The relationship between guns and school is most evident after a tragedy and often paralyzes students, parents, teachers, communities etc. with fear and resentment. The issue of guns in schools arose in the late 1990s and has continued to be prevalent in American schools today as Fridel and Fox mentioned that, “Between the 1992-1993 and 2014-2015 school years, there were a total of 235 shootings at primary and secondary schools in the United States in which at least one victim was killed” (p. 18). After perusing through the readings, I have decided to focus my reading response around a specific epistemological take and theory on guns and schools:
The theory I noticed throughout most of the readings was the idea that a violence in society can result in violence in schools. In other words, if one is violent the other will be violent too, due to the inherent interconnectedness of both societies and schools. I found it very interesting how James Fox and Emma Fridel took an existentialist approach to the issue of guns in school. Instead of strictly focusing on classroom culture, the authors called the society in which schools function into question. Their idea that schools and society are inherently connected calls not only for a change in schools but also for a change in society. Alan Prendergast also touched on this existentialist theory of guns in schools specifically positing that the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting might have been a, “symptomatic of a larger breakdown in social values rather than a reflection of the bully-jock culture at Columbine.” This made me think about the perception of guns in society today and how the issues of guns in schools can be linked to the general attitude of the public rather than pinpointing the issue of guns in schools on troubled individuals. Some ideas that I came to on my own and from the readings were the glorification of violence in media (games, shows, books, etc.) and the accessibility and disposability of guns and weapons in America. Glen Muschert posited that the location and attitude of community also contributes to the possibility of a shooting by stating:
“The youth social dynamics of communities experiencing school shootings are often exclusionary, meaning that students who are different are ostracized. Similarly, shooting more commonly take place in communities that are generally intolerant of difference……School shootings have occurred in tightly knit communities that may suppress delinquency, but also in uprooted communities that are incapable of responding to delinquency by informal means” (pg. 34).
Muschert makes a nice point that a school is somewhat representative of the community it serves by drawing connections between the social dynamics and tolerance in schools and communities. The intricate relationship between schools and their communities was also taken into account in “School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention” as the universal or primary prevention for gun violence in schools starts by limiting the influence of causal risk factors and uses strategic approaches that “are often based on working to prevent aggressive and violent behavior among children and adolescents in general” (pg. 346). I believe that the parallel or mirror effect between schools and society is something that is often overlooked in the heat of the moment as we look for someone to blame when really we might need to take our own societal norms (whether that’s violent tv shows, games, gun laws, etc) into account and try to lead by example more.
Reporting on school shootings falls into two main categories – (1) personal focused stories and (2) data driven analyses. In most cases the focus is on the who, the what, and, most pervasively, the why. Reporters ask what could have driven someone to want to take the lives of our most vulnerable and how we as a society may be able to prevent further tragedy from taking place. Stories focus on the trends that pervade in order to seek to understand what happened.
The articles on the Columbine shooting written by Prendergast and Gibbs and Roche certainly spend time detailing the events that took place, but they spend much of their time analyzing the context in which the tragedy took place. These pieces look at the stories of the shooters and their lives leading up to the events of April 20th, 1999. In some ways the articles endeavor to humanize the shooters by examining their motives and backgrounds. The Prendergast article even includes direct appeals to “Eric” and “Dylan”. These writings are driven by a human desire to understand what is happening in the minds of perpetuators as they plan and execute mass violence. It is human to question: Why would someone do this? Why did no one stop this tragedy from happening? How can we move on and prevent this from ever happening again?
Perhaps in an attempt to break from this trend, other reporting focuses on presenting facts: the number killed, the dates and times, the types of weapons used. For these writers, it may feel as if approaching the issue clinically can allow them to soften the reality of the events taking place. Taking something so human and distilling it down to numbers helps us feel like we have some control over something that is scary because of its randomness and unpredictability. In her article about the #NeverAgain movement, Alter tells a story of people, filled with vivid language of the students and their actions, but the substance of the piece are statistics. There is a juxtaposition here, but it is clear that the data is key to the argument. In this way, Alter finds herself in a peer group with more academic writing. Introduction of theory and numbers allows reporting to take a step back towards rationalizing and explaining what has transpired.
So how can we understand the issue of guns in schools? The goal seems to be to address human desire to question paired with data that may be able to assuage fear, tension, and stress that comes from emotionally tinged writing.
Journalists seem to use two focal points to understand guns in schools: facts and experiences. The fact-based journalism focuses on information like location, death counts, statistics, step-by-step process of killings. The experience-based journalism focuses more on information like survivors’ accounts, parents’ stories, and experiences of the shooter. One thing that is pervasive in both journalism types is the focus on the why someone would do a school shooting. In Alter’s piece, “The School Shooting Generation has had Enough,” there is some experience-based journalism, but the focal point is more on the facts. She highlights the prevalence of guns and gun violence in America, while educating on the percentages of people supporting gun regulation. The backdrop for these facts is a narrative of the creators of March for our Lives, but the focal point is on the regulation. The goal of this form of journalism is to educate the public on steps that are being taken to combat guns in schools, give them hope, and create a call to action. Additionally, other reporting techniques of gun violence focuses on facts such as guns used, number of people killed, and the characteristics that make up a school shooter (Muschert). This form of fact-journalism is more palatable to the public than individual accounts. Authors like Prendergast, Gibbs and Roche focus more on the experiences of the survivors and perpetrators of the Columbine shooting. They provide extensive quotes from survivors, survivors’ families, administrators, teachers, and shooters. They use these quotations to lead the reader to answer how such a tragedy could occur. The focus is on the why, so in the future schools can prevent tragedies from occurring. Overall, journalists report on school shootings using two methods: facts and experiences, to try to understand why shootings occur. Muschert mentions that solution in journalism are shooting-specific and school-specific. There is little acknowledgement of the larger societal issues that are causing the shootings. This creates a question for me: how can we start to think about guns in schools as a more societal problem and how can we use that knowledge to save students in the future?
Prior to tonight’s reading, I was under the mistaken impression alluded to by many of tonight’s authors that school shootings were usually grand in scale (i.e., involving ‘double-digit victims’). This misconception was partially due to the emergence of mass shooting and multiple-victim homicides in the 1990s and the “great notoriety” (Muschert: 36) the media generates about these events. However, thanks to the articles and texts assigned tonight, I now see that school shootings on that scale are incredibly rare; Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland are the exception not the rule. This realization was the first of many I had during the readings tonight, which successfully challenged many conceptions I previously held about guns in school and highlighted the issues in reporting on school shootings.
First, I greatly appreciated how Muschert posits a variety of specific, possible motivations for school shooters (e.g., troubled home lives) but also acknowledges that there is never one singular cause we can easily point to. He also notably highlights that the availability of guns is salient in every one of these tragedies, which is clearly demonstrated in Alter’s statistic that the U.S. has 42% of the world’s guns but only 4.4% of the world’s population. This statistic helped illustrate for me that while other countries may also have issues with gun violence in school, the United States is particularly vulnerable to such violence given the sheer number of firearms we have in this country.
Continuing Muschert’s acknowledgment that there is never one simple answer to the ‘why’ question in a school shooting, I was struck by the authors’ interrogation of our—and the popular media’s—search for such a simple answer. In his piece on Columbine, Prendergast speaks to our search for blame and how we seek easy answers and a comprehensive narrative of sorts. In Columbine for instance, the media painted a picture of an outcast, ‘Trench Coat Mafia’ member who was the victim of bullying, when in reality much of that was fabricated and/or exaggerated. Also, Dylan Klebold did not neatly fit the prototype a ‘typical school shooter’ (Muschert). For example, his parents were not negligent or abusive; they were attentive and loving (Gibbs and Roche). Thus, there is nuance and complexity to every story that must be acknowledged rather than ignored. Finally, our attempt to create a narrative about the perpetrators of mass violence can sometimes sensationalize their stories and inspire other people to commit complementary acts. Therefore, in covering guns in schools and mass tragedies, we may inadvertently bring more guns into classrooms.
In addition to media coverage, government and legislation may also contribute to increased firearm presence in schools. For example, President Clinton’s Department of Justice implemented the “COPS in Schools” program which effectively increased the number of police officers in schools by 50% between 1999 and 2005 (Fox and Fridel). However, this increased police presence led to more (unnecessary and at times, seemingly racially motivated) punitive measures and alienated students from school employees. Furthermore, there were armed police officers at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Therefore, we have to ask what the unintended consequences of new practices are and if they are really achieving the end we all want: more safety for our students in their place of learning.
School shootings are often the product of extreme, mishandled rage, fed by feelings of inadequacy and disrespect. The people behind shootings often feel like outsiders in a hostile school environment. The question lingers—who is to blame for school shootings? It seems mean-hearted to blame the shooters themselves—they are mostly young men with a lack of supervision and a natural urge to fit in and gain respect. Parents are blinded by love and hope for their troubled children and school faculty let warning signs slip through the cracks in the chaos of trying to teach thousands of children. In understanding guns in schools, we must understand the variety of factors that lead someone to bring a gun into a school with violence in mind. The blame cannot be placed onto one party. The issue of gun safety must be tackled from all sides. Schools must react to (potentially negative) feedback about their environments and provide better mental health services, parents must form networks with other parents to look for warning signs, police must take threats made by minors seriously. Gun control laws must be strengthened nation wide. Above all, people must plant themselves firmly in reality in order to under the guns in school crisis. The risk of being killed in a school setting has plateaued since 2000 (other than the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012), according to Fox and Friedel. They argue that school shooting training should be treated similarly to airplane safety— train the teachers (the airline employees) but leave the students (passengers) out of it, until something happens. The solution remains somewhere on the spectrum between hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. Journalists’ responsibility are to tell the story (like in the Prendergast piece) while making the facts clear and contextualized (like in the Fox and Friedel piece).
