide. So far, similar schemes have been approved in two more states - Oregon and Washington.

A school shooting comes to 'paradise'

Trump pushes for ban on modified guns

5. Airport-style security in schools

Two days after the shooting in Florida, a lawyer in Corbin, Kentucky, posted a video on Facebook.

Shane Romines offered $20,000 (£14,000) to buy five metal detectors - one for each school in the area.

He also offered another $5,000 for tasers, firearms, and training, and called on other community leaders to contribute. Within three days, $75,000 had been pledged.

Some US schools, mostly in big cities, already have metal detectors. In 2014, around 8.7% of high schools used "random metal detector checks".

But school security expert Ken Trump doubts whether metal detectors will stop school shootings. "It may meet an emotional need," he says. "It's not going to meet a practical need."

He points out that schools are often open all day, every day.

"So you'd have to run a metal detector operation 24/7," says Trump. "Or someone could come for a basketball game in the evening, stash the weapons in a locker, then come back the next morning."

Trump has worked in school security for 30 years. "I'm a parent, I get it," he says. "But there is no magic wand. This is complex."

6. Repeal the Second Amendment

Gun-owners' rights are protected by the US Constitution. The Second Amendment, adopted in 1791, gives Americans the right to "keep and bear arms".

The Constitution, though, can be altered.

Amendments can be proposed by Congress - when two-thirds of both houses are in favour - or by two-thirds of the states. The amendment must then be approved by three-quarters of states.

For example, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited alcohol. The Twenty-First Amendment repealed it.

Since the Florida shootings, some commentators have called for the Second Amendment to be repealed.

"Most gun-control legislation is ineffective when most Americans have a guaranteed constitutional right to purchase deadly weaponry in nearly unlimited quantities," wrote Bret Stephens in the New York Times.

But it isn't just the national constitution that gives Americans gun rights. Forty-four state constitutions also give people the right to bear arms.

And - even if the Second Amendment were repealed - it wouldn't mean that guns were banned. It would simply remove the constitutional right to "keep and bear arms".

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Six radical ways to tackle US school shootings

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After 17 people were killed in Florida, could these measures stop US school shootings? In January 2014, Dr Sherry Towers went to a meeting at Purdue University, Indiana. On the same day, elsewhere on campus, Cody Cousins shot dead Andrew Boldt, a fellow student. After the killing, the meeting was cancelled.

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This year, 113 people have been killed or injured in school shootings in the United States.

That's the sobering finding of a project to count the annual toll of gun attacks in schools.

At the beginning of 2018, Education Week, a journal covering education in the US, began to track school shootings - and has since recorded 23 incidents where there were deaths or injuries.

With many parts of the US having about 180 school days per year, it means, on average, a shooting once every eight school days.

Another database recording school shootings says 2018 has had the highest number of incidents ever recorded, in figures going back to 1970.

That database, from the US Center for Homeland Defense and Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), uses a different way of identifying gun incidents in school, and says this year there have been 94.

Never 'normal'

The idea behind the year-long Education Week project was to mark each shooting - so that attacks should never come to seem "normal" and that every victim should be remembered.

But it was also an attempt to fill in the gaps in knowledge, because while there was intense media coverage of multiple-casualty shootings, there was much less clarity about the attacks happening across the country each month.

Lesli Maxwell, assistant managing editor of Education Week, said this year has "definitely been an outlier" with two large-scale school shootings, which have contributed to such a high annual loss of life.

Seventeen people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

At Santa Fe High School near Houston, Texas, there were 10 killed, with both gun attacks carried out by teenage boys.

"This year also stands out because of all the activism that followed Parkland, with students leading the charge," says Ms Maxwell.

Teenagers, guns and victims

There have been campaigns for tighter gun control - and on the other side of the debate, calls for more weapons in the hands of teachers or school staff.

While such mass shootings made headlines around the world, the majority passed by with much less attention.

These included a shooting at a primary school in Virginia last month, when a parent collecting their child was shot in the leg when a gun in the pocket of another parent was accidentally fired.

Or in March in a high school in Maryland, when a 17-year-old teenager shot and injured two students and then, after he was confronted, killed himself. One of the injured, a 16-year-old girl, died a few days later.

The shootings are a bleak list of teenagers, guns and innocent victims. The perpetrators are as young as 12 but are mostly 16 or 17.

The lack of certainty about the number of school shootings is also because it can be defined in different ways.

Highest level

The Education Week tracker only counted events where there were casualties and where shootings took place on school property and in school time and where there was a victim other than the perpetrator.

The Center for Homeland Defense and Security has a different measure - counting gun incidents in school, regardless of the time or whether anyone was shot or injured.

This wider measure has so far recorded 94 school shooting incidents across the US - which stands significantly above what had been the previous highest total, 59 in 2006.

By this measure, 2018 has also been the worst year for deaths and injuries, with 163 casualties, compared with a previous high of 97 in 1986.

