For starters, experts suggest, get the kids back into school. Routines matter in the raw aftermath of trauma.

Child health experts say the shooting that killed a mother and wounded several children at the close of Kansas City’s celebration of the Chiefs’ latest championship likely left kids traumatized. Whether they were near Union Station or, for some, just hearing the news.

Schools quickly made social workers and counselors available Thursday and put out advice to parents on how to help children return to a sense of normalcy and safety.

Some children, the experts say, need to talk about their concerns. That, the experts say, needs to be balanced against dwelling too much on what happened or trying to force conversations that could go wrong.

Wednesday’s violence came after clinicians saw a troubling mental health hangover from the pandemic.

“Rates of anxiety and depression doubled for young people,” said Dr. Shayla Sullivant, a child and adolescent psychiatrist with Children’s Mercy Hospital. “Now we have more kids that have experienced trauma.”

Multiple school districts told The Beacon that they’re turning to what’s familiar — like going right back to school — to help restore calm after a calamity.

When disaster strikes, “it comes from a place that we didn’t expect, and we don’t know how to deal with that,” said David Smith, a spokesperson for the Shawnee Mission School District. “Being able to connect people, kids, to the familiar, to the routine, can be helpful and give them a comfort that the world is returning to the world that they know and (where) they feel safe.”

Adults matter, too. Parents and teachers, Smith said, need to recognize and seek support for their own distress “in order for us to be there for our kids.”

The shooting marked a “community-level trauma,” said Damon Daniel, president of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, even in a city that saw a record 182 homicides last year.

“We live in a city where we’re not strangers to violence,” he said.

His group worked with prosecutors and other organizations to offer counseling on Thursday at the Kansas City United Church of Christ in Brookside. He said it’s time to talk with professionals and not to lean on isolation, substance abuse or more violence to cope.

“It’s a very complex problem. It’s not one solution,” Daniel said. “There’s no silver bullet to this.”

For starters, public places might never feel the same to some people after the Union Station shooting. Chris Williams, a counselor with Heartland Therapy Connection, said teenagers and young adults might be particularly damaged by the trauma.

“There are no public places they can look at and be, like, ‘I’m safe here,’” he said. “More and more children are on guard, looking out.”

He said survivors can experience extreme post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, such as paranoia or fear of loud noises, and will look to adults for assurance.

“We’re losing that ability to tell them it’s gonna be OK,” Williams said. “There are no safe spaces.”

Kansas City Public Schools Superintendent Jennifer Collier emailed parents urging them to address the trauma directly.

“While our instinct may be to shield them from the harsh realities of the world,” she wrote, “it’s essential to proactively address their concerns, especially with our older students who are more likely to seek information independently.”

The district was still sorting out Thursday how many students were close to the shooting even as it suggested parents limit their children’s exposure to news coverage.

Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools also enlisted counselors and social workers and told parents that their kids need someone to turn to.

“People deal with pain and tragedy differently,” district spokesperson Edwin Birch said. “The main thing is just being available.”

At Wichita’s USD 259, the largest school district in Kansas, administrators strove to return to the routine.

“Children are pretty quick to move on to the next thing,” said Stephanie Anderson, who works in the district’s counseling services. “They don’t dwell on stuff like this, unless they hear adults dwelling on it.”

That, she said, needs to be paired with candor.

“(Don’t) sugarcoat it or don’t create fear,” Anderson said.

She and other experts suggest parents look for routines breaking down in the aftermath of the Super Bowl parade. Is your child having trouble sleeping? Has their appetite dwindled? Are they crankier than usual?

An adult’s ear can prove especially helpful, said , a clinical psychologist specializing in children and adolescents at Laurel School’s Center for Research on Girls in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

She said trusted adults — family, mental health professionals, school staff — need to be available. Cordiano said younger children may prefer to process their emotions about the parade shooting through art, and older children will need someone to confide in.

“When they have those places to talk,” Cordiano said, “it can help them cope.”

The more comfortable kids feel to talk, she said, the better to keep them grounded and feeling safe.

“When we shut it down,” she said, “it makes it too big or scary.”

Yet exposure to leaves some psyches damaged for a lifetime. Starsky Wilson, president of the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund, said gun violence can heighten children’s risk of abusing drugs and alcohol or weigh them down with depression and anxiety.

“The normalization of gun violence in society can desensitize children to the impact of violence and contribute to a sense of helplessness or resignation about the problem,” he said in an email to The Beacon.

Wilson said, in turn, that can make it harder to feel secure, form relationships or thrive in school.

“When exposed to violence,” he wrote, “school-aged children tend to exhibit lower academic grades and increased absenteeism.”

This story was compiled by Scott Canon based on staff reporting. Suzanne King contributed.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Following a late Monday night shooting that killed three Michigan State University students and injured five more — mere miles from the state’s Capital of Lansing — Democratic lawmakers are vowing to deliver more than empty words in order to prevent another tragedy.

“F—k your thoughts and prayers,” reads the opening line of a late-night from House Majority Whip Ranjeev Puri (D-Canton).

“ … Thoughts and prayers without action and change are meaningless. Our office will continue to work tirelessly to pass common sense gun reform immediately. We will not stop until our students can attend school without fear, our communities can attend places of worship in peace, and our society is safe from senseless gun violence.”

State Rep. Kelly Breen (D-Novi) echoed Puri’s sentiments in a , writing: “Policy & change. F—k your thoughts and prayers. I will not mince words.”

Democrats hold slim majorities in both the House and Senate. For the first time in about 40 years, they have a governing trifecta along with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and have vowed to take action on gun control measures that have long stalled in Michigan, such as safe storage and so-called “red flag” laws.

The gunman, Anthony McRae, who police said is not affiliated with the university, opened fire in MSU’s Berkey Hall at 8:18 p.m. Two students were killed there.

The suspect then moved next door to the MSU student union and opened fire again, where another student was killed.

MSU Police on Tuesday afternoon  the names of the three students killed: Brian Fraser, a sophomore from Grosse Pointe, Alexandria Verner, a junior from Clawson, and Arielle Anderson, a sophomore from Harper Woods.*

Five more injured victims — all students — are still in critical condition as of Tuesday morning, and four have required surgical  at Lansing’s Sparrow Hospital.

MSU classes are canceled until Monday, Feb. 20.

“I am angry that the safety and security of Michigan State University has been shattered by the uniquely American scourge of gun violence,” said House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit), who graduated from MSU.

“ … This is not a new phenomenon, and the people who elected us to help lead the state have no patience for inaction. … We have a choice. We can continue to debate the reasons for gun violence in America, or we can act. We cannot continue to do the same thing over and over again and hope for a different outcome,” Tate said.

There have so far been  nationwide in the first 45 days of 2023 alone.