In the aftermath of school shootings many are very understandably so left confused, hurt, and angry. Prendergast illustrates this confusion of who and why, through their analysis of the Columbine school shooting. Not only was the community trying to come to an understanding of this tragic event but so was the rest of the nation. Parents, teachers, survivors, journalists, politicians and more were searching for a why, a cause, and all the warning signs leading up to the shooting. Journalism plays a big role in relying these questions and information to those who are outside of the community. However, in a search for what went wrong to cause such a catastrophic event, there were many false reports spread around in an effort to be expedient in updating the nation. For example, some news source exhibited little effort to separate fact from myth and spread rumors such as the Trench coat mafia and Satanic worship.
Prendergast, Gibbs, and Roche are journalist who covered the Columbine shooting. The sensationalism of school shootings like Columbine and Sandy Hook paint a picture of frequency and horror within the nation’s public education system despite the statistics. These terrible events, as illustrated by Muschert, Fox, and Fridel, show how often times the coverage of such events dramatically changes the culture. Fox and Fridel examine the political polarization the follow the aftermath. Not only are people confused about why this happens, but people also are faced with the question of what to do to ensure the safety of the nation’s children, “each multiple-victim shooting has reinforced a sense that schools are under siege” (Fox and Fridel). Security is bolstered as a form of assurance but many argue that adding more cops or cameras are simply not enough to fix the problem at its root. As Prendergast states, “To find an effective cure, though, on must first have a grasp of the disease,” (Prendergast). Was it the bullying, the school board, or the lack of trained adults to recognize these problems? Prendergast examines the potentially damaging effect of implementing these security measure in schools in order to prevent shootings. Cops in schools lead to more youth criminalizations and marginalized groups are unfairly suspected and monitored. These responses in turn alienate students when communities should be working to do the opposite. Prendergast cites a more low-key approach to be effective.
In addition to implementing more security measures in schools, reformation of gun laws are called for by many affected by school shootings, “The series of school massacres energized gun control advocates, but did little to silence gun rights proponents,” (Fox and Fridel). It is a shared belief that school shootings are perhaps one of the most terrible things to happen in our nation, however, politics divide the country despite our shared grief. When the polarized view of politicians stump further legislation meant to protect students it is the very survivors themselves that take it upon themselves to fix it. Alter describes the #neveragain movement lead by students that survived the Parkland shooting. They are inclusive of other groups of survivors that have not had their voice heard, and work to pressure politicians to use their power to come up with tangible solutions to school shootings. Even despite the death of those involved in violence against schools, politicians still grapple to effectively find a solution.
School shootings leave the nation shocked. We wonder why nobody noticed and how come we couldn’t have stopped it faster? We look everywhere for a scapegoat. Was it the parents, school, society’s expectations of masculinity, or the culture of violence in many games and shows? There are many different opinions on the cause and the solution to school shootings. However, the one universal belief that is held is how terribly these events shake our world.
Muschert argues that school rampage attacks—the category of school shooting that is most mediatized—are not nearly as prevalent as they seem to be in the eyes of the media, which focuses in depth on them since their dramatic nature warrants clicks and views. He states that the shootings are blown out of proportion, actually much rarer than they appear to be from the lens of news outlets. While this may be true, I disagree that it lessens the significance of these attacks by any means. Guns have no place in schools and mass shootings, while rare, still take place and are inexcusable—no matter how common they are or are not.
The 1999 Columbine shooting was one of the first instances of grossly romanticizing shooters. They planned their attack on their classmates as a strategy for fame and for vengeance, intending to die as martyrs on behalf of those who have been mistreated and understood. They were self-aware in their attack, knowing exactly what the reactions of the community, the media and their parents would be. In their home videos, created right before the shooting, they candidly express their intention to live forever in media, in culture and in the minds of survivors. They express their awareness of the infamousness the massacre would bring them, and they were right. “The Columbine Tapes” TIME article does exactly this, ironically while also relaying the videotapes.
As expressed in Muschert’s “School Shootings as Meditized Violence” article, this romantic notion of the shooter was invented by and was carried forth after the Columbine shooters. Because of them, the school shooter archetype has become well known around the world. They are brooding, broken, often mentally ill people. Bullied and tortured by their classmates, they finally decided to fight back, to reclaim their voice and power through violence. This way of looking at shooters is incredibly harmful and dangerous, as it has provoked those who felt silenced or harassed by their peers to become copycat shooters. Also the choice to place intense focus on the shooter and why they did what they did deemphasizes the pain felt by victims of the attack. It also causes the shooter to become infamous, alive forever—exactly what their goal was in the first place.
This is where the reaction to and coverage of the Parkland shooting differed. Nikolas Cruz, while discussed and focused on for maybe a day or two by the press, disappeared from the limelight pretty quickly and the attention was refocused onto the teenagers and adults who lived and died during the attack. Instead of obsessing over the killer and his backstory, the media watched the teenagers who were using their voices to fight against a corrupt system that gave Cruz the opportunity to obtain a gun in the first place. This shift of attention in media coverage is what made the reaction to the Parkland shooting different. Citizens all over the country felt the pain of the survivors as they watched Emma Gonzales stand in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds during March for Our Lives. They felt it when Stonewall Douglas students relayed their own views of the trauma. They felt it when students around the country walked out of class for seventeen minutes, each minute meant to commemorate each person who died during the shooting. The event stayed on people’s minds for much longer than other shootings had in the past. Overall support for gun reform went up by 60% after Parkland (Alter). This shift in media attention is a huge part of why.
To understand guns in schools, what happens when people bring them in, and the consequences thereof, it is important to go across several different sources. Similar to any research, there are both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources could be considered first responders, students at the scene, parents of the shooters, etc. And secondary sources would be any coverage of the tragedies, and should be examined carefully as they may . Students are a major source of understanding what school shootings are like, unfortunately. Survivors are beyond important in comprehending events like this, even if they do not seem like it. Their responses are key, because at the end of the day, they are the victims. They are the ones who will be impacted by policy. School shooters have evolved over the years, just as technology has improved. Rightly so, as shootings have increased paranoia and police presence in schools, just as more anti-bullying programs have emerged to stop shooters before they emerge. Just as shooters have changed, so have their meant to be victims. Prendergast writes the story of Columbine, which students who were considered “outcasts” talked about being bullied by an “upper class” of jocks. The immediate response of the after was to pursue other members of the “Trenchcoat Mafia” or other marginalized kids like Melissa Sowder, and suggest they try homeschooling. The overwhelming feeling in the moment was fear. Investigations into the two teenagers who perpetrated Columbine, including the finding of their tapes where they told what they would do to the school and why, created animosity of athletic groups by anxious parents. In an age without as much technology and accessibility, it makes sense. The lack of social media really does drive up fear and accusation, and from the nineties to the present, Fox and Fidel confirm that over 235 school shootings happened at “primary” and “secondary” schools where at least one person was killed. This statistic doesn’t include happenings where injuries have happened. The mental scars will carry on with these students regardless of the casualties. Skipping to just last year in the Parkland shooting, the immediate response after thoughts and prayers is anger. Anger and exhaustion on behalf of the students, on behalf of, they say, almost all students in what has become known as the “school shooter generation”. Appearing on a cover of TIME magazine, a group of four teenagers including who has become the icon of gun safety advocacy Emma Gonzalez, have started their own movement, #NeverAgain. But it’s not only a hashtag; The March For Our Lives as well as the National Walk Out Day were huge successes, started from this grassroots organization. As media has evolved, students are feeling more united than ever in their pain. The students were not so concerned with the shooter, nor whatever reasons he may have had for what he did. The attitude they have is very soldier-like, in which they must focus on the living. And it’s true; to focus on the living is to focus on a solution, which is what the “school shooter generation” demands. Even Muschert had issues defining what makes a school shooter; “Many are white”, many are male, many have intricate “fantasies”, etc. While studying the shooters and the people close to them is beneficial, there is a lot of theorizing involved it seems, which can distract citizens. Reporting is slowly shifting from being about the “why”, like the investigation showing the tapes that the Columbine shooters reported, to the “how”, like the analysis of the Parkland teens and #NeverAgain. With this shift is the shift of our understanding of guns in schools. It is a real threat, but just because it’s a threat doesn’t mean that it can’t be tackled.
