School Shootings 1927 - 2018

Channel 9 News Denver, CO has posted a database of school shootings, in the United States, from 1927 - 2018.

Despite Heightened Fear Of School Shootings, It's Not A Growing Epidemic. "Schools are safer today than they had been in previous decades," says James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University who has studied the phenomenon of mass murder since the 1980s.

Other experts agree. Garen Wintemute is an emergency room physician who leads a prominent gun violence research program at the University of California, Davis. He says school shootings, specifically, are not epidemic. "Schools are just about the safest place in the world for kids to be," Wintemute says. "Although each one of them is horrific and rivets the entire nation for a period of time, mass shootings at schools are really very uncommon, and they are not increasing in frequency. What's changed is how aware we are of them."

One thing that stood out in all of these shootings was that "there were plenty of warning signs offered up in the months and years leading up to these horrific events. Few involved someone seemingly untroubled."

Dr. Roger Depue at the University of New Orleans has published a list of "Red Flags, Warning Signs, and Indicators" associated with school shootings in the United States.

Warning signs prior to a mass shooting did not however indicate that the individuals involved suffered from a true mental illness.

Dr. James L. Knoll IV, M.D. and Dr. George D. Annas, M.D., M.P.H writing in Psychiatry Online found that:

Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides.

The overall contribution of people with serious mental illness to violent crimes is only about 3%. When these crimes are examined in detail, an even smaller percentage of them are found to involve firearms.

Laws intended to reduce gun violence that focus on a population representing less than 3% of all gun violence will be extremely low yield, ineffective, and wasteful of scarce resources. Perpetrators of mass shootings are unlikely to have a history of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Thus, databases intended to restrict access to guns and established by guns laws that broadly target people with mental illness will not capture this group of individuals.

Gun restriction laws focusing on people with mental illness perpetuate the myth that mental illness leads to violence, as well as the misperception that gun violence and mental illness are strongly linked. Stigma represents a major barrier to access and treatment of mental illness, which in turn increases the public health burden.

A February 23, 2018 article in the LA Times reported that " Efforts to downplay the role of mental illness in mass shootings are simply misleading. There is a clear relationship between mental illness and mass public shootings.

At the broadest level, peer-reviewed research has shown that individuals with major mental disorders (those that substantially interfere with life activities) are more likely to commit violent acts, especially if they abuse drugs. When we focus more narrowly on mass public shootings - an extreme and, fortunately, rare form of violence - we see a relatively high rate of mental illness.

According to our research, at least 59% of the 185 public mass shootings that took place in the United States from 1900 through 2017 were carried out by people who had either been diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack.

There is clearly some debate over whether individuals who commit school shootings suffer from a mental illness or not. Part of this is because defining a mental illness - or more specifically determining that a person is actually suffering from a particular mental illness - is a difficult task. What is not at debate however is that there is a behavioral problem, a problem of personal conduct that does have warning signs and indicators that can help identify a potential school shooter.

Last week I discussed  How to Respond to School Violence, and noted that bullying behavior is very frequently involved in events leading up to school shootings. Addressing this type of behavior will have a much greater effect on preventing the next school shooting than any type of gun ban or restriction. Addressing personal conduct and responsibility does not have the same media and political sensation as cries for gun ban, but addressing the behavioral problems will almost certainly save far more lives than any type of gun control.