McRae, 43, was found by law enforcement roughly three hours after the shooting in East Lansing. After being confronted, police  he fatally shot himself.

Whitmer, an MSU alum who ordered U.S. and Michigan flags across the state to be lowered to half-staff until further notice on Tuesday, said in statements Tuesday morning that “the whole state of Michigan is wrapping its arms around the Spartan community today.”

“This is a uniquely American problem. Too many of us scan rooms for exits when we enter them. We plan who that last text or call would go to. We should not, we cannot, accept living like this,” Whitmer said.

She and U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Lansing) spoke at the MSU police briefing Tuesday morning. 

Law enforcement have so far not been able to find a motive for the shooting. According to the Detroit News, McRae was  with multiple gun-related crimes in 2019.

Attorney General Dana Nessel has twin sons who attend MSU. She told CNN on Tuesday that one of them had just left one of the locations on campus shortly before shots were fired.

“As a parent, there is no greater fear than having your child tell you there is an active shooter at their school. I experienced this terror along with thousands of other MSU families last night,” Nessel said in a statement. “While my Spartan sons are safe, I am mourning the devastating loss and senseless violence.  The events at Michigan State University are a tragedy for the entire state of Michigan. My thoughts are with the victims, their families, friends, and loved ones.”

Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) also has a child who attends MSU.

“As the mom of an MSU student, I’m watching with dread as the events on and around campus are unfolding, so grateful and relieved my daughter is answering my texts and calls. My heart is breaking for the parents whose children have been injured or killed,” Brinks .

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten and David Hecker, AFT Michigan president, demanded that politicians take immediate action on gun control.

“The tragedy at Michigan State demands immediate action from our state and federal lawmakers,” Weingarten and Hecker said in a joint statement. “We cannot become numb and accept this violence as normal. We cannot allow politics to hold us back from acting. Too many lives have been taken because of gun violence and too little has been done. Our elected officials need to act and push through common sense gun violence prevention legislation that will save lives.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Lansing) and groups including Michigan Education Association (MEA), MSU Administrative Professionals Association, Campaign for a Safer Michigan, Detroit Action, Michigan Health & Hospital Association (MHA), Progress Michigan and more.

Mitchell Robinson, a Democratic member of the State Board of Education in Michigan,  that his two sons were on campus when the shooting began; one was in the Union and heard the shots. Robinson said both of his sons are safe.

President Joe Biden’s press secretary said on Twitter that Biden  with Whitmer Monday night following the shooting. Whitmer also confirmed that at the press conference Tuesday morning.

“Last night, I spoke to Governor Whitmer and directed the deployment of all necessary federal law enforcement to support local and state response efforts. I assured her that we would continue to provide the resources and support needed in the weeks ahead,” Biden said in a statement later on Tuesday.

” … As I said in my State of the Union address last week, Congress must do something and enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, closing loopholes in our background check system, requiring safe storage of guns, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets. Action is what we owe to those grieving today in Michigan and across America,” Biden continued.*

Republicans, now in the minority in the Michigan Legislature, also offered some words of support for victims but did not offer plans of action.

“Today, we are all Spartans,” reads the lone statement from the House GOP caucus on Twitter.

State Sens. Aric  (R-Porter Twp.) and Mark  (R-Walker) issued statements of their own, with Nesbitt writing that “parents and community leaders [are] desperately searching for ways to prevent these senseless attacks on the innocent.”

Some Republicans in Congress also responded.

U.S. Sen. Lisa McClain (R-Romeo) also  that she is “heartbroken” and is praying for the MSU community and families affected.

“This culture of violence and murder must stop,”  U.S. Rep. John James (R-Farmington Hills).

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In June, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which, although limited in scope, offers the most significant federal firearm rules in nearly three decades. Still, Newtown parents are faced with a harrowing reality: while mass school shootings remain statistically rare and campuses have become safer in recent decades, active mass shootings — where gunmen open fire indiscriminately in populated areas and kill four or more people — have become more frequent and more fatal in the years since Sandy Hook, the deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history.

Mass Shootings Since Newtown

We set out to document the toll as firearm deaths — including those from suicides, assaults and accidents — become the among U.S. children. Between the Sandy Hook tragedy and the law’s passage, we found that such active shootings resulted in at least 490 deaths and 1,293 injuries, according to an analysis of data compiled by and the . 

There is no universal definition of mass shootings, with some trackers using looser guidelines than those employed here. Taking a cue from The Violence Project, the map reflects parameters employed by the nonpartisan . 

A Texas House committee released a 77-page Sunday on the Uvalde school shooting, concluding that allowed an 18-year-old gunman to enter Robb Elementary School May 24 and kill 19 children and two teachers. The report, described as the most exhaustive account of the tragedy, cited a disorganized, chaotic law enforcement response crippled by an across-the-board leadership failure, multiple missed warning signs about the shooter’s propensity for deadly violence and a lax atmosphere toward security at the school that had developed over time.

Shortly after Texas news outlets published raw footage of the recent mass school shooting in Uvalde — and of police officers’ gut-wrenching delay in taking out the gunman — shady corners of the internet became a haven for new conspiracy theories. 

On 4Chan, the fringe chat board that’s notorious for hosting extremist content, users insisted the 82 minutes of school surveillance camera footage of the May 24 shooting, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers, was staged. Rather than depicting one of the deadliest mass school shootings in U.S. history, forum users claimed the heavily armed officers seen milling about were either “crisis actors” or simply participants in a harmless training exercise.

“I didn’t see anyone get shot,” one user commented.

“Saw a lot of police standing around during a live shooter training exercise though,” another said.

The footage jointly released by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper and KVUE TV briefly features the 18-year-old suspect as he walks unimpeded into the school and the piercing sounds of gunfire, but is mostly focused on police standing back in the brightly painted hallway. The news outlets chose to edit out the children’s screams and nobody is shown getting shot on frame, details that quickly became fodder for conspiracy theorists, including one who dubbed it propaganda promoting “DEMOCRAP GUNGRABBING.”

Ever since news outlets released the footage this week inside Robb Elementary School, the small community west of San Antonio has endured a new round of trauma and turbulence. Anger once again focused on the failed police response, as the footage showed how officers with rifles and protective shields idled for more than an hour before confronting the killer, one casually sanitizing his hands from a wall dispenser.

 Yet for many, the publication itself became the focus of fury. 

While some experts saw the images as critical to holding police accountable, some Texas officials criticized the news outlets for their decision. Uvalde residents, particularly the victims’ families, said releasing the video publicly, before they were scheduled to see it privately first, was re-traumatizing. 

“Who in the hell do these people think they are?” Angel Garza, whose daughter Amerie was killed, said on CNN. “You want to go ahead and air their final moments to the entire world. What makes you think that’s OK? The least you can do is have some freaking decency for us.” 