Understanding such a complex and sensitive topic such as gun violence in schools requires deep consideration and thorough research. It's easy to say that we understand concepts and news better when they are well-researched. But when the research is done and it's time to write an article, what perspective and detail-arrangement is most effective in getting the point across? Is it better to utilize storytelling and imagery, or statistical analysis? In our readings, there are many different angles taken to the final goal of getting people to understand how awful of an issue that guns in schools really poses. Writers like Alan Prendergast and Charlotte Alter choose the path of narrative-building and storytelling in order to communicate their research, while James Alan Fox & Emma E. Fridel choose to get their points across through statistical analysis. Prendergast tells a long and detailed story, spending much of his time on telling the story of Eric Harris and how he became the Columbine shooter. Prendergast uses video games, online servers, and social constructs at Harris' school to prove why he committed his crime on April 20, 1999. It's interesting to read 20 years later the narrative that Prendergast built to tell his story, especially given the awful amount of school shootings that have taken place since that day. Although not directly made, the argument that videogames are a cause of school shootings has all but been disproven. It's especially interesting to contemplate given the incredible advancements in graphical technology since the days of Doom, which was originally released in 1993. The narrative of (often anonymous) online evidence has also continued over time, as it feels like for almost every school shooting, there are secret accounts of troubled youth, with comments ranging from not fitting in to active death threats and detailed plans. Social situations at school also continue to personify school shooters- shooters are often portrayed as kids that were bullied as a child through high school, or truants that were never given the proper support in their formative years. These narratives reflect our desire to understand exactly why school shootings happen. For so many people that haven't had to live through their own community being attacked, these occurrences are almost foreign, so putting relatable faces and narratives to these awful acts help us to understand shooters. I feel that a better use of journalism comes in the form of statistical analysis. It's too often that people humanize school shooters (often white kids) into almost feeling bad for the person that just brought a gun to school. It's dangerous to get too close to these awful people. Statistical analysis, as utilized by Fox & Fridel, is effective in that it helps get exactly to the problem- although they don't necessary cover all bases. How many of these people had mental health issues? Where are they exactly getting their firearms? What experiences more closely correlate with school shootings? In order to make change, we have to rationally understand the issue before getting to the point of talking about these shooters as normal people. It's also a valuable understanding to show the world that although school shootings are nothing to invalidate, there are other issues that plague the country in more dangerous ways. We have to get past the viewpoint that schools are dangerous places for children. Police violence kills about 1,000 people every year, disproportionately people of color, whereas school shootings kill people in the single digits. It's tough to get thorough in a reflection. -Michael Gorman
I found a few things to be of incredible importance in tonights reading. Before reading today I knew really nothing at all about Columbine (it happened a month before I was born, and I live 15 minutes away from the school). As a general observation, I have always been struck by humans in general— and it seems to be very present with the issue of gun violence— with the need to find answers immediately. This was seen in the coverage of Columbine in the aftermath. As Alan Prendergast notes, the amount of inaccurate reporting that occurred was quite frankly, absurd. The most compelling narratives— the idea that the trench coat mafia was a hate group, etc— all turned out to be false. We jump on board too fast a lot of the time. I find that this could have an impact on a few things. First, it leads us to think that there can be an easy fix or to put it in other words, one cause to an issue. While I wholeheartedly believe that there is nowhere near enough preventative gun control legislation, and there should be little or preferably no access to assault weapons in our country, I doubt that just focusing on gun control will end this epidemic. I thought it was particularly intriguing that Nancy Gibbs and Timothy Roche for Time, inform readers that Eric Harris stated that even if he and Klebold could not get access to guns, they would have found other means. Therefore, what about other issues? What about mental health? How does this relate and affect the issue at hand? And additionally, how come we don’t talk about— as in-depth as we should — the fact that nearly all school shooters are men (not to mention they are mostly all white)? It is important to find patterns and to research, continuously, searching for something hopeful. At the same time, ‘looking for answers’ should strive to not to overhype, causing fear and anxiety— something that Fox and Friedel allude to. Thankfully we are learning the rules of engaged journalism that seeks to let our communities show us answers rather than trying so hard to find them.
Weapons designed to kill have no place in a building intended for learning. So to make sense of the issue, journalists have unknowingly created a timeline of appropriateness starting at a case study level and with time comparing one tragedy to other events through statistical reports.
One problem as reported by Muschert, guiltily admitted by my classmates, and understood by the Columbine shooters is that the facts of the case are often so intriguing that the “why” questions come later than they should. Furthermore, immediately following a tragic event with a round of the blame game hardly seems respectful to a grieving community. However, the separation between factual reporting and the “why” questions contributes to a mirky understanding between guns and schools.
Reporting on the nature of school shootings transforms with time. The articles by Prendergast, Gibbs, and Roche, published immediately after the Columbine shootings, lyrically described the events of Columbine, calling the shooters, “natural born killers,” but failed to address the problems on a macro scale. On the other hand, the Menace and Muschert publications take a look at school shooting trends on a national (and even international) level, but their statistical analysis and categorization act to remove the tragedy of the subject from the numbers. Furthermore, large scale statistics come with the assumption that all school shootings need to be treated as the same issue.
Understanding guns in school, similar to any complex problem, needs to be addressed from many different angles. Neither the articles published immediately after an event or the macro scale reports (or 575-page books) give a comprehensive view of the issue. However, when combined, we can gain a clearer understanding of why gun violence continues to appear month after month on the news.
It’s taken me some time to try to get my thoughts together, and I still don’t think that they completely are. How can we understand guns in schools? As Muschert said, there is a certain aspect to creating a discourse around guns in schools and gun violence in schools. I think of it as a “symptom pool,” a concept sometimes used in public health and medical conversations. Once there is enough discussion about a certain topic, and enough of the details are released, the topic becomes more and more prevalent because people know that it exists and what it entails. There is then a following increase in diagnoses. In the case of gun violence, the mass media reporting on gun violence in schools creates an atmosphere of panic and epidemic (a really interesting word for this scenario...what makes an epidemic?). This idea is similar to Fox and Fridel’s contagion effect. Stories like those from Prendergast and Demczuk provide immense detail as they attempt to explain the scenarios. This detail is embedded into the social consciousness, and permeates the idea that guns in schools are a highly prevalent, priority topic (Fox and Fridel). This concept of building fear and then putting in place often ineffective response strategies gives a false sense of success in terms of addressing the concept. But, I’m still not sure that this answers how we understand guns in schools. Perhaps this is more how we understand the aftermath of gun violence in schools. How we understand guns in schools may be more associated with how we understand shootings, as described by Muschert. The increasing association of school shootings as symbolic terms has a huge effect on how we understand and react. As several authors mentioned about the Sandy Hooks shooting, there are different responses to something when it affects “our” (a phrase often used, and people form individual investments) children, who are young, impressionable, and vulnerable, as opposed to something this is viewed as inevitable and not preventable (Hurricane Sandy, with higher death tolls). The difficulty in understanding guns in schools is finding a way to understand both polar ends: there are the attacks within the school, coming from insiders, which can be sometimes understood through school climate discussions, school support, and safety measures. However, when discussing attacks with schools as symbols, it is much more difficult to understand, other than acknowledging that we have shown as a society how strongly we react to school shootings (and I do not mean to say at all that this reaction is unwarranted -- school shootings are absolutely awful). This reaction, however, may incentivize further shootings and further attacks because of the knowledge that it will strongly affect people. Maybe the only way to understand guns in schools is to ask questions. The questions must be carefully crafted and addressed to the right people. They should not be exclusively dramatic, nor should they probe only the explain or understand. From this, hopefully, we will be able to better position our understanding of these shootings and how to address them.
Understanding the issue of guns in schools seems to fall into two camps – statistics and narratives. In the wake of tragedy (not tragedy in the modern way we use it, but an event that causes mass suffering) the different angles of what happened come spewing out of the community that has been turned upside-down by loss and media circus. Looking at Columbine specifically, it is so blatantly clear that the local Jefferson County police seemed to let things fall through the cracks on multiple occasions, and that the school had a rather toxic social hierarchy in place. But in the end it wasn’t about the bullies. Klebold and Harris both made it clear in their tapes and in the manner in which they targeted the school as a whole rather than the jocks specifically that this was a matter of what Klebold called his inner rage and the boys’ access to weapons. I understand that talking about the weapons used to hurt so many people is of vital importance, but why aren’t we talking about mental health? After reading these articles (in the library which was a mistake since I was on the verge of tears more than a few times) looked up typical school shooter drills and how they are executed in schools. There was plenty of information on barricading doors and covering up windows, but I didn’t see much information on how to look for signs of a troubled kid. In every narrative we read, there was some mention of how many people had reported troubling behavior to the police and the school, and so little was done. How English teachers read essays about mass killings and it was looked at as teenage angst. What interests me now is that, with Parkland and Sandy Hook, how can educators be trained to spot signals of violent or unhinged behavior? How can we implement rehabilitation methods rather than punitive ones that simply fuel anger? Legislation changes would be all well and good but like Harris and Klebold said, if they hadn’t of had guns, they still would have found a way. This fight has to start within our education system. We want to look to the government to solve community based problems, but legislation isn’t enough to stop an unstable individual from hurting and acting on anger in some form or another.
“Individual access to guns is in fact the only necessary cause and the only factor that appears in al school shooting incidents” (Muschert 34).