It also shows the big increase over the decades, with annual casualties in the 1970s never higher than 35, about a fifth of this year's level.

Killers typically 17 and male

The data from five decades of school shootings shows the most typical age for a school killer is 16 or 17 and these perpetrators are highly likely to be male.

The attacks are not often "indiscriminate", but are more usually an "escalation of a dispute" or a gang-related incident.

But as well as following the statistics of school shootings, Ms Maxwell has seen the aftermath.

In the schools affected by such attacks, she says, there can be a cycle of strong and contradictory emotions.

At first, along with the "raw grieving" there can be a "coming together" of communities.

But that can be followed by divisions and a "splintering" as families look for answers and people to hold accountable for their loss.

She says there can be "fury against authorities and institutions", rather than any consensus on what should happen next.

No consensus

There is also no agreement at a national level about how to respond to school shootings, with opinion just as divided as when the year began.

"The needle hasn't moved," she says.

There are calls for guns to be kept out of schools and others calling for more guns to be used to defend schools.

"Our sense is that a vast majority of teachers don't want to be armed," she says.

"Whether it's one child or 17, it's awful and tragic and we need vigorous discussion about how to put a stop to it," says Ms Maxwell.

But there is no sign of any agreement about how that might happen.

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The editor of Global education is Sean Coughlan (sean.coughlan@bbc.co.uk).

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2018 'worst year for US school shootings'

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This year, 113 people have been killed or injured in school shootings in the United States. That's the sobering finding of a project to count the annual toll of gun attacks in schools. At the beginning of 2018, Education Week, a journal covering education in the US, began to track school shootings - and has since recorded 23 incidents where there were deaths or injuries.

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If it seemed like 2018 was a particularly bad year for gun violence in schools, that's because it was.

According to data from the US Naval Postgraduate School, there were 94 school gun violence incidents this year - a record high since 1970, which is as far back as the data goes, and 59 percent higher than the previous record of 59 in 2006.

The database counts "each and every instance a gun is brandished, is fired, or a bullet hits school property for any reason, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, or day of week,"according to the project. The project pulls from a variety of sources, including media reports and government agencies, to collect its data.

Separately, the project also tracks deaths. By this metric, 2018 was also the worst year on record. So far, 55 people, including the shooter, were killed in school gun violence. The second-worst annual death toll was 40 in 1993. (To put these numbers in context, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, including homicides and suicides, in the US in 2016.)

The great majority of incidents tracked involved handguns: 911 involved one or more handguns, 76 one or more rifles, 47 one shotgun, 33 a combination of weapons, and 230 unknown.

Other data backs up that 2018 was particularly bad for school gun violence. The database from Everytown, a gun control advocacy group, found 86 incidents so far this year in which "a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds, as documented by the press." That's the highest number of incidents going back to 2013, when Everytown began tracking the data.

School shootings this year gave way to a new movement for stricter gun laws, with the March for Our Lives taking off after a gunman in Parkland, Florida, in February killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

But it doesn't seem that 2018 was a particularly abnormal year for mass shootings, regardless of whether they happened on school grounds. The Gun Violence Archive's data, visualized by Vox in map form, indicates that there have been 328 mass shootings so far in 2018, or nearly one a day, resulting in 365 killed and 1,301 wounded. That's roughly in line with recent years going back to 2015, which have averaged about one mass shooting a day. (The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people were shot but not necessarily killed, excluding the shooter, in a similar time or place, which differs from some other groups' definitions.)

Meanwhile, gun homicides as a whole have trended down over the decades as crime has steadily dropped in the US - by roughly half since the 1990s.

It's not clear why 2018 appeared to be a particularly bad year for gun violence in schools.

But at the international level, America has long been an outlier among developed nations when it comes to gun violence - and the experts and research suggest that the US's abundance of firearms and extremely lax firearm laws have helped create its gun problem.

America's gun problem, explained

America's gun problem can be broken down into two parts.

First, America has uniquely weak gun laws. Other developed nations at the very least require one or more background checks and almost always something more rigorous beyond that to get a gun, from specific training courses to rules for locking up firearms to more arduous licensing requirements to specific justifications, besides self-defense, for owning a gun.

In the US, even a background check isn't a total requirement; the current federal law is riddled with loopholes and snared by poor enforcement, so there are many ways around even a basic background check. There are simply very few barriers, if any, to getting a gun in the US. (Although some states, like Massachusetts, have worked to change that.)

Second, the US has a ton of guns. It has far more than not just other developed nations but any other country, period. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

Both of these factors come together to make it uniquely easy for someone with any violent intent to find a firearm, allowing them to carry out a horrific shooting.

This is borne out in the statistics. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data for 2012 compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center, is also pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides but also with suicides (which in recent years were around 60 percent of US gun deaths), domestic violence, and violence against police.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it's not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence - and that's driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

"A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar," Zimring and Hawkins wrote. "A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London."