Meanwhile, researchers who study school shootings and online extremism warned the footage would likely have intense preoccupation in fringe online communities, including those that advocate real-world violence. The video’s release has opened a debate about whether it serves any utility for the general public and has left some experts concerned that the footage could become useful for someone planning the next fatal attack. 

The Uvalde shooting “will have tremendous fascination for a certain segment of the population,” said psychologist Peter Langman, who has spent decades . Time and again, his research has shown, perpetrators study and emulate the behaviors and tactics of previous gunmen. 

In , the Department of Homeland Security warned that online forums dedicated to the glorification of domestic extremist violence have been flooded with posts urging copycat attacks in the wake of Uvalde. Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2018 , and federal law enforcement officials have warned that fringe online forums are being leveraged to radicalize young, violent extremists. Some have seized on the attack “to spread disinformation and incite grievances, including claims it was a government-staged event meant to advance gun control measures,” the threat bulletin warned. 

Violent videos are often presented online as memes or jokes and aren’t inherently harmful, said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communication at American University and a faculty fellow with the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. But such jokes, he said, can serve to radicalize. 

“Kids and young people, they have a technological capacity that people who are older never had,” he told ����Ӱ��. “The problem is that they don’t have the media literacy skills to distinguish what’s a joke and what’s a call to action.”

A compulsive interest with mass shootings in fringe online communities traces back to the 1999 Columbine High School attack in suburban Denver, which has been repeatedly cited by the shooters in subsequent attacks. In online communities, so-called “Columbiners” mull over every detail of the infamous shooting, sharing a vast photo and video archive of the high school gunmen. That includes haunting surveillance video footage from inside the school cafeteria. 

“There’s a whole phenomenon of Columbiners, people who are obsessed with every aspect of Columbine and track down every photo they can find of the perpetrators and post them on websites,” said Langman. Because so many people were killed in Uvalde, he said a similar warped pursuit could emerge with the Texas massacre. Intellectual curiosity has driven some people to become obsessed with Columbine and subsequent attacks, Langman said, and others have developed romantic infatuations with the perpetrators. Meanwhile, he said a segment of the community is motivated by the desire for violence. 

 “Most of the people fascinated with these attacks are not aspiring killers but some of them are likely to be eventual killers and that’s where the potential danger is.” 

‘Too graphic’

Surveillance video footage depicting the mayhem inside a school during a shooting is rarely released publicly. Beyond footage of the Columbine cafeteria, a limited selection of videos were made public after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida. But none were as extensive as the footage released in Uvalde, experts said. 

The video was published Tuesday by the Texas news outlets nearly a week before state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican leading a legislative investigation into the shooting, had planned to show the video to victims’ families in a private screening before releasing it publicly alongside the probe’s preliminary findings. In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Burrows said he is “glad that a small portion is now available for the public,” which deserves to see police officers’ response to the shooting, but expressed disappointment that victims’ families were unable to see it first. Meanwhile, efforts to withhold certain images and audio of the violence, he said, “were not achieved.”

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin , calling the media outlets’ decision to publish the video “one of the most chicken things I’ve ever seen.” 

In , the Austin newspaper explained that its decision came after “long and thoughtful discussions,” and was done to provide clarity about what happened inside the school after weeks of confusion and repeated misinformation. The newspaper blurred the face of a student who appears momentarily at the beginning of the video and omitted the sounds of children screaming as the gunman entered their fourth grade classroom, a detail they deemed “too graphic.” Editors ultimately chose, however, to show the face of the gunman as he entered the school undeterred.

“Our news organization guidelines state that we should not glorify these individuals and give them the notoriety that they seek,” the paper said in the op-ed. “We chose, in this instance, to show his face to chisel away at any conspiracy that we are hiding something.” 

Such conspiracy theories had already become widespread in online forums, including 4Chan. In one online forum dedicated to mass shootings, users compared the Uvalde suspect to the perpetrator who carried out the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, commenting on their physical and strategic similarities. The forum, whose previous users have included multiple mass shooters, including the Newtown gunman, was flooded with screenshots of the Uvalde suspect’s social media posts. 

Since the Columbine shooting, standard law enforcement procedures have called on officers to respond to threats immediately even at risk of their own lives, said campus security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security services. The hallway video from Uvalde, he said, is critical to hold police accountable for their hour-long delay before confronting the gunman. There’d be reason to withhold footage that depicts the gunman killing children, he wrote in an email, but not of officers in the hallway. That footage, he said, made clear that police lacked a coordinated response during the mayhem. 

“That is fair game for public scrutiny especially given the conflicting accounts and finger pointing by public officials,” Trump said. “There are questions about accountability and you cannot have accountability without transparency.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and a leading proponent of tighter gun control measures, also sees utility in the video. In an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC, Murphy said it clearly dispels a common right-wing talking point that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is good guys with a gun.” 

“If one teenager with a high-powered weapon is so scary as to prevent all of those highly trained adults from going in and saving lives, maybe we should try to stop those teenagers from having those kinds of guns in the first place,” Murphy said. “Because clearly, we never have enough good guys with guns. We can never have enough high-powered weapons in the hands of law enforcement to stop an assailant if we couldn’t get that job done given what we have seen on the tapes in Uvalde.”

Yet for all its persuasive power, Murphy noted the traumatizing nature of the footage, saying “I don’t recommend that people watch it.”

A right to know? 

For years to come, the hallway video will serve as a mass-shooting training tool for police, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. And given the intense scrutiny of the officers’ response, she said “the only way to set the record straight is to release this video.”

“The footage is so damning,” she said. “You had officers sitting there on their phones, you had an officer who was not only on his phone but then went and sanitized his hands. It’s incredibly problematic.”

Several officers can be seen checking their phones during the long standoff in the hallway, although a clarified that one who had come under particular attack was Uvalde school police Officer Ruben Ruiz, whose wife, Eva Mireles, had called her husband to tell him she had been shot inside the classroom. Mireles and her co-teacher, Irma Garcia, were both killed protecting their students.

Schildkraut said the video has limited value in the public domain, and could actually be harmful for the families of the victims who will be forced to relive the tragedy for the rest of their lives. They should have been given a say about the video’s public release, she argued, while noting the footage could fall into the wrong hands.��

“There’s going to be people who come up with conspiracy theories and then go harass the families because that’s what they did in Sandy Hook and they’ve done elsewhere,” she said. “This could end up on the dark web and people could idolize this individual even more. What public value does it add?”

After the Sandy Hook shooting, conspiracy theorists flooded the internet with claims the tragedy was a “false flag.” Last year, conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones in a defamation lawsuit by victims’ families for his repeated claims that the shooting was a hoax. 