The concept of guns and schools needs to be analyzed through the lenses of American culture, politics and policy, and emotion and loss. The value placed on owning and having the right to operate firearms is somewhat unique to American culture. That value is deeply rooted in traditional and patriotic symbols of freedom in our country, a value that cannot be ignored when trying to understand the role guns play in our nation, unfortunately including in our schools. The emphasis on the Second Amendment, regardless of its intended meaning when established, plays a major role in shaping the policies of rural American culture that undoubtedly lead to the polls. In his 2018 campaign, Brian Kemp, the newly elected governor of Georgia coined himself on “respect and a healthy appreciation for the Second Amendment,” an Amendment intended for firearms that are unfathomably archaic to even the most amateur of hunters. The emphasis on the right to bear arms impacts policy and the rhetoric surrounding guns in general, but especially when it comes to guns in schools. For example, the NRA’s proposed “School Shield Program” would arm every school in the U.S. with sharpshooters and according to a poll done by the Gallup organization, “nearly two-thirds of Americans see merit in this idea” (Fox 28). The right to bear arms in our country makes it harder for people to desire stricter gun laws, even if they have the possibility to protect the children of our future. The excessive minor and major school shootings in America in the last decade or so have brought up important conversations of increased school security, mental health, as well as a questioning of the need for the Second Amendment. What can sometimes get ignored in the politicized conversation surrounding guns in schools are the families and parents who are too intimately connected to this issue. Their loss and struggle must be at the forefront of this conversation, not as a political tool but as a bipartisan effort for an increased value on real Americans who want and need a solution to this problem. Statistics show that the majority of mass shootings in American schools are carried out by white, middle- or lower-class young males. How to understand guns in schools means we must understand this demographic of person. What Muschert explains as a “rampage shooter” seeking revenge, often characterizes this person in mass shootings that are hyper-publicized, although the vast majority of school shootings are targeted attacks on individuals that don’t get the same press. Understanding the role that guns play in school requires being analytical as we take a holistic look at history, policy, culture, and the role they play in preventing and perpetrating tragedy.
Muschert explained the typical timing of news cycle reporting on mass shootings in his 2013 work. He explained that the first week of the news cycle often consists of a steady stream of stories reporting on the facts of the case. After that first week, media outlets often switch gears and begin their efforts to find the cause of the shooting and figure out how it will play into the now internationally accepted trope of the rampage shooter. This first week of journalism more closely resembles traditional journalism: news outlets compile facts and distribute them to the public in order to establish a communally accepted truth. The second cycle of journalism bears more similarity to engaged journalism. While this second week of delving deeper into the affected community is presented as a search for the cause of shooting, in reality it merely serves to exacerbate the already unproportionate role that school shootings play in the American psyche. As Muschert explained, “There is a dramatic quality to the coverage of school shootings, and as a theatrical schema would suggest, there is a need to identify a cast of characters”. This dramatic coverage reinforces the impression that mass school shootings could be a legitimate daily threat for all students across the country. By humanizing the shooters and delving into their stories they become familiar characters, as close as one’s own classmates. As Fox and Fridel emphasized, security has a growing presence in American public schools, further emphasizing the imagined proximity of the threat. Though deep investigative media reporting on school shootings is done in an attempt to assuage fears and come to the root of the problem, in reality it does the opposite. It spreads an inordinate amount of fear throughout the American public and cements the figure of the unbalanced school shooter into the American psyche.
Understanding why guns have been brought into schools requires the synthesis of comprehensive knowledge of many situations. It is impossible to have a completely comprehensive model of a school shooting. There are too many factors at play. Studying these occurences as comprehensively as possible is the best tool we have to problem solve. News articles are often driven by our desire to understand the perpetrator. Journalists attempt to dive into the mind of the shooter, forced to make many assumptions if they're attempting to produce a narrative (Pendergast) (Gibbs and Roche). Looking at just one part of the story, whether that be the "damaged mind" of the shooter, the poisinous school climate, or easy access to guns makes the issue seem simple. To understand guns in schools, we must accept that it is the contribution of a myraid of factors that enable this reality. o understand guns in schools, we compare incidents and search for patterns. Patterns do come up, but none are reliably true across the aboard except access to a firearm (Muschert). Even in analyses of many shootings and understanding of many factors, questions are left unanswered. Individuals and groups seem to latch onto one core factor that is to blame. This leads to disagreement and debate that distracts from solving the probem. School shootings are often reported on either by creating a story of human experience or a story of numbers (Fox and Fridel), or sometimes they are intertwined (Alter). There is no consensus on how to report on a school shooting, and maybe there shouldn't be. I find it interesting that we immeditatly thirst for answers in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, but our quest to problem solve always falls flat, and after the initial rush of headlines, people move on. "The columbine effect" was referenced, but obviously if any kind of nonviolent policies were passed following these shootings, it hasn't worked very well, at least on a a national scale. Guns in schools is obviosuly a complex issue that won't be fully understood in a day, a month, or a year. I think people will always understand it differently, which stalls and inhibits problem solving. I think the best thing we can do for now is study with an open minded view, aware of our lack of understanding and of the complexty of how the factors involve intersect.
Well, I’m not going to try to pretend that I know quite yet how to understand guns in schools. It’s a disturbing topic that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Reading these articles on school shootings, I feel repulsed, but at the same time I can’t take my eyes away. There’s some strange sense of fascination that these episodes of unspeakable violence that arouses incredible attention. Journalists know this, and consequently we are inundated with articles and reports trying to explain, justify, and solve these horrific cases.
I find the trend of spikes in school shootings very interesting. Looking at the database of school shooting data, one can see that school shootings are often clustered in a short time frame. Reading the “Menace of School Shootings in America”, I found it very interesting hearing school shootings framed as an “emerging epidemic”. This framing fills us with fear, and also normalizes the issue. I find this phenomenon, of the normalization and panic around school shootings, somewhat counterproductive. As Fox and Friedel note, the fortress approach to schools seems to be somewhat ineffective, and framing school shootings as a “new-normal” may make it appear a viable option to distressed students who are looking to release their frustrations. Further strengthening the normalization of school shootings is what Muschert calls the “media saturation” of today. We have come to view school shootings not only as isolated cases of revenge, but a public ritual. This reminds me of yesterday’s readings. I think it’s important here to remember the journalist’s responsibility to order the issues of society and present them in a solution-driven manner. I don’t think we’re seeing this responsibility taken seriously in the case of school shootings. If we can reorder our coverage of school shootings to explore solutions that can scale, perhaps “longo run, low-key” solutions as Fox and Friedel suggest, perhaps we can begin to understand school shootings better in the future.
In the context of our society, school shootings are often something which people don’t quite understand how to approach.While any sort of violent crime is always devastating, it is expected that minors are supposed to be protected from these cruel and terrifying aspects of the world, and it seems awfully unfair that simply getting the education they need to get by as adults makes them a target. Thus, unlike other violent crimes which happen daily across the country, there seems to be a problem which people are urgent to put an end to. But with such different case-specific incidents occurring nationally, everyone seems to want to go about the issue in different ways. One issue is the way in which schools may choose to go about this issue. In Alan Prendergast’s Westword Article “Doom Rules”, after the Columbine shooting, any student who stood out or seemed like they fit in to the crowd which the shooters were a part of were all targeted by their school, and given options of transferring or being homeschooled, which some even took. This technique is shown to be ineffective and prejudice against students, yet the hunt for a scapegoat mercilessly continues, because when children die, someone must pay. What seems to be common now is making it an issue of politics. Rather than blaming the students, students (and those backed behind them) are blaming the guns. In Charlotte Alter’s “The School Shooting Generation Has Had Enough”, students like Emma Gonzales are shown to lead a movement against the government rather than the people, with statements like “Policy and Change instead of Thoughts and Prayers”. While the idea of eliminating the mere possibility of guns in schools in the first place seems like a pretty obvious answer, would it ever be truly possible? Whether you blame the school board or its security, the government’s policy on gun ownership, the students, or even their parents, it seems as though this problem will never be as simple as people are making it out to be and would take serious change in many different aspects in order to be solved.
When the Parkland shooting occurred, students were live-tweeting the devastating event. Viral videos were posted in real time from smartphones to many social media platforms and it became almost impossible to not see information coming straight from the students themselves. From fighting with online trolls about their experiences to shaming their public representatives, Parkland students were able to fight for their voices in a newfound way that greatly contrasts the experience of their Columbine counterparts. In the age of social media, from Tik Tok to Snapchat, it seems that many young people have found an ability to share their thoughts and opinions in new and fascinating ways.
In the Time article “The Columbine Tapes”, Gibbs and Roche methodically explain how the shooting occurred the diabolical plot that was recorded in various videos by Klebold and Harris. One of the most disturbing portions of the article, despite the many bloody and horrific descriptions of violence, was the inability for law enforcement to gather critical information from inside the building and act on those realities. When Evan Todd, a student who was wounded in the library, described to the police officers exactly where students were that needed medical help, his voice was silenced. He noted that “They told me to calm down and take my frustrations elsewhere” and even his information regarding the type of guns being used was not seen as relevant.
From the #MeToo movement centering the stories of sexual violence survivors/victims to the Parkland students using social media to fight for their positions concerning gun violence, social media has surely changed how social movements occur. However, the question of physical safety and the ability for students to communicate logistical information while the shooting was happening is truly a small miracle in comparison to the grim reality of students who could barely reach the 911 call line during the Columbine shooting. It would be interesting and incredibly important to more fully analyze how social media and smartphones help or hinder law enforcement during and live shooter situation within schools in comparison to the pre-smartphone era to understand this on a more quantitative level.
How Can we Understand Guns in Schools?
