It is without a doubt that there has been an increase in violent crimes in schools throughout recent years. School shootings continue to become more and more common, especially in North America. Safety concerns for any and all students and staff in schools are at all all time high due to the high number of fatal and non-fatal occurring incidences. Since 2013 to the present, it is estimated that the United States has seen approximately 205 school shootings. Weekly, that is a shocking one shooting on average. Many of these shootings have resulted in the injuries and deaths of multiple of students and staff members. (Everytown Research, 2017) Evidently, school shootings are tragic events that affect so many more people than just the victims. However, these events are also interesting to look at from the psychological and sociological point of views. Through much research, it can be concluded that school shootings are a complex problem that are caused by a mix of improper brain development and societal and media influences which motivate school shooters to emerge. Psychological factors may include struggling with mental illnesses and/or abuse that leads to damaged brain development. Additionally, being bullied and/or the role of the media are examples of sociological factors.
Society plays a big role in the development of a school shooter. When an individual feels isolated or excluded from a community and is a target for bullies, it often causes them to take out that repressed anger and lash out in heinous ways. Nowadays, students are typically at school five days a week for six to seven hours a day. That is a lot of time spent with classmates, and unfortunately, bullies. Bullying usually involves an imbalance of power, in which the bully hopes to establish a feeling of dominance over their victim. (Bullying, 2017) Being the victim of bullying is certainly an emotionally damaging situation, especially when one feels helpless and alone. Anger or discontent from the victim may develop into something deeper like hatred and the need for revenge, which is the reason why some individuals turn to shooting schools- to finally hurt others instead of being the one getting hurt. One horrifying example of bullying taking
School violence is becoming a worldwide issue, but is a particular problem within the United States. Violence can occur in many ways such as; bullying, school gangs, physical attacks, and fatalities involved with guns. School shootings have been on the rise over the past several years. To bring awareness to school violence, teachers, staff, and parents need to be further trained in noticing warning signs of depression and anger issues which may lead to bullying and disrespectful learning environments for all parties. In addition to awareness within schools, the debate over gun control has been a topic discussed for many years in hopes to curb school shootings.
According to nobullying.com, ¨Over 77 percent of students have been bullied verbally, mentally, and physically. Each day about 160,000 students miss school because of bullying or because of their fear of being bullied.¨ According to nveee.org, ¨86% of students said, “other kids picking on them, making fun of them or bullying them” causes teenagers to turn to lethal violence in schools.¨ When a student gets harassed or bullied it adds anger inside of them and hate. The feeling of being picked on and having this negative attention can make a child act out or feel hatred and somehow want a way to let the anger out. They could also have it all stuffed inside with all of these horrible thoughts and one day decide to explode which could result in a horrible outcome.
There has been an average of one school shooting every week in America since the Sandy Hook shooting. On the fourteenth of December, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, 20-year-old Adam Lanza not only killed his mother in her home, but also twenty children and six members of staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. This was to be the third deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The Huffington Post reports that as of 2014, there have been over 200 school shootings. These have resulted in at least 94 deaths and over 156 serious and minor injuries. And, with an issue as emotive and contentious as the murder of school children, the question has been frequently asked: why do school shootings happen?
More than 270 gun sightings have been reported in schools in the year of 2016 (Mascia). Overall, more than fifty million kids walk into school with firearms everyday, but nobody knows about it. Why? Because most school officials do not have enough rights to search through students’ belongings if they have suspicion about something. Schools should have the right to search students’ belongings because of behavior, ownership, and safety.
For the past couple of years, the number of school shootings has increased. In the aftermath of these tragedies, reporters often discover that the shooter was mentally ill. Many people believe that mental illness refers to severe diseases such as schizophrenia but it also includes depression, stress, and anxiety. As mass shootings become more commonplace in America, parents are concerned for their children’s safety at school. Within San Gabriel, some people say that Gabrielino High School does not have adequate support and help for mentally ill students. They claim that any help from Gabrielino would be useless and believe that it is not Gabrielino’s responsibility to provide help for these students. Other people believe that there are enough resources at Gabrielino to help mentally ill students as well as sufficient awareness about this help. Through the annual Club Faire and Gab week, these people state that students know that they can reach out and receive support. These statements are not completely true; Gabrielino does have sufficient resources for students with mental illness but students are not aware of this help.