A similar debate over the public’s right to know key details also followed the Columbine shooting, Langman said. Extensive footage has become publicly available, including the cafeteria surveillance video and other homemade videos created by the perpetrators. But some were never publicized, most notably the “basement tapes,” which reportedly included some four hours of film that offer a window into the motives and plans of the perpetrators just weeks before they carried out the attack. The tapes were due to concerns they could inspire more violence. 

American University’s Braddock said the Uvalde hallway video presents a catch-22. Transparency around the police response is important, he said, but it also offers a wealth of material to online circles of people with morbid curiosities or worse

“It’s so easy to turn the images from that video into memes that can circulate within these circles online, and those can serve to build other little communities of would-be mass shooters,” he said.

WASHINGTON — Survivors of two mass shootings in New York and Texas will appear before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee on Wednesday to relate their experiences. (Watch live here after 10 a.m. ET)

The witnesses will include fourth grader Miah Cerrillo of Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were gunned down at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Her in order to appear dead to the 18-year-old gunman has gripped Americans, including lawmakers. 

Felix and Kimberly Rubio, parents of Lexi Rubio, in the mass shooting, will also speak before lawmakers.

Zeneta Everhart, a survivor of a mass shooting May 14 by a white supremacist in Buffalo, New York, will also testify. , Zaire Goodman, who was shot in the neck.

The hearing will be live-streamed here.��

“Our hearing will examine the terrible impact of gun violence and the urgent need to rein in the weapons of war used to perpetrate these crimes,” Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said in a statement.

“It is my hope that all my colleagues will listen with an open heart as gun violence survivors and loved ones recount one of the darkest days of their lives,” Maloney said. “This hearing is ultimately about saving lives, and I hope it will galvanize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation to do just that.”

Firearm related injuries are now the for children and adolescents in the United States, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The House Judiciary Committee held an emergency meeting Thursday to mark up a legislative package that contains eight bills related to gun control. President Joe Biden also and urged Congress to move forward on passing gun control legislation. 

The hearing will be broken into two panels of witnesses. The first panel includes survivors and victims of gun violence, and the second panel will be made up of gun safety advocates, experts and law enforcement.

The only pediatrician in Uvalde, Dr. Roy Guerrero, , will testify. 

The second panel will include Greg Jackson Jr., the executive director of the Community Justice Action Fund, which advocates to end gun violence; Joseph Gramaglia, a police commissioner in Buffalo; Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, a labor union representing public school teachers and staff; and Nick Suplina, the senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization that advocates for gun control formed a year after the Sandy Hook mass school shooting. 

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“It doesn’t feel safe going to school,” said Joshua Oh, a rising ninth grader from Gambrills, Maryland.

“Even if you … don’t go to the school where the shooting happened, it’s still something that’s in the back of your head,” said Mahbuba Sumiya, who grew up in Detroit and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

On Monday evening, ����Ӱ�� convened members of its Student Council to speak about the ripple effects of the tragic event on their own school communities and to share their thoughts on the issue of gun safety more broadly. Several young people relayed anecdotes illustrating that fear and worry spurred by the shooting reverberate far beyond Texas.

Ameera Eshtewi attends an Islamic private high school in Portland, Oregon. In May alone, there have been multiple Islamophobic attacks on mosques in her community, she said. Those events plus the Texas shooting made it hard for her not to imagine the worst at her school.

“Thinking that someone could go into an elementary school and murder so many kids and then they could hear about our school, and on top of that we’re Muslim … they could easily come in and do the same,” she said. “I felt terrified.”

At Devin Walton’s high school in South Torrance, California, the ninth grader began to anxiously take account of safety measures in a way he never had before. He noticed the location of school security officers, surveillance cameras, the locks on the door. He began to imagine how, if an intruder were to enter his classroom, he could use the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall as a possible weapon to defend himself.

“After hearing about this school shooting, I’ve started to consider to myself, like, ‘Am I safe enough at my school?’” he said.

For Maxwell Surprenant, a high school senior in Needham, Massachusetts, an otherwise innocuous task became clouded by worry. The day after the shooting, he was helping carry supplies outside for a pre-graduation ceremony. Having read the news that the Uvalde shooter entered through a side door propped open by a teacher, he couldn’t avoid a creeping thought.

“I was looking at some of the doors and wondering, all it takes is for one of these to be left open one day,” he told ����Ӱ�� in a phone call separate from the group meeting. 

“This shouldn’t be something that we should be concerned about,” added Sumiya, who noted that gun possession was common among her peers in high school to protect themselves from street violence, striking fear in her heart and rendering learning nearly impossible. 

“We’re going to school to get the education that we need. Why is our safety and our life on the verge of, like, you never know what can happen?”

With March For Our Lives youth organizers planning a in Washington, D.C. to demand universal background checks, students agreed that school safety and the prevention of shootings is one of the major issues on the minds of young people today.

“It’s such an important issue to us, to this generation, particularly because this generation, Gen Z, has really experienced it,” said Diego Camacho, a high school senior in Los Angeles, California.

School shootings have over the past decade. Excluding 2020 when schools were largely remote, there has not been a full calendar year since 2018 — the year of the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that galvanized the March For Our Lives movement — with fewer than 27 classroom attacks. The highest annual tally before that, spanning from 1999 to 2017, was 16 school shootings. Through only five months this year, there have already been 24.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to hearing about events that are as terrifying and heart wrenching as school shootings with such regularity and needing to continue going about their lives, expressed students. It’s weird, said Oh, that when a school shooting happens, it almost feels like a “normal event.”

“I felt a little numb,” added Eshtewi. “I was angry that I felt numb because this shouldn’t be something normal.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six educators. 

In the days after the shooting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to and ban military-style firearms, including a mandatory buy back program set to begin at the end of the year. Meanwhile, after visiting with survivors and families of victims in Uvalde, Texas, U.S. President Joe Biden said policy changes such as background check requirements or assault weapon bans , which remains gridlocked on the issue.

But while Washington stands still, students are mulling what they think should be the path forward. The Uvalde shooting, said Suprenant, spurred meaningful conversations within his friend group, which spans the full political spectrum.

The high school seniors thought about the stark difference between the requirements for gun ownership and for driving a car—both activities that can pose a deadly threat to oneself and others. To earn a driver’s license, young people must first take a permit test, complete a driver’s education course and log a specified number of training hours, the teenagers observed, but no comparable preparations are required to purchase a gun in this country.

The accused shooter, who didn’t have , crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. A week earlier, he was able to legally purchase two AR-15-style rifles, according to authorities.

“It’s just common sense to all of us that the process should be longer in terms of obtaining a weapon,” said Surprenant. 