ReplyDeleteThe relationship between guns and school is most evident after a tragedy and often paralyzes students, parents, teachers, communities etc. with fear and resentment. The issue of guns in schools arose in the late 1990s and has continued to be prevalent in American schools today as Fridel and Fox mentioned that, “Between the 1992-1993 and 2014-2015 school years, there were a total of 235 shootings at primary and secondary schools in the United States in which at least one victim was killed” (p. 18). After perusing through the readings, I have decided to focus my reading response around a specific epistemological take and theory on guns and schools:
The theory I noticed throughout most of the readings was the idea that a violence in society can result in violence in schools. In other words, if one is violent the other will be violent too, due to the inherent interconnectedness of both societies and schools. I found it very interesting how James Fox and Emma Fridel took an existentialist approach to the issue of guns in school. Instead of strictly focusing on classroom culture, the authors called the society in which schools function into question. Their idea that schools and society are inherently connected calls not only for a change in schools but also for a change in society. Alan Prendergast also touched on this existentialist theory of guns in schools specifically positing that the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting might have been a, “symptomatic of a larger breakdown in social values rather than a reflection of the bully-jock culture at Columbine.” This made me think about the perception of guns in society today and how the issues of guns in schools can be linked to the general attitude of the public rather than pinpointing the issue of guns in schools on troubled individuals. Some ideas that I came to on my own and from the readings were the glorification of violence in media (games, shows, books, etc.) and the accessibility and disposability of guns and weapons in America. Glen Muschert posited that the location and attitude of community also contributes to the possibility of a shooting by stating:
“The youth social dynamics of communities experiencing school shootings are often exclusionary, meaning that students who are different are ostracized. Similarly, shooting more commonly take place in communities that are generally intolerant of difference……School shootings have occurred in tightly knit communities that may suppress delinquency, but also in uprooted communities that are incapable of responding to delinquency by informal means” (pg. 34).
Muschert makes a nice point that a school is somewhat representative of the community it serves by drawing connections between the social dynamics and tolerance in schools and communities. The intricate relationship between schools and their communities was also taken into account in “School Shootings: International Research, Case Studies, and Concepts for Prevention” as the universal or primary prevention for gun violence in schools starts by limiting the influence of causal risk factors and uses strategic approaches that “are often based on working to prevent aggressive and violent behavior among children and adolescents in general” (pg. 346). I believe that the parallel or mirror effect between schools and society is something that is often overlooked in the heat of the moment as we look for someone to blame when really we might need to take our own societal norms (whether that’s violent tv shows, games, gun laws, etc) into account and try to lead by example more.
Reporting on school shootings falls into two main categories – (1) personal focused stories and (2) data driven analyses. In most cases the focus is on the who, the what, and, most pervasively, the why. Reporters ask what could have driven someone to want to take the lives of our most vulnerable and how we as a society may be able to prevent further tragedy from taking place. Stories focus on the trends that pervade in order to seek to understand what happened.
ReplyDeleteThe articles on the Columbine shooting written by Prendergast and Gibbs and Roche certainly spend time detailing the events that took place, but they spend much of their time analyzing the context in which the tragedy took place. These pieces look at the stories of the shooters and their lives leading up to the events of April 20th, 1999. In some ways the articles endeavor to humanize the shooters by examining their motives and backgrounds. The Prendergast article even includes direct appeals to “Eric” and “Dylan”. These writings are driven by a human desire to understand what is happening in the minds of perpetuators as they plan and execute mass violence. It is human to question: Why would someone do this? Why did no one stop this tragedy from happening? How can we move on and prevent this from ever happening again?
Perhaps in an attempt to break from this trend, other reporting focuses on presenting facts: the number killed, the dates and times, the types of weapons used. For these writers, it may feel as if approaching the issue clinically can allow them to soften the reality of the events taking place. Taking something so human and distilling it down to numbers helps us feel like we have some control over something that is scary because of its randomness and unpredictability. In her article about the #NeverAgain movement, Alter tells a story of people, filled with vivid language of the students and their actions, but the substance of the piece are statistics. There is a juxtaposition here, but it is clear that the data is key to the argument. In this way, Alter finds herself in a peer group with more academic writing. Introduction of theory and numbers allows reporting to take a step back towards rationalizing and explaining what has transpired.
So how can we understand the issue of guns in schools? The goal seems to be to address human desire to question paired with data that may be able to assuage fear, tension, and stress that comes from emotionally tinged writing.
Journalists seem to use two focal points to understand guns in schools: facts and experiences. The fact-based journalism focuses on information like location, death counts, statistics, step-by-step process of killings. The experience-based journalism focuses more on information like survivors’ accounts, parents’ stories, and experiences of the shooter. One thing that is pervasive in both journalism types is the focus on the why someone would do a school shooting.
ReplyDeleteIn Alter’s piece, “The School Shooting Generation has had Enough,” there is some experience-based journalism, but the focal point is more on the facts. She highlights the prevalence of guns and gun violence in America, while educating on the percentages of people supporting gun regulation. The backdrop for these facts is a narrative of the creators of March for our Lives, but the focal point is on the regulation. The goal of this form of journalism is to educate the public on steps that are being taken to combat guns in schools, give them hope, and create a call to action. Additionally, other reporting techniques of gun violence focuses on facts such as guns used, number of people killed, and the characteristics that make up a school shooter (Muschert). This form of fact-journalism is more palatable to the public than individual accounts.
Authors like Prendergast, Gibbs and Roche focus more on the experiences of the survivors and perpetrators of the Columbine shooting. They provide extensive quotes from survivors, survivors’ families, administrators, teachers, and shooters. They use these quotations to lead the reader to answer how such a tragedy could occur. The focus is on the why, so in the future schools can prevent tragedies from occurring.
Overall, journalists report on school shootings using two methods: facts and experiences, to try to understand why shootings occur. Muschert mentions that solution in journalism are shooting-specific and school-specific. There is little acknowledgement of the larger societal issues that are causing the shootings. This creates a question for me: how can we start to think about guns in schools as a more societal problem and how can we use that knowledge to save students in the future?
Prior to tonight’s reading, I was under the mistaken impression alluded to by many of tonight’s authors that school shootings were usually grand in scale (i.e., involving ‘double-digit victims’). This misconception was partially due to the emergence of mass shooting and multiple-victim homicides in the 1990s and the “great notoriety” (Muschert: 36) the media generates about these events. However, thanks to the articles and texts assigned tonight, I now see that school shootings on that scale are incredibly rare; Columbine, Sandy Hook and Parkland are the exception not the rule. This realization was the first of many I had during the readings tonight, which successfully challenged many conceptions I previously held about guns in school and highlighted the issues in reporting on school shootings.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I greatly appreciated how Muschert posits a variety of specific, possible motivations for school shooters (e.g., troubled home lives) but also acknowledges that there is never one singular cause we can easily point to. He also notably highlights that the availability of guns is salient in every one of these tragedies, which is clearly demonstrated in Alter’s statistic that the U.S. has 42% of the world’s guns but only 4.4% of the world’s population. This statistic helped illustrate for me that while other countries may also have issues with gun violence in school, the United States is particularly vulnerable to such violence given the sheer number of firearms we have in this country.
Continuing Muschert’s acknowledgment that there is never one simple answer to the ‘why’ question in a school shooting, I was struck by the authors’ interrogation of our—and the popular media’s—search for such a simple answer. In his piece on Columbine, Prendergast speaks to our search for blame and how we seek easy answers and a comprehensive narrative of sorts. In Columbine for instance, the media painted a picture of an outcast, ‘Trench Coat Mafia’ member who was the victim of bullying, when in reality much of that was fabricated and/or exaggerated. Also, Dylan Klebold did not neatly fit the prototype a ‘typical school shooter’ (Muschert). For example, his parents were not negligent or abusive; they were attentive and loving (Gibbs and Roche). Thus, there is nuance and complexity to every story that must be acknowledged rather than ignored. Finally, our attempt to create a narrative about the perpetrators of mass violence can sometimes sensationalize their stories and inspire other people to commit complementary acts. Therefore, in covering guns in schools and mass tragedies, we may inadvertently bring more guns into classrooms.
In addition to media coverage, government and legislation may also contribute to increased firearm presence in schools. For example, President Clinton’s Department of Justice implemented the “COPS in Schools” program which effectively increased the number of police officers in schools by 50% between 1999 and 2005 (Fox and Fridel). However, this increased police presence led to more (unnecessary and at times, seemingly racially motivated) punitive measures and alienated students from school employees. Furthermore, there were armed police officers at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Therefore, we have to ask what the unintended consequences of new practices are and if they are really achieving the end we all want: more safety for our students in their place of learning.
School shootings are often the product of extreme, mishandled rage, fed by feelings of inadequacy and disrespect. The people behind shootings often feel like outsiders in a hostile school environment.
ReplyDeleteThe question lingers—who is to blame for school shootings?
It seems mean-hearted to blame the shooters themselves—they are mostly young men with a lack of supervision and a natural urge to fit in and gain respect. Parents are blinded by love and hope for their troubled children and school faculty let warning signs slip through the cracks in the chaos of trying to teach thousands of children.
In understanding guns in schools, we must understand the variety of factors that lead someone to bring a gun into a school with violence in mind. The blame cannot be placed onto one party.
The issue of gun safety must be tackled from all sides. Schools must react to (potentially negative) feedback about their environments and provide better mental health services, parents must form networks with other parents to look for warning signs, police must take threats made by minors seriously. Gun control laws must be strengthened nation wide.
Above all, people must plant themselves firmly in reality in order to under the guns in school crisis. The risk of being killed in a school setting has plateaued since 2000 (other than the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012), according to Fox and Friedel. They argue that school shooting training should be treated similarly to airplane safety— train the teachers (the airline employees) but leave the students (passengers) out of it, until something happens. The solution remains somewhere on the spectrum between hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.