Not only is there physical bullying in today’s society, but there is cyber bullying which is through social media. People can say something or put a picture of somebody on the internet and it won’t really be removed because nothing on the internet is really removed, which enhances the tormenting. But how could bullying be a cause of school shooting? Well most people will feel as the whole world knows something about them they didn’t want the world to know about and then those people feel as they need to hurt the people who hurt them. When they think of their life being ruined, they either want to attack the ones who laughed at them or just hurt themselves. However, studies have shown that there has been a 31% decrease in bullying as of 2015. If schools start teaching classes on what bullying can cause, then we can see a future of not only less bullying but less school
Shootings at schools have increased significantly over the past years and have now become a huge talking point in today's society. Many people believe it is the guns fault and people are protesting to put stricter gun laws in effect and some are even wanting guns ban from civilians entirely. On the opposite end of the spectrum there have been efforts to arm teachers and school officers to try and prevent school shooting. One possible reason school shooting are such a big problem is the backstory of the shooters. One of the biggest reason kids are bringing guns to school is bullying. The recent parkland shooting showed this when the gun law activist emma gonzalez openly admitted to bullying the shooter. The only two ways people are coming up
One key factor in almost all of these school shootings are these students home and school lives. At home they normally don’t have a strong parent figure in their lives. They then go to school, and stand out as different, leading to being alone or bullied. Not having people there for you in your life is extremely hard, and sadly some people take it
In the article titled Ultimate revenge of the bullied, it’s stated that "More subtle, insidious forms of bullying are also on the rise, with text messaging and web forums allowing cowards to hide behind technology” (par.1). With the increase in people using social media, more people are starting to get bullied. An increase in bullying has caused kids to start committing heinous crimes. Lately, there has been many school shootings and that has surged a lot of conversation on possible reasons as to why they are happening. There has been research looking into why school shooters are deciding to shoot up schools and what exactly is wrong with them. In the article, Ultimate revenge of the bullied, the article goes in depth in how school shooters are made and the bad they go through that pushes them too far. Through all the research that is on school shooters most share a few things in common. School shootings are done
When you hear about a school shooter, you might think “Oh, there parents are awful, they just let their child do that,” Well you would be wrong. Most of the time we can`t comprehend if a child will be a potential school shooter, also them owning a gun does not make them a suspect for a potential school shooter.. The real issue here is the lack of communication between the victim or potential school shooter and the school. In “Here’s How to Prevent the Next School Shooting, Experts Say” by Anya Kamenetz, she states “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.” Also “School climate, in turn, affects students' mental and emotional health and
Incidences of school shootings have dramatically risen within the past few decades. Events like the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook shootings have increased the fear of Americans worried for the safety of their children. Annually, many children, as well as adults, are faced with the risk of losing their lives to mentally ill criminals in a place commonly held as a safe haven—school. 160 school shootings have occurred in America since 2013, with an average of nearly one a week (“The). This is unacceptable and something should be done to prevent acts of terror like this from arising.
According to Agnich (2010); Böckler, Seeger, Sitzer, & Heitmeyer (2013, p. 2) there has been an unprecedented trend in shootings, especially within the last decade. But, one of the most feared shooting tends to happen at schools where are children attended. These types of shootings put fears in teachers, education administrators, parents’ and students. Even though these incidents can happen
The earliest known school shooting in the United States took place in 1764 and was known as the Pontiac Rebellion School Massacre; out of 13 children enrolled in the school, only three survived (Dixon, 2005). Since then early 2000’s there has been 186 active shooters nationwide. People are now asking the question what is making these kids become school shooters. The question seems pretty straight forward, but no one knows a straightforward answer. Scientists and mental health professional have found there to be three main afflictions to cause people to become school shooters. The causes are being bullied, side effects of prescribed drugs, and abusive/neglective households.
This review of literature examined four different research studies on perpetrators of school shootings. These studies reveal school shooter share common characteristics and identified some risk factors that may influence an individual to become a school shooter. Scholars agree that perpetrators of school shootings mainly share an uniform demographic. Environmental risk factors such as rejection increase the likelihood of becoming a perpetrator of school shooting. Having a mental illness is another factor that increases the chances an individual of becoming a school
Unfortunately, school shootings and threats have become more common throughout the past 18 years. One of the first major school shootings that brought attention to gun violence in America was the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. According to the U.S. History website state that two teens, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting spree throughout the school. After killing 12 students and one teacher, the boys then killed themselves. During the investigation on the boys motives, investigators came to the conclusion that most likely the shooting was connected to bullying because the boys were members of social outcast groups, and violence in video games. It is unfortunate that bullying may have been the cause of this awful event in history, but it is even more upsetting that school shootings like these, have happened again at an even worse