The accused shooter crashed his grandparents’ car before opening fire at Robb Elementary, authorities said. His grandfather that his grandson, who legally purchased two AR-15-style rifles last month, didn’t have a driver’s license.

Sumiya agreed that gun control measures are overdue, but also pointed to deeper issues like poverty and housing insecurity, which she thinks played into the high crime rates where she grew up.

“What [are] the underlying concerns making someone go out of their way and then buy a gun?” she wondered. Teachers should be raising those questions and “talking about issues like that in the classroom setting.”

Surprenant offered advice to educators looking to facilitate dialogue on gun safety: Give students access to resources through which to inform themselves, but then “encourage kids coming up with their own solutions.”

With little to show for the efforts of adult policymakers to advance gun safety measures, Eshtewi understands that young leaders may have to pick up the torch. That frustrates her, but she sees no other choice.

“With any issue I remind myself, if not us, then who?” said the high school junior.

This story was brought to you via ����Ӱ��’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, which resulted in the deaths of at least 19 children and two teachers, unfolded just 10 days after the nation was shocked by a mass shooting that left 10 people dead at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. 

It could be more than a coincidence: A growing body of research suggests these assaults have a tendency to spread like a viral disease. A research theory called the contagion effect suggests that mass shootings often happen in clusters, with intense media coverage playing a significant role in subsequent attacks. About a dozen studies, dating to the 1970s, suggest this is the case.

The U.S. has experienced 16 mass shootings in just 10 days, including the carnage in Buffalo and Uvalde. That’s according to , which tracks shootings that result in at least four injuries or deaths. So far this year, the U.S. has endured 212 mass shootings in which four or more people were shot or killed, according to the archive. 

The tragedy in Texas has reignited the country’s divisive and cyclical debate over gun laws, with President Joe Biden asking in an emotional White House address Tuesday night, “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”

Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York Oswego, said shooters are often motivated by a desire for fame. She’s a proponent of the “, which urges media outlets to limit the frequency with which they publish a shooting suspect’s name and photograph.

Attackers “want people to know who they are, they want their name recognition, and so when we remove that incentive and we don’t report their names, we aren’t rewarding people for killing other people by making them celebrities,” Schildkraut said. “It’s also removing the incentive for other like-minded individuals who may be seeing the amount of coverage that a case is getting and want similar attention.”

A day after the May 14 Buffalo supermarket assault, four people were killed and 23 were injured in five mass shootings: two in Texas, two in North Carolina and one in California. In one incident, a at a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, California, resulting in one death and five injuries. In another, two people were killed and three injured after in Houston. More recently, on Monday, in a shooting at a club in North Charleston, South Carolina. 

While the Buffalo and Uvalde suspects are both 18-year-old men, a motive for the Texas school shooting remains unknown, as does the degree to which the perpetrator studied or was inspired by the incident in upstate New York or elsewhere. But Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, noted that the Texas suspect was active on social media and reportedly outlined plans on Facebook prior to the attack. The suspect and communicated with a stranger online before the shooting, offering a cryptic message about what would soon unfold. Lankford said the suspect appeared to portray himself “as a mysterious, dangerous man who might do something like this.” 

“He was dancing around the possibility that seemed likely that he would do something dramatic, perhaps dangerous, and perhaps a mass shooting,” Lankford said. “You can only dance around or imply that in a culture in which people are aware that young men with firearms too often do that.”

The Uvalde shooting was the deadliest attack on a school since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators. 

In one 2015 study on the contagion effect, researchers at Arizona State University found a in the immediate aftermath of a similar attack with four or more victims. A second incident was statistically more likely to occur within 13 days, on average, researchers found.

Yet a similar contagion effect doesn’t appear to exist in the wake of attacks with just a few victims, “possibly indicating that the much higher frequency of such events compared with mass killings and school shootings reduces their relative sensationalism, and thus reduces their contagiousness,” according to the researchers.  

So far this year, 27 shootings at K-12 schools have resulted in 67 injuries or deaths, according to , which has tracked such attacks since 2018. Prior to the shooting in Uvalde, the most recent campus attack unfolded just last week in Kentwood, Michigan. In that May 19 tragedy, after a Crossroads Alternative High School graduation ceremony.

In recent years, mass shootings in the U.S. have become “substantially more deadly over time,” by Lankford. Shooters often take inspiration from previous attacks and apply the lessons learned to their own. In fact, the number of mass shootings where eight or more people were killed since 2010, compared with the previous four decades.

The number of shooters who were inspired by previous attackers has also doubled, Lankford found. Between 1966 and 2009, a quarter of the deadliest shootings were perpetrated by someone who directly cited, referenced or studied a previous mass killer. Such direct influence was observed in half of the deadliest shootings between 2010 and 2019. 

Older attacks seem to have a stronger direct influence than more recent events, Lankford said. The Buffalo suspect, for example, reportedly referenced the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in writing. Lankford noted that mass shooters often conduct extensive research and planning before carrying out their attacks and are unlikely to act impulsively after learning about the most recent shooting on the news. Rather, at-risk individuals who have already been considering violence could see the latest headline and decide that now is the time to act. 

The rise of social media, Lankford said, has helped researchers understand how transmission occurs. 

“We’re increasingly able to study the social media and internet searches of the perpetrators themselves, so what was in previous decades mere speculation about transmission can now be confirmed,” he said. “So, as just one example, we know what the Parkland shooter was googling and that he was looking up both things like the Virginia Tech shooting or the Columbine shooters, but then also a shooting that had just occurred several weeks earlier.”

While many questions about the Texas shooter remain unanswered, Schildkraut said it’s important to focus attention on the victims and their needs. 

“There are so many people in years past who can tell you the names of shooters and not one of their victims, let alone all of their victims,” she said. “We just really need to refocus the attention on who matters in this, and it’s not the person who did the killing.” 

According to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking Monday morning on a Buffalo radio station, a teacher asked Payton Gendron what his plans were for after his upcoming graduation last year from Susquehanna Valley High School, located near Binghamton.

“He said, ‘I want to murder and commit suicide,’” Hochul said. “So they immediately took action.”

On June 8, 2021, state police took Gendron to a hospital, where he underwent a psychiatric evaluation but was released — possibly because he had not made a specific threat against any individual.

“The state police responded,” National Public Radio as saying. “They investigated. They interviewed the subject. And they felt at the time it was appropriate to have that individual brought in for a mental health evaluation.” 

After he graduated two weeks later, , Gendron “fell off investigators’ radar.” It’s not clear why he was not on a so-called red flag list of people whose threats of violence bar them from owning or purchasing weapons when he recently bought a Bushmaster semiautomatic from a dealer in Endicott, New York.

she had ordered an investigation into how the 18-year-old was able to purchase an assault rifle despite the interaction with state police. In 2019, New York state enacted a law that allows a judge to issue an “extreme risk protection order” preventing a person suspected of being a threat to themselves or others from buying a gun.