Journalists’ responsibility are to tell the story (like in the Prendergast piece) while making the facts clear and contextualized (like in the Fox and Friedel piece).
In the aftermath of school shootings many are very understandably so left confused, hurt, and angry. Prendergast illustrates this confusion of who and why, through their analysis of the Columbine school shooting. Not only was the community trying to come to an understanding of this tragic event but so was the rest of the nation. Parents, teachers, survivors, journalists, politicians and more were searching for a why, a cause, and all the warning signs leading up to the shooting. Journalism plays a big role in relying these questions and information to those who are outside of the community. However, in a search for what went wrong to cause such a catastrophic event, there were many false reports spread around in an effort to be expedient in updating the nation. For example, some news source exhibited little effort to separate fact from myth and spread rumors such as the Trench coat mafia and Satanic worship.
ReplyDeletePrendergast, Gibbs, and Roche are journalist who covered the Columbine shooting. The sensationalism of school shootings like Columbine and Sandy Hook paint a picture of frequency and horror within the nation’s public education system despite the statistics. These terrible events, as illustrated by Muschert, Fox, and Fridel, show how often times the coverage of such events dramatically changes the culture. Fox and Fridel examine the political polarization the follow the aftermath. Not only are people confused about why this happens, but people also are faced with the question of what to do to ensure the safety of the nation’s children, “each multiple-victim shooting has reinforced a sense that schools are under siege” (Fox and Fridel). Security is bolstered as a form of assurance but many argue that adding more cops or cameras are simply not enough to fix the problem at its root. As Prendergast states, “To find an effective cure, though, on must first have a grasp of the disease,” (Prendergast). Was it the bullying, the school board, or the lack of trained adults to recognize these problems? Prendergast examines the potentially damaging effect of implementing these security measure in schools in order to prevent shootings. Cops in schools lead to more youth criminalizations and marginalized groups are unfairly suspected and monitored. These responses in turn alienate students when communities should be working to do the opposite. Prendergast cites a more low-key approach to be effective.
In addition to implementing more security measures in schools, reformation of gun laws are called for by many affected by school shootings, “The series of school massacres energized gun control advocates, but did little to silence gun rights proponents,” (Fox and Fridel). It is a shared belief that school shootings are perhaps one of the most terrible things to happen in our nation, however, politics divide the country despite our shared grief. When the polarized view of politicians stump further legislation meant to protect students it is the very survivors themselves that take it upon themselves to fix it. Alter describes the #neveragain movement lead by students that survived the Parkland shooting. They are inclusive of other groups of survivors that have not had their voice heard, and work to pressure politicians to use their power to come up with tangible solutions to school shootings. Even despite the death of those involved in violence against schools, politicians still grapple to effectively find a solution.
School shootings leave the nation shocked. We wonder why nobody noticed and how come we couldn’t have stopped it faster? We look everywhere for a scapegoat. Was it the parents, school, society’s expectations of masculinity, or the culture of violence in many games and shows? There are many different opinions on the cause and the solution to school shootings. However, the one universal belief that is held is how terribly these events shake our world.
Muschert argues that school rampage attacks—the category of school shooting that is most mediatized—are not nearly as prevalent as they seem to be in the eyes of the media, which focuses in depth on them since their dramatic nature warrants clicks and views. He states that the shootings are blown out of proportion, actually much rarer than they appear to be from the lens of news outlets. While this may be true, I disagree that it lessens the significance of these attacks by any means. Guns have no place in schools and mass shootings, while rare, still take place and are inexcusable—no matter how common they are or are not.
ReplyDeleteThe 1999 Columbine shooting was one of the first instances of grossly romanticizing shooters. They planned their attack on their classmates as a strategy for fame and for vengeance, intending to die as martyrs on behalf of those who have been mistreated and understood. They were self-aware in their attack, knowing exactly what the reactions of the community, the media and their parents would be. In their home videos, created right before the shooting, they candidly express their intention to live forever in media, in culture and in the minds of survivors. They express their awareness of the infamousness the massacre would bring them, and they were right. “The Columbine Tapes” TIME article does exactly this, ironically while also relaying the videotapes.
As expressed in Muschert’s “School Shootings as Meditized Violence” article, this romantic notion of the shooter was invented by and was carried forth after the Columbine shooters. Because of them, the school shooter archetype has become well known around the world. They are brooding, broken, often mentally ill people. Bullied and tortured by their classmates, they finally decided to fight back, to reclaim their voice and power through violence. This way of looking at shooters is incredibly harmful and dangerous, as it has provoked those who felt silenced or harassed by their peers to become copycat shooters. Also the choice to place intense focus on the shooter and why they did what they did deemphasizes the pain felt by victims of the attack. It also causes the shooter to become infamous, alive forever—exactly what their goal was in the first place.
This is where the reaction to and coverage of the Parkland shooting differed. Nikolas Cruz, while discussed and focused on for maybe a day or two by the press, disappeared from the limelight pretty quickly and the attention was refocused onto the teenagers and adults who lived and died during the attack. Instead of obsessing over the killer and his backstory, the media watched the teenagers who were using their voices to fight against a corrupt system that gave Cruz the opportunity to obtain a gun in the first place. This shift of attention in media coverage is what made the reaction to the Parkland shooting different. Citizens all over the country felt the pain of the survivors as they watched Emma Gonzales stand in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds during March for Our Lives. They felt it when Stonewall Douglas students relayed their own views of the trauma. They felt it when students around the country walked out of class for seventeen minutes, each minute meant to commemorate each person who died during the shooting. The event stayed on people’s minds for much longer than other shootings had in the past. Overall support for gun reform went up by 60% after Parkland (Alter). This shift in media attention is a huge part of why.
To understand guns in schools, what happens when people bring them in, and the consequences thereof, it is important to go across several different sources. Similar to any research, there are both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources could be considered first responders, students at the scene, parents of the shooters, etc. And secondary sources would be any coverage of the tragedies, and should be examined carefully as they may . Students are a major source of understanding what school shootings are like, unfortunately. Survivors are beyond important in comprehending events like this, even if they do not seem like it. Their responses are key, because at the end of the day, they are the victims. They are the ones who will be impacted by policy.
ReplyDeleteSchool shooters have evolved over the years, just as technology has improved. Rightly so, as shootings have increased paranoia and police presence in schools, just as more anti-bullying programs have emerged to stop shooters before they emerge. Just as shooters have changed, so have their meant to be victims. Prendergast writes the story of Columbine, which students who were considered “outcasts” talked about being bullied by an “upper class” of jocks. The immediate response of the after was to pursue other members of the “Trenchcoat Mafia” or other marginalized kids like Melissa Sowder, and suggest they try homeschooling. The overwhelming feeling in the moment was fear. Investigations into the two teenagers who perpetrated Columbine, including the finding of their tapes where they told what they would do to the school and why, created animosity of athletic groups by anxious parents. In an age without as much technology and accessibility, it makes sense. The lack of social media really does drive up fear and accusation, and from the nineties to the present, Fox and Fidel confirm that over 235 school shootings happened at “primary” and “secondary” schools where at least one person was killed. This statistic doesn’t include happenings where injuries have happened. The mental scars will carry on with these students regardless of the casualties.
Skipping to just last year in the Parkland shooting, the immediate response after thoughts and prayers is anger. Anger and exhaustion on behalf of the students, on behalf of, they say, almost all students in what has become known as the “school shooter generation”. Appearing on a cover of TIME magazine, a group of four teenagers including who has become the icon of gun safety advocacy Emma Gonzalez, have started their own movement, #NeverAgain. But it’s not only a hashtag; The March For Our Lives as well as the National Walk Out Day were huge successes, started from this grassroots organization. As media has evolved, students are feeling more united than ever in their pain. The students were not so concerned with the shooter, nor whatever reasons he may have had for what he did. The attitude they have is very soldier-like, in which they must focus on the living. And it’s true; to focus on the living is to focus on a solution, which is what the “school shooter generation” demands. Even Muschert had issues defining what makes a school shooter; “Many are white”, many are male, many have intricate “fantasies”, etc. While studying the shooters and the people close to them is beneficial, there is a lot of theorizing involved it seems, which can distract citizens.
Reporting is slowly shifting from being about the “why”, like the investigation showing the tapes that the Columbine shooters reported, to the “how”, like the analysis of the Parkland teens and #NeverAgain. With this shift is the shift of our understanding of guns in schools. It is a real threat, but just because it’s a threat doesn’t mean that it can’t be tackled.
Understanding such a complex and sensitive topic such as gun violence in schools requires deep consideration and thorough research. It's easy to say that we understand concepts and news better when they are well-researched. But when the research is done and it's time to write an article, what perspective and detail-arrangement is most effective in getting the point across? Is it better to utilize storytelling and imagery, or statistical analysis?
ReplyDeleteIn our readings, there are many different angles taken to the final goal of getting people to understand how awful of an issue that guns in schools really poses. Writers like Alan Prendergast and Charlotte Alter choose the path of narrative-building and storytelling in order to communicate their research, while James Alan Fox & Emma E. Fridel choose to get their points across through statistical analysis.
