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A high school student opened fire in the school cafeteria in Ohio. Some have died and others are wounded. As every news outlet in the country and across the world quickly reported, this is not the first school shooting in the United States, and the story line is familiar enough that it felt like we were reading the same reports we've read before.
I have not, of course, ever met the alleged shooter. I cannot make any comments at all about his motivations, his reasons, or what ought to be done in this particular case. I say all this up front because I need to be absolutely clear that I am writing in general terms here and not about any specific incident. For me to even make conjectures regarding yesterday's shooting would be unprofessional and irresponsible.
Nevertheless, as often happens when horrible events involve kids, I have been asked about this incident by friends, by family, by co-workers, and by various news outlets. I also have seen that psychiatrists, psychologists, pediatricians, social scientists, educators, and law enforcement officials have all already participated in the national discussion.
This discussion is in and of itself vital. It is equally vital that we have this discussion carefully and with no stones unturned. That doesn't mean we'll make sense of this in a single blog post or even in a series of lengthy debates; it does mean that we have, I believe, an obligation to try to make whatever sense we can of what happened so that we can understand how best to cope. I want to be clear that coming to an understanding is not the same thing as sanctioning. I say this because I have seen comments already around the web suggesting that any attempt to discuss this issue is tantamount to making acceptable excuses for this and similar events.
So let me be clear before I go any further. This post is not about excuses, acceptable or otherwise. It is about a careful, painful discourse that we must undertake in order to move forward in the face of something this horrible.
That's a lot of caveats, and usually the number of caveats in any essay is directly proportional to the affective temperature of that which is being discussed. As more than one person has said already, things will not be the same in Ohio for some time. The same goes for all of the other places where similar shootings have occurred.
That last sentence is a good place to start our discussion. "...all of the other places..."
We need to acknowledge that there have been other shootings in other schools. I don't think it is necessary that these schools be listed in this particular essay; I do think it is necessary that we note, however, that these incidents remain very, very rare. That does not make them OK in any way. Nuclear power-plant dysfunctions are also very rare, but we try our best—we owe it to ourselves to try our best -to understand how they happen.
So, before we embark on our discussion, we should accentuate that these shootings are extremely uncommon, that students are safest overall when they are in school, and that acts of overt violence (shootings, physical altercations and assault) and covert violence (intimidation, threats, poverty and perceived hopelessness) are much more common outside of schools and are much more common in impoverished urban and rural settings. In fact, part of what makes us take note of stories like the one yesterday is our implicit understanding of this very observation. Schools are supposed to be safe, and by and large they are safe. When schools fail to be safe, especially when that lack of safety occurs at the hands of an armed student, we dizzily question the rules and conditions under which we send our kids to school in the first place. That's why a suburban school shooting makes the news and the exponentially higher number of teens shot and injured and killed outside of their schools often does not float to the top of the headlines.
I do not intend to discuss here what some may see as an obvious issue. I don't think we have the evidence to say that violent media is a definitive driving force towards these events. This is itself a highly controversial issue, and screening for those who watch or engage in violent entertainment is even more problematic than screening for the characteristics that researchers have identified as common among school shooters. The question of whether the violence in our entertainment is culpable is not the subject of this essay. Instead, I'd like to focus on what we know, with some degree of certainty, with regard to school shooting incidents.
What are the characteristics of school schooters? Retrospectively, the profile of school shooters is generally pretty consistent. School shooters are more isolative, more withdrawn, and perhaps more bullied (though the definitions for "bullying" are themselves many and controversial). We also know that school shooters are almost exclusively male.
Nevertheless, it is not clear how helpful these relatively stable profiles are. There is not solid evidence that all school shooters are or have been bullied. The very ambiguity of the definition of bullying also makes it difficult to say when bullying itself is occurring. That's not to say that we shouldn't try to stop bullying. Of course we should. But we should also note that not everyone who is bullied responds violently or even negatively. It doesn't make bullying OK at all to know this. Knowing this, however, prevents us from the misconception that all school shooting incidents are bullying related. In some ways, that's a way over-simplified explanation.
An important point—one so obvious that it often goes unmentioned—involves the act of shooting itself. School shooters must have access to a gun. As with the topic of violence in media, I don't intend to argue here the merits or lack of merits to our current safeguards with regard to firearms. I know I saw more guns when I was growing up than my kids see now. Many of the families I knew when I was a kid were avid hunters; it wasn't uncommon to see a parent teaching the kids how to clean and shoot a firearm. I also am familiar with the argument that if a kid wants a gun, a kid will find a gun. I don't know that this is true, but I very much hope that readers do not use what I am writing here to infer my thoughts or politics with regard to gun control. I am simply noting that among the risk factors for school shooters, an important common feature is the acquisition of a gun. Whether we ought to or want to do something to change that fact is again the subject of a different essay.
Most importantly, we can say that an awful lot of kids match these risk factors. That means that the overwhelming vast majority of isolative, withdrawn and perhaps bullied boys will not ever shoot or harm anyone.
That's an immensely important point. If we try, prospectively, to identify kids at risk for shooting others at school, we'll gather an intolerable, inefficient and essentially useless number of false positives.
However, it also seems to me that if we try to identify kids based on these risk factors with an eye towards offering support (as opposed to pursuing the sole goal of preventing another school shooting), then that endeavor by itself would be a very good thing. There have been attempts and inspiring successes at screening for all kinds of psychological suffering in schools. Alternatively, there have also been highly placed political figures who have argued that this kind of screening is best left out of the public sphere. As long as we have this ongoing disagreement about who is most or even somewhat responsible for noting when our kids suffer, we run the risk of failing to recognize all those who do suffer. I am comfortable standing by that statement. Thus, while screening for potential school shooters might not be useful, screening for kids who suffer has been shown through many investigations to be worthwhile, important, and I believe ethically expected in an enlightened society such as ours.
As an aside, we should also note that in addition to political objections, what often stops these attempts at screening is a lack of availability among those who care professionally for children. Many schools have noted that more comprehensive screening is frustratingly challenged by the stark fact that it is not at all clear to whom we ought to turn for help when suffering kids are identified. These limitations can help us to understand why schools, school boards, and communities might seem reluctant to take responsibility for identifying kids who need help.
Here's something we know for sure, and probably therefore constitutes the most important point of this national discussion:
A teen's sense of belonging to a community, like a high school, directly correlates with a teen's hugely decreased likelihood of doing or contemplating doing harm to that very community. In other words, if a kid feels like he or she belongs, then he or she will be a part, positively, of belonging. We're pack animals, and the pull towards positive socialization is profound and deeply ingrained. That fact, a biological reality, might explain why kids who sense that they don't belong can become so despondent so quickly. Add to this the developmental task of identity formation that takes place in our culture during adolescence, and it is fair to say that the last thing we want is for a kid to identify him or herself as the outcast. I am not talking about a kind of forced conformity here. I am talking about the very complex task that families, schools and communities have of making sure kids, especially, have a valued place in their worlds.
Please, I'm really begging here. Do not misread what I am saying or misrepresent my emphasis. I have no way of knowing anything regarding any of these issues about any of the schools where these shootings have taken place. I don't for a second mean to suggest that any school has somehow failed in this difficult task. I know only that what we understand about schools and kids accentuates the fact that building a carefully crafted and accepting environment is the most deceptively complicated and yet likely the best step we can continue to work towards as we wrestle, again, as we are doing today, with these awful events.