The District of Columbia and 19 states have red-flag laws, 14 of them enacted in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The laws enable courts to intervene, typically when relatives or law enforcement present evidence a person has exhibited warning signs of possible future violence. 

According to a 2020 examination of the new laws by ����Ӱ��, New York’s law goes a step further than most, allowing educators to petition a judge directly, rather than attempt to get a parent or law enforcement agency to do so. Hawaii and California have since adopted similar provisions. Research into the laws’ is mixed. 

Last fall, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined the laws’ implementation and found a lack of public education about them, including among the agencies that are most likely to receive reports about troublesome behavior.

“You pass the law and then nothing happens,” Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University School of Medicine and a leading researcher on red flag laws, . “There’s no real systematic efforts to invest in letting people know about it, educating the stakeholder groups who need to know about it, setting up the infrastructure and protocol to do it.”

According to former classmates , the remarks that alarmed Gendron’s teacher followed a pattern of odd behavior that included showing up at school in hazmat gear after COVID restrictions ended. “He wore the entire suit, boots, gloves, everything,” Nathan Twitchell, 19, told the newspaper. “Everyone was just staring at him.”

Former classmates said they knew that Gendron was interested in guns but didn’t find that unusual in their rural community. In a 180-page online “manifesto” filled with racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant theories, the suspect wrote at length about different kinds of firearms as well as his admiration for past mass murderers. 

Gendron said he was while “bored” during the pandemic, a phenomenon experts on extremism say is increasingly common. “A lot of it is happening in plain sight,” Jinnie Spiegler, director of curriculum and training at the Anti-Defamation League, told ����Ӱ��. “There’s the concern on a personal level that young people are getting sucked into it, frankly,” she said, adding that a growing proliferation of hate speech online “sets the stage for that next level of literal white supremacist ideology.”

One student, 16-year-old star running back Tate Myre, as he charged toward the gunman in an attempt to stop the mayhem. He died while being rushed to the hospital in the back of a deputy’s squad car.

For many, the scene symbolized a harrowing reality: After years of routine drills, the school’s students — members of the “lockdown generation” — seemed to know how they should act under fire. For the ALICE Training Institute, among the country’s most controversial school security groups, scenes from inside the school were validating. Oxford students underwent ALICE’s , a fact that Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard said likely saved lives.

The Oxford community “would have seen three to 10 X the number of deaths” without the company’s guidance, JP Guilbault, CEO of , which owns ALICE, told ����Ӱ��. Such casualty claims would have made the Oxford shooting — where four students were killed and six students and one teacher injured — the worst mass school shooting in U.S. history. 

“Based on student accounts, it was clear to me the school went well into preparing their kids for something they hoped they would never see,” said Guilbault, who leads the country’s largest for-profit provider of active-shooter drills. “But those kids were prepared.” 

Almost all schools in America conduct active shooter drills despite a growing concern in recent years that they’re ineffective and traumatize students who are forced to grapple with their mortality on a regular basis. Dubbed by one news outlet, ALICE has repeatedly found itself at the forefront of controversy. In a 2019 ALICE training incident, for example, law enforcement officers who led a mock school shooting with plastic airsoft pellets, leaving welts and bruises on the unsuspecting educators. The episode led school safety experts to denounce the drills. 

Now, the high-profile Nov. 30 shooting in Oxford, which resulted in the very rare circumstance of both the 15-year-old suspected gunman and his parents being charged, has reignited a tense debate about how to prepare students for the possibility that they could find themselves under attack. In a letter, Oxford Community Schools Superintendent Tim Throne said the district to review its safety practices. 

ALICE — an acronym for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter and Evacuate — employs a model that goes far beyond traditional lockdown drills that the company and its proponents say offers a toolbox of options as an attack unfolds and increases students’ odds of survival. Yet critics argue the institute’s training doesn’t just traumatize children, but could put them at greater risk of getting killed. 

Traditional lockdowns teach children to bolt classroom doors, turn off the lights, move as far away from windows and doors as possible, stay completely silent and wait for emergency responders to arrive with help. Along with locking doors, “multi-options” approaches like ALICE teach students to barricade the doors with desks, chairs and other environmental objects and to self-evacuate if they feel it’s safe. As a last resort, ALICE teaches students to “counter” — or fight — the gunman. 

Teaching kids to fight off a gunman is by far ALICE’s most contentious lesson. But Guilbault, the CEO, said that traditional lockdowns teach students “to just sit in place” and conditions “the natural freeze process” when confronted with a deadly threat. By presenting multiple avenues of response, Guilbault said, ALICE strengthens students’ chances of coming out of such lethal encounters alive. The factors most critical to survival, he said, are “time and distance.” 

“Should a door get breached, your job is to figure out how to give yourself time and distance,” including through distraction techniques like throwing books and other classroom supplies, he said. “It’s clear the kids were getting ready, if that door was breached, to throw objects and to give themselves the best chance of surviving.” 

In one viral video, a classroom of students were shown engaging with someone through a barricaded door who identifies himself as a member of the sheriff’s office. Skeptical of the man who tells them “it’s safe to come out,” students flee the room through a window. Guilbault said the students made the right decision when they refused to open the door because they were unsure who stood on the other side. Yet he said he would have instructed them to remain silent rather than engage in a conversation with the man. The sheriff later said the man was not the gunman, but was most likely a plainclothes police officer. 

Though Guilbault declined to comment on reports that Myre, one of the shooting victims, had charged toward the gunman, he advised against the strategy.

“Fighting is a last resort,” he said. “We teach individuals that are not first responders to move away from danger, not towards it.

Drills raise competing philosophies

School safety consultant Kenneth Trump, the president of Cleveland-Based National School Safety and Security Services, is among the institute’s most outspoken critics. K-12 students’ brains haven’t fully developed and many lack the capacity to fight off a gunman, Trump said. Meanwhile, students self-evacuating from the school could increase their odds of getting shot, he said, while inhibiting police officers’ ability to pursue the shooter. 

Students are being asked “to make split-second decisions that trained law enforcement and military professionals still struggle with” when confronting an armed gunman, said Trump, who endorses traditional lockdowns during active shootings. 

Research on the efficacy of active-shooter drills is limited, but in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Violence used simulations to test ALICE against traditional lockdown drills. Traditional lockdown drills ended when the shooter ran out of ammunition, researchers found, while participants using ALICE techniques were able to thwart the attacker. The study’s results, the authors wrote in an op-ed, “brings into serious question if traditional lockdown should still be considered as the sole response to these types of events.” The sophomore charged in the Oxford shooting had 18 rounds of ammunition still on him when he quickly surrendered to police. 