Prendergast tells a long and detailed story, spending much of his time on telling the story of Eric Harris and how he became the Columbine shooter. Prendergast uses video games, online servers, and social constructs at Harris' school to prove why he committed his crime on April 20, 1999. It's interesting to read 20 years later the narrative that Prendergast built to tell his story, especially given the awful amount of school shootings that have taken place since that day. Although not directly made, the argument that videogames are a cause of school shootings has all but been disproven. It's especially interesting to contemplate given the incredible advancements in graphical technology since the days of Doom, which was originally released in 1993. The narrative of (often anonymous) online evidence has also continued over time, as it feels like for almost every school shooting, there are secret accounts of troubled youth, with comments ranging from not fitting in to active death threats and detailed plans. Social situations at school also continue to personify school shooters- shooters are often portrayed as kids that were bullied as a child through high school, or truants that were never given the proper support in their formative years. These narratives reflect our desire to understand exactly why school shootings happen. For so many people that haven't had to live through their own community being attacked, these occurrences are almost foreign, so putting relatable faces and narratives to these awful acts help us to understand shooters.
I feel that a better use of journalism comes in the form of statistical analysis. It's too often that people humanize school shooters (often white kids) into almost feeling bad for the person that just brought a gun to school. It's dangerous to get too close to these awful people. Statistical analysis, as utilized by Fox & Fridel, is effective in that it helps get exactly to the problem- although they don't necessary cover all bases. How many of these people had mental health issues? Where are they exactly getting their firearms? What experiences more closely correlate with school shootings? In order to make change, we have to rationally understand the issue before getting to the point of talking about these shooters as normal people. It's also a valuable understanding to show the world that although school shootings are nothing to invalidate, there are other issues that plague the country in more dangerous ways. We have to get past the viewpoint that schools are dangerous places for children. Police violence kills about 1,000 people every year, disproportionately people of color, whereas school shootings kill people in the single digits. It's tough to get thorough in a reflection.
-Michael Gorman
I found a few things to be of incredible importance in tonights reading. Before reading today I knew really nothing at all about Columbine (it happened a month before I was born, and I live 15 minutes away from the school). As a general observation, I have always been struck by humans in general— and it seems to be very present with the issue of gun violence— with the need to find answers immediately. This was seen in the coverage of Columbine in the aftermath. As Alan Prendergast notes, the amount of inaccurate reporting that occurred was quite frankly, absurd. The most compelling narratives— the idea that the trench coat mafia was a hate group, etc— all turned out to be false. We jump on board too fast a lot of the time.
ReplyDeleteI find that this could have an impact on a few things. First, it leads us to think that there can be an easy fix or to put it in other words, one cause to an issue. While I wholeheartedly believe that there is nowhere near enough preventative gun control legislation, and there should be little or preferably no access to assault weapons in our country, I doubt that just focusing on gun control will end this epidemic. I thought it was particularly intriguing that Nancy Gibbs and Timothy Roche for Time, inform readers that Eric Harris stated that even if he and Klebold could not get access to guns, they would have found other means. Therefore, what about other issues? What about mental health? How does this relate and affect the issue at hand? And additionally, how come we don’t talk about— as in-depth as we should — the fact that nearly all school shooters are men (not to mention they are mostly all white)?
It is important to find patterns and to research, continuously, searching for something hopeful. At the same time, ‘looking for answers’ should strive to not to overhype, causing fear and anxiety— something that Fox and Friedel allude to. Thankfully we are learning the rules of engaged journalism that seeks to let our communities show us answers rather than trying so hard to find them.
ReplyDeleteWeapons designed to kill have no place in a building intended for learning. So to make sense of the issue, journalists have unknowingly created a timeline of appropriateness starting at a case study level and with time comparing one tragedy to other events through statistical reports.
One problem as reported by Muschert, guiltily admitted by my classmates, and understood by the Columbine shooters is that the facts of the case are often so intriguing that the “why” questions come later than they should. Furthermore, immediately following a tragic event with a round of the blame game hardly seems respectful to a grieving community. However, the separation between factual reporting and the “why” questions contributes to a mirky understanding between guns and schools.
Reporting on the nature of school shootings transforms with time. The articles by Prendergast, Gibbs, and Roche, published immediately after the Columbine shootings, lyrically described the events of Columbine, calling the shooters, “natural born killers,” but failed to address the problems on a macro scale. On the other hand, the Menace and Muschert publications take a look at school shooting trends on a national (and even international) level, but their statistical analysis and categorization act to remove the tragedy of the subject from the numbers. Furthermore, large scale statistics come with the assumption that all school shootings need to be treated as the same issue.
Understanding guns in school, similar to any complex problem, needs to be addressed from many different angles. Neither the articles published immediately after an event or the macro scale reports (or 575-page books) give a comprehensive view of the issue. However, when combined, we can gain a clearer understanding of why gun violence continues to appear month after month on the news.
It’s taken me some time to try to get my thoughts together, and I still don’t think that they completely are. How can we understand guns in schools? As Muschert said, there is a certain aspect to creating a discourse around guns in schools and gun violence in schools. I think of it as a “symptom pool,” a concept sometimes used in public health and medical conversations. Once there is enough discussion about a certain topic, and enough of the details are released, the topic becomes more and more prevalent because people know that it exists and what it entails. There is then a following increase in diagnoses. In the case of gun violence, the mass media reporting on gun violence in schools creates an atmosphere of panic and epidemic (a really interesting word for this scenario...what makes an epidemic?). This idea is similar to Fox and Fridel’s contagion effect. Stories like those from Prendergast and Demczuk provide immense detail as they attempt to explain the scenarios. This detail is embedded into the social consciousness, and permeates the idea that guns in schools are a highly prevalent, priority topic (Fox and Fridel). This concept of building fear and then putting in place often ineffective response strategies gives a false sense of success in terms of addressing the concept. But, I’m still not sure that this answers how we understand guns in schools. Perhaps this is more how we understand the aftermath of gun violence in schools. How we understand guns in schools may be more associated with how we understand shootings, as described by Muschert. The increasing association of school shootings as symbolic terms has a huge effect on how we understand and react. As several authors mentioned about the Sandy Hooks shooting, there are different responses to something when it affects “our” (a phrase often used, and people form individual investments) children, who are young, impressionable, and vulnerable, as opposed to something this is viewed as inevitable and not preventable (Hurricane Sandy, with higher death tolls). The difficulty in understanding guns in schools is finding a way to understand both polar ends: there are the attacks within the school, coming from insiders, which can be sometimes understood through school climate discussions, school support, and safety measures. However, when discussing attacks with schools as symbols, it is much more difficult to understand, other than acknowledging that we have shown as a society how strongly we react to school shootings (and I do not mean to say at all that this reaction is unwarranted -- school shootings are absolutely awful). This reaction, however, may incentivize further shootings and further attacks because of the knowledge that it will strongly affect people.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the only way to understand guns in schools is to ask questions. The questions must be carefully crafted and addressed to the right people. They should not be exclusively dramatic, nor should they probe only the explain or understand. From this, hopefully, we will be able to better position our understanding of these shootings and how to address them.
Understanding the issue of guns in schools seems to fall into two camps – statistics and narratives.
ReplyDeleteIn the wake of tragedy (not tragedy in the modern way we use it, but an event that causes mass suffering) the different angles of what happened come spewing out of the community that has been turned upside-down by loss and media circus. Looking at Columbine specifically, it is so blatantly clear that the local Jefferson County police seemed to let things fall through the cracks on multiple occasions, and that the school had a rather toxic social hierarchy in place. But in the end it wasn’t about the bullies. Klebold and Harris both made it clear in their tapes and in the manner in which they targeted the school as a whole rather than the jocks specifically that this was a matter of what Klebold called his inner rage and the boys’ access to weapons. I understand that talking about the weapons used to hurt so many people is of vital importance, but why aren’t we talking about mental health?
After reading these articles (in the library which was a mistake since I was on the verge of tears more than a few times) looked up typical school shooter drills and how they are executed in schools. There was plenty of information on barricading doors and covering up windows, but I didn’t see much information on how to look for signs of a troubled kid. In every narrative we read, there was some mention of how many people had reported troubling behavior to the police and the school, and so little was done. How English teachers read essays about mass killings and it was looked at as teenage angst. What interests me now is that, with Parkland and Sandy Hook, how can educators be trained to spot signals of violent or unhinged behavior? How can we implement rehabilitation methods rather than punitive ones that simply fuel anger?
Legislation changes would be all well and good but like Harris and Klebold said, if they hadn’t of had guns, they still would have found a way. This fight has to start within our education system. We want to look to the government to solve community based problems, but legislation isn’t enough to stop an unstable individual from hurting and acting on anger in some form or another.
“Individual access to guns is in fact the only necessary cause and the only factor that appears in al school shooting incidents” (Muschert 34).