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it's much more likely that someone will get angry at an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

Similarly, every country in the world has bigots, extremists, and disturbed people who may want to carry out mass atrocities. But in the US, it's uniquely easy to do so because so many guns are readily available.

Researchers have found that stricter gun laws could help. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence - a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives. A review of the US evidence by RAND also linked some gun control measures, including background checks, to reduced injuries and deaths.

That doesn't mean that bigots, extremists, disturbed people, or anyone else will never be able to carry out a shooting in places with strict gun laws. Even the strictest gun laws can't prevent every shooting.

And guns are not the only contributor to violence. Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, alcohol consumption, and the strength of criminal justice systems.

There are also some evidence-based policies that could help outside the realm of gun control, including more stringent regulations and taxes on alcohol, changes in policing, and behavioral intervention programs.

But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America's loose access to guns is a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

So America, with its lax laws and abundance of firearms, makes it uniquely easy for people to commit massacres. Until the US confronts that issue, it will continue seeing more gun deaths than the rest of the developed world.

For more on America's gun problem, read Vox's explainer.

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2018 was by far the worst year on record for gun violence in schools

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If it seemed like 2018 was a particularly bad year for gun violence in schools, that's because it was. According to data from the US Naval Postgraduate School, there were 94 school gun violence incidents this year - a record high since 1970, which is as far back as the data goes, and 59 percent higher than the previous record of 59 in 2006.

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I like how it gives the stats on how fast it takes an officer to respond to a call. It also is crazy to me that not every call is a top priority.
"What 911 calls are considered high priority?
Every time you call 9-1-1 it's not high priority. The only high priority calls are those that have life threatening issues"

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You call 9-1-1 and expect an immediate response. A lot of the time, that's not the case, though. Read our shocking report to see just how long you should expect to wait for police help. The results may just surprise you.

What's Takes So Long?

A lot goes on behind the scenes at the police station. Processing emergency phone calls isn't as simple as it seems.

In fact, many of the calls dispatchers take aren't even true emergencies. These calls just slow down the process for those who truly need the help.

What is the average police response time?
10 minutes is how long you'll wait on average for police to respond to your 9-1-1 call. You might think you'd get an immediate response. Unfortunately, so do hundreds of others.

What are police response time rates highly dependent on? That 10 minutes can feel like a lifetime. However, consider the factors that play a role:

The priority of your emergency (high, low, or somewhere in between)

The number of other high priority calls coming in at the same time

The number of officers on duty at the time

The number of officers needed for the particular call

What 911 calls are considered high priority?
Every time you call 9-1-1 it's not high priority. The only high priority calls are those that have life threatening issues. Next most important are calls that require immediate response. Included in those calls are those that pose a threat to property. From there, the priorities decrease:

Calls with a need for immediate attention yet no immediate physical harm or damage is apparent

Calls that don't need an immediate response but which could result in the apprehension of a suspect

Calls where assistance is necessary but don't pose any immediate danger

Investigating Specific Situations

Security alarms going off, domestic violence, and robberies each have their own response times. Some may not rate as high on the scale as you think. Even though in our eyes everything is an emergency, the police may see it differently.

City Specific Details

Certain cities are ripe with crime. Here we take a look at some of their response times to help put things into perspective.

What are the average police response times in Los Angeles? Los Angeles is a city known for its high crime levels. Luckily, the average police response time in LA is just 5.7 minutes.

What are the average police response times in Chicago? Chicago has its fair share of crime, especially gun violence. However, even with everything going on, they managed to keep their response time at just 3.46 minutes for priority calls.

What are the average police response times in Detroit? Unfortunately, Detroit always comes in with some of the longest police response times. Topping the charts at 58 minutes, no other city has come even close to this number.

What are the average police response times in New York City? New York City, with all its hustle and bustle, has a slightly elevated response time. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, New Yorkers wait an average of 9.1 minutes for police after a 9-1-1 call.

We all need to do our part to keep each other safe. Safeguarding your home is the first step. Knowing when it's okay to call 9-1-1 is another. Using the non-emergency line for non-life threatening issues can help free up the line for true emergencies. When an emergency does occur, we have to remember that everyone is trying their best.

Sources and References

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You call 9-1-1 and expect an immediate response. A lot of the time, that's not the case, though. Read our shocking report to see just how long you should expect to wait for police help. The results may just surprise you.

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School shootings can be prevented -- here's how | William Woodward | TEDxMileHigh

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Florida school shooter's disturbing social media posts

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This story gives me an inside on what goes through a students mind during the event. The guy in the video was a "jock" and on the day the school shooting at Columbine happened he was the table that a shooter was sitting at during lunch right before the shooting happened.
"it was life or death"

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This video shows how easy kids/ adults can not see when someone is planning on doing something like this.  Some of the signs are magazines he's reading, what he is looking at on his computer, etc.

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

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This rapper dedicated this song to the parkland shooting so it is nice to see people are trying to notice what is wrong

"Rest in peace to all the kids that lost their lives in the Parkland shooting
This song is dedicated to you"