Trump challenged the study’s independence and rigor. One author works for ALICE and the others are certified ALICE instructors. Police officers made up a large share of simulation participants and children weren’t included. 

Study co-author Cheryl Lero Jonson, an associate criminal justice professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, denied that any conflicts of interest exist between her being a certified ALICE instructor and her research. 

ALICE relies on a train-the-trainer model to put its method in front of millions of kids across the country each year. Through a two-day course, educators and police learn the ins and outs of the approach before passing its lessons on to youth. Guilbault said that multiple Oxford officials are ALICE instructors and the district has been a customer for several years, but declined to comment on who went through the company’s certification process. 

ALICE’s train-the-trainer model allows for a wide degree of variability, Guilbault said. Oftentimes, the drills are , who are accustomed to tactical training, and are conducted to mimic real-world shooting simulations — a tactic Guilbault said “is common in law enforcement, but it’s not applicable for kids or teachers.” used by ALICE trainers. Guilbault said that ALICE instructors must take students’ age into consideration.

The result, Trump argued, is a training model that resembles the “telephone game” that’s left some districts undergoing full-scale simulations that resemble real-world mass shootings.

“It leaves a lot of room for interpretation to the point where we’ve seen some very extreme cases” including incidents where administrators told kids to keep cans of soup under their desk to throw at any potential gunmen. “Those variations have left people scratching their heads going, ‘What are you thinking?’” 

Johnson said that ALICE “adamantly opposes’ full-scale active shooter simulations with weapons and fake blood because it “causes undue trauma” in children.  

“We don’t put smoke in a school to practice for fire or big fans in the school to practice for a tornado,” she said while acknowledging that simulations have been central to multiple ALICE-related controversies. “Personally, what I think is happening, it’s rogue instructors.” 

Drills prompt psychological concerns

Some education leaders and school safety experts have challenged the premise of active shooter drills altogether, pointing to a growing concern that active-shooter drills traumatize the kids who are forced to endure them.

Last year, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund to unannounced active-shooter drills that simulate gun violence. Also in 2020, Everytown researchers and found the timing of active shooter drills were correlated with an uptick in posts that signaled stress, anxiety and depression among students, parents and teachers.  

Jonson, the Xavier University researcher, has pushed back. In a report last year, she that students are no more fearful of ALICE training than tornado drills. Just 1 in 10 surveyed students reported feeling a negative psychological outcome from ALICE. The 2019 survey was conducted in a single unidentified school district in the Midwest, which used discussion-based instruction rather than simulations. 

Forensic psychologist Jillian Peterson, an associate criminal justice professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota and co-founder of , said the national conversation about school shootings has focused too much attention on “target hardening” and responding to shootings rather than heading off the tragedies from unfolding in the first place. Peterson promotes a greater emphasis on preventative strategies like improving mental health supports in schools, creating welcoming campus environments and establishing anonymous reporting tools where students can alert the authorities to their peers’ troubling behaviors. 

On two occasions just before the Oxford shooting, teachers sounded the alarm about the suspected gunman’s concerning behavior. On the morning of the shooting, the student and his parents to discuss his behaviors but he was ultimately allowed to return to class. Several hours later, police say, he walked out of a school bathroom and opened fire. The factors leading up to the shooting will likely be explored in the independent review of the school’s actions 

Active shooter drills in particular, Peterson said, fail to account for a reality that most school shooters are insiders. Her research has found that are carried out by current or former students. Along with concerns the drills could lead to heightened anxiety and increase the perception that statistically rare school shootings are commonplace, Peterson said that active shooter drills — including the one recently carried out in Oxford — could teach gunmen how officials will react under siege. 

“If it’s an insider going through all of that with everybody else, with all of that information, then that approach just stops making a lot of sense,” Peterson said. “But that also opens up all of these new avenues where you can say, ‘Hey, it’s a kid in this school who is going to do this. How do we make sure, as a school, that none of these kids are going to want to do this?’” 

Meanwhile, there’s a growing concern that school shootings in which one mass shooting has a tendency to spark additional violence in the immediate aftermath as vulnerable people considering violence seek fame after reading about shootings and identifying with the gunman. Following the Oxford shooting, schools nationwide were confronted with a wave of “copycat” threats. 

Frequent active shooter drills, Peterson worries, could plant a seed by placing so much attention on school shooting preparedness.  

“When we’re running students through this over and over and over again, what is that doing in terms of increasing fascination, in terms of having students think through this again and again?” she asked. “What was that experience for this perpetrator when he went through this ALICE training a month ago?” 

The accused perpetrator of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, pleaded guilty to all counts on Wednesday. The development unfolded in a Broward County courtroom, where the suspect was charged with 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Fourteen students and three faculty members were killed in the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

During the hearing, which was attended by the families of those killed in the school, the suspect responded “guilty” 34 times as the judge read each charge along with the victims’ names. Judge Elizabeth Scherer asked the suspect if he understood that he faces “a minimum, as a best case scenario, of life in prison,” a reality the man acknowledged.

In a statement to the victims’ families, the suspect removed his face mask and offered an apology.

“I am very sorry for what I did and I have to live with it every day, and if I were to get a second chance I would do everything in my power to try to help others,” he said. “I have to live with this every day and it brings me nightmares and I can’t live with myself sometimes but I try to push through because I know that is what you guys would want me to do.”

While he went onto to say he thought it was the victims’ families who should decide “where I go, and whether I live or die,” the judge reminded him that would be left to a jury. Jury selection in the penalty phase of the trial is set to begin Jan. 4.

The man accused of carrying out the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, will plead guilty to killing 17 people, bringing the yearslong case a step closer to its resolution, one that could end with a jury sentencing him to death. 

The development, morning court hearing, comes more than three and a half years after the Valentine’s Day shooting unfolded at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that led to a massive uprising among young people over gun control and a national debate about school safety measures. The 23-year-old man, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, plans to plead guilty to 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder during a court hearing Wednesday. 

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The suspect, who made a court appearance in plainclothes Friday, pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated battery in a separate incident after he was while being held inside a Fort Lauderdale jail nine months after the shooting. 

The tragedy, one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, resulted in the deaths of 14 students and three faculty members. On Oct. 19, it was announced that the families of the 17 victims and nearly three dozen others who were wounded or traumatized with the Broward County school district. District officials had come under intense scrutiny for their handling of school security and disciplinary issues involving the accused gunman.

His guilty plea in the criminal case comes without an agreement with prosecutors and a jury will ultimately decide his fate. Prosecutors argue the suspect should receive the death penalty while his defense seeks 17 consecutive life sentences. The trial is expected to be held in January. 

����Ӱ�� is not naming the suspected gunman in accordance with , an effort to deprive perpetrators of media attention. A growing body of research suggests that perpetrators and that media coverage of mass shootings can inspire copycats. 