ReplyDeleteThe concept of guns and schools needs to be analyzed through the lenses of American culture, politics and policy, and emotion and loss. The value placed on owning and having the right to operate firearms is somewhat unique to American culture. That value is deeply rooted in traditional and patriotic symbols of freedom in our country, a value that cannot be ignored when trying to understand the role guns play in our nation, unfortunately including in our schools. The emphasis on the Second Amendment, regardless of its intended meaning when established, plays a major role in shaping the policies of rural American culture that undoubtedly lead to the polls. In his 2018 campaign, Brian Kemp, the newly elected governor of Georgia coined himself on “respect and a healthy appreciation for the Second Amendment,” an Amendment intended for firearms that are unfathomably archaic to even the most amateur of hunters. The emphasis on the right to bear arms impacts policy and the rhetoric surrounding guns in general, but especially when it comes to guns in schools. For example, the NRA’s proposed “School Shield Program” would arm every school in the U.S. with sharpshooters and according to a poll done by the Gallup organization, “nearly two-thirds of Americans see merit in this idea” (Fox 28). The right to bear arms in our country makes it harder for people to desire stricter gun laws, even if they have the possibility to protect the children of our future. The excessive minor and major school shootings in America in the last decade or so have brought up important conversations of increased school security, mental health, as well as a questioning of the need for the Second Amendment. What can sometimes get ignored in the politicized conversation surrounding guns in schools are the families and parents who are too intimately connected to this issue. Their loss and struggle must be at the forefront of this conversation, not as a political tool but as a bipartisan effort for an increased value on real Americans who want and need a solution to this problem. Statistics show that the majority of mass shootings in American schools are carried out by white, middle- or lower-class young males. How to understand guns in schools means we must understand this demographic of person. What Muschert explains as a “rampage shooter” seeking revenge, often characterizes this person in mass shootings that are hyper-publicized, although the vast majority of school shootings are targeted attacks on individuals that don’t get the same press. Understanding the role that guns play in school requires being analytical as we take a holistic look at history, policy, culture, and the role they play in preventing and perpetrating tragedy.
Muschert explained the typical timing of news cycle reporting on mass shootings in his 2013 work. He explained that the first week of the news cycle often consists of a steady stream of stories reporting on the facts of the case. After that first week, media outlets often switch gears and begin their efforts to find the cause of the shooting and figure out how it will play into the now internationally accepted trope of the rampage shooter.
ReplyDeleteThis first week of journalism more closely resembles traditional journalism: news outlets compile facts and distribute them to the public in order to establish a communally accepted truth. The second cycle of journalism bears more similarity to engaged journalism. While this second week of delving deeper into the affected community is presented as a search for the cause of shooting, in reality it merely serves to exacerbate the already unproportionate role that school shootings play in the American psyche. As Muschert explained, “There is a dramatic quality to the coverage of school shootings, and as a theatrical schema would suggest, there is a need to identify a cast of characters”.
This dramatic coverage reinforces the impression that mass school shootings could be a legitimate daily threat for all students across the country. By humanizing the shooters and delving into their stories they become familiar characters, as close as one’s own classmates. As Fox and Fridel emphasized, security has a growing presence in American public schools, further emphasizing the imagined proximity of the threat. Though deep investigative media reporting on school shootings is done in an attempt to assuage fears and come to the root of the problem, in reality it does the opposite. It spreads an inordinate amount of fear throughout the American public and cements the figure of the unbalanced school shooter into the American psyche.
How Can we Understand Guns in Schools?
ReplyDeleteUnderstanding why guns have been brought into schools requires the synthesis of comprehensive knowledge of many situations. It is impossible to have a completely comprehensive model of a school shooting. There are too many factors at play. Studying these occurences as comprehensively as possible is the best tool we have to problem solve.
News articles are often driven by our desire to understand the perpetrator. Journalists attempt to dive into the mind of the shooter, forced to make many assumptions if they're attempting to produce a narrative (Pendergast) (Gibbs and Roche). Looking at just one part of the story, whether that be the "damaged mind" of the shooter, the poisinous school climate, or easy access to guns makes the issue seem simple. To understand guns in schools, we must accept that it is the contribution of a myraid of factors that enable this reality.
o understand guns in schools, we compare incidents and search for patterns. Patterns do come up, but none are reliably true across the aboard except access to a firearm (Muschert). Even in analyses of many shootings and understanding of many factors, questions are left unanswered. Individuals and groups seem to latch onto one core factor that is to blame. This leads to disagreement and debate that distracts from solving the probem.
School shootings are often reported on either by creating a story of human experience or a story of numbers (Fox and Fridel), or sometimes they are intertwined (Alter). There is no consensus on how to report on a school shooting, and maybe there shouldn't be. I find it interesting that we immeditatly thirst for answers in the immediate aftermath of a shooting, but our quest to problem solve always falls flat, and after the initial rush of headlines, people move on. "The columbine effect" was referenced, but obviously if any kind of nonviolent policies were passed following these shootings, it hasn't worked very well, at least on a a national scale.
Guns in schools is obviosuly a complex issue that won't be fully understood in a day, a month, or a year. I think people will always understand it differently, which stalls and inhibits problem solving. I think the best thing we can do for now is study with an open minded view, aware of our lack of understanding and of the complexty of how the factors involve intersect.
Well, I’m not going to try to pretend that I know quite yet how to understand guns in schools. It’s a disturbing topic that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Reading these articles on school shootings, I feel repulsed, but at the same time I can’t take my eyes away. There’s some strange sense of fascination that these episodes of unspeakable violence that arouses incredible attention. Journalists know this, and consequently we are inundated with articles and reports trying to explain, justify, and solve these horrific cases.
ReplyDeleteI find the trend of spikes in school shootings very interesting. Looking at the database of school shooting data, one can see that school shootings are often clustered in a short time frame. Reading the “Menace of School Shootings in America”, I found it very interesting hearing school shootings framed as an “emerging epidemic”. This framing fills us with fear, and also normalizes the issue. I find this phenomenon, of the normalization and panic around school shootings, somewhat counterproductive. As Fox and Friedel note, the fortress approach to schools seems to be somewhat ineffective, and framing school shootings as a “new-normal” may make it appear a viable option to distressed students who are looking to release their frustrations. Further strengthening the normalization of school shootings is what Muschert calls the “media saturation” of today. We have come to view school shootings not only as isolated cases of revenge, but a public ritual. This reminds me of yesterday’s readings. I think it’s important here to remember the journalist’s responsibility to order the issues of society and present them in a solution-driven manner. I don’t think we’re seeing this responsibility taken seriously in the case of school shootings. If we can reorder our coverage of school shootings to explore solutions that can scale, perhaps “longo run, low-key” solutions as Fox and Friedel suggest, perhaps we can begin to understand school shootings better in the future.
In the context of our society, school shootings are often something which people don’t quite understand how to approach.While any sort of violent crime is always devastating, it is expected that minors are supposed to be protected from these cruel and terrifying aspects of the world, and it seems awfully unfair that simply getting the education they need to get by as adults makes them a target. Thus, unlike other violent crimes which happen daily across the country, there seems to be a problem which people are urgent to put an end to. But with such different case-specific incidents occurring nationally, everyone seems to want to go about the issue in different ways.
ReplyDeleteOne issue is the way in which schools may choose to go about this issue. In Alan Prendergast’s Westword Article “Doom Rules”, after the Columbine shooting, any student who stood out or seemed like they fit in to the crowd which the shooters were a part of were all targeted by their school, and given options of transferring or being homeschooled, which some even took. This technique is shown to be ineffective and prejudice against students, yet the hunt for a scapegoat mercilessly continues, because when children die, someone must pay.
What seems to be common now is making it an issue of politics. Rather than blaming the students, students (and those backed behind them) are blaming the guns. In Charlotte Alter’s “The School Shooting Generation Has Had Enough”, students like Emma Gonzales are shown to lead a movement against the government rather than the people, with statements like “Policy and Change instead of Thoughts and Prayers”. While the idea of eliminating the mere possibility of guns in schools in the first place seems like a pretty obvious answer, would it ever be truly possible? Whether you blame the school board or its security, the government’s policy on gun ownership, the students, or even their parents, it seems as though this problem will never be as simple as people are making it out to be and would take serious change in many different aspects in order to be solved.
This is Susie, not anonymous, I had it set to the wrong setting when I posted it.
DeleteW1D3 - Reflection - Isabella McShea
ReplyDeleteWhen the Parkland shooting occurred, students were live-tweeting the devastating event. Viral videos were posted in real time from smartphones to many social media platforms and it became almost impossible to not see information coming straight from the students themselves. From fighting with online trolls about their experiences to shaming their public representatives, Parkland students were able to fight for their voices in a newfound way that greatly contrasts the experience of their Columbine counterparts. In the age of social media, from Tik Tok to Snapchat, it seems that many young people have found an ability to share their thoughts and opinions in new and fascinating ways.
In the Time article “The Columbine Tapes”, Gibbs and Roche methodically explain how the shooting occurred the diabolical plot that was recorded in various videos by Klebold and Harris. One of the most disturbing portions of the article, despite the many bloody and horrific descriptions of violence, was the inability for law enforcement to gather critical information from inside the building and act on those realities. When Evan Todd, a student who was wounded in the library, described to the police officers exactly where students were that needed medical help, his voice was silenced. He noted that “They told me to calm down and take my frustrations elsewhere” and even his information regarding the type of guns being used was not seen as relevant.
From the #MeToo movement centering the stories of sexual violence survivors/victims to the Parkland students using social media to fight for their positions concerning gun violence, social media has surely changed how social movements occur. However, the question of physical safety and the ability for students to communicate logistical information while the shooting was happening is truly a small miracle in comparison to the grim reality of students who could barely reach the 911 call line during the Columbine shooting. It would be interesting and incredibly important to more fully analyze how social media and smartphones help or hinder law enforcement during and live shooter situation within schools in comparison to the pre-smartphone era to understand this on a more quantitative level.