Hunter Pollack, whose 18-year-old sister Meadow was killed in the shooting, that it’s time for “this monster” to face sentencing. “Our families need justice to be served,” he wrote. “It’s 1,338 days overdue.” 

Manuel Oliver, whose 17-year-old son Joaquin was killed in the shooting, told that the announcement Friday wasn’t a revelation to the victims’ families.

“We all know he is guilty, and finally, he knows he is guilty and will share that,” Oliver said. “That is fine.” 

As people reacted to the news Friday, many survivors and victims’ families sought to move attention toward those who lost their lives in the shooting and away from the suspected perpetrator. 

In a tweet, shooting survivor and co-founder of the youth anti-gun violence group March for Our Lives Ryan Deitsch called on people to honor the lives lost in the attack — and “not their killer.” “Was already under intense ptsd all week, this verdict has worsened my state of being,” . “It was bound to happen but [after] so many years, that [high school] building still up while memorials were torn down, breaks my heart.”  

https://twitter.com/Ryan_Deitsch/status/1449034563515256835?s=20

Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jaime was killed in the shooting, offered a similar sentiment. His only comment on the guilty plea, he tweeted, is “to remember the victims.” 

Giffords, the gun control group co-founded by former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords who was shot in a 2011 assassination attempt, of each of those killed: Carmen Schentrup, Aaron Feis, Martin Duque, Scott Beigel, Nicholas Dworet, Gina Montalto, Peter Wang, Alaina Petty, Alyssa Alhadeff, Jaime Guttenberg, Joaquin Oliver, Cara Loughran, Alex Schachter, Chris Hixon, Helena Ramsay, Luke Hoyer and Meadow Pollack. 

Forensic psychologist Jillian Peterson, a criminology professor at Hamline University in Minnesota who built what researchers believe is the largest database on mass shooters ever created, said she was grateful that the Parkland community didn’t have to go through a grueling trial to determine if the suspect was guilty of carrying out an attack that police say he already admitted to committing. Peterson, who previously worked as an investigator on death penalty cases, said that in such instances a guilty plea usually comes after prosecutors and defense attorneys agree on a sentence. 

That’s not the case here, and prosecutors have been unwilling to take the death penalty off the table. 

Among mass shooters who live through their attacks, 12 percent receive the death penalty and about 20 percent get life with or without parole. Ultimately, Peterson said that several factors could play into the suspect’s sentence including his impact on the school community, his past disciplinary record and his own mental health. The perpetrator had a lengthy disciplinary record and was expelled from the Parkland high school a year before the tragedy. Meanwhile, just three months before the shooting, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. 

She compared the case to the one against the shooter who killed 12 people at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012. In that case, prosecutors sought the death penalty but the gunman, 24 at the time of the shooting,  pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. He was ultimately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 

“If we have the death penalty and the jurors who are sitting on that jury are williing to implement the death penalty, it’s hard to imagine a crime that is more deserving, with this many victims,” said Peterson, co-founder of , a nonprofit think tank. “That being said, we also know this shooter has a really significant trauma history and mental health history so it’s just hard to know how those two things are going to weigh against each other.” 

Oliver that he is glad the death penalty remains on the table. 

“The death penalty that Joaquin received was four shots with an AR-15 in the middle of his school,” Oliver said. “With kids dropping on the floor and bleeding out, screaming. That’s how my son died.” 

We’ve tried hiding from the monsters. We’ve tried running from the monsters. We’ve tried barricading the doors so they can’t come in, and locking them up so they can’t get out. And yet, they keep creeping into our lives — more so than ever before.

The monsters are mass shooters, including those who unleash hell on schools. But metal detectors, active-shooter drills and school-based police are not a sufficient antidote, a duo of criminologists argue in their forthcoming book “.”

The first step in violence prevention, Jillian Peterson and James Densley write in the book released Sept. 7, is to recognize that mass shooters are far more complex than ghoulish caricatures. And stopping them will take more than one simple solution.

“We’ve been treating this all wrong,” said Densley, a sociologist and criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “We are expecting these individuals to just be outsiders beyond the reach of help, beyond the scope of our control. And instead, they are our children, they are our neighbors, they are our work colleagues.”

The book’s conclusions were gleaned from a massive undertaking that’s been years in the making. Peterson and Densley, co-founders of The Violence Project, a nonprofit research center, built what they believe is that spans back to 1966, involving about 180 attacks with more than 1,200 fatalities. Backed by funding from the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice’s research arm, they compared mass shooters’ life experiences across more than 150 variables, like childhood trauma, to identify commonalities. Under the Violence Project’s definition, mass shootings include tragedies that unfold in public locations with four or more victims excluding the shooter and do not stem from domestic violence, gangs, drugs or organized crimes.

They also trekked across the country for interviews with incarcerated killers, their parents and survivors, offering a new window into the lives of shooters and the impulses that make them tick.

Among the book’s key takeaways, the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the youngest mass shooters leaked their plans before the killings and, among those who inflicted mayhem on schools, 70 percent had previously experienced childhood trauma. And perhaps counterintuitively, fatalities were higher in school shootings where armed security was present on campus.

Based on what they uncovered, the book offers a detailed policy roadmap that Densley and Peterson believe could save lives.

The data highlight the critical role of schools, said Peterson, a forensic psychologist and criminology professor at Hamline University in Saint Paul. In many instances, shooters faced significant childhood trauma, stemming from issues like physical or sexual abuse and neglect. Just three months before a suspected school shooter killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, his mother and sole parent died of pneumonia. Shooters often lacked supportive family connections, but their schools were often ill-equipped to confront those challenges.

“Schools aren’t necessarily resourced to be screening for trauma and providing in-depth mental health resources and working with families on coping mechanisms and teaching social-emotional learning,” she said. “Right now, so many schools are stretched so thin, but as we think about ‘How do we provide resources to prevent violence,’ I think that’s where they should be going.”

Though school shootings remain statistically rare and federal data suggest that in the last few decades, The Violence Project’s data reveal that mass shootings have become both more frequent and deadlier in recent years. More than half of the country’s mass shootings have occurred since 2000, the researchers found, and 16 of the 20 deadliest tragedies in modern history unfolded during that time. Of the country’s 20 deadliest mass shootings, three occurred in schools.

Though mass shootings happen elsewhere, the U.S. is a clear outlier. After controlling for population, researchers found the U.S. has six times more mass shootings compared to the rest of the world.

Yet as politicians offer “thoughts and prayers” to victims and stand their ground in a gun-control debate caught in a feedback loop, Peterson said that tangible steps can be taken right now to prevent more carnage. In fact, the pandemic offers lessons for prevention. When people stopped gathering en masse in public places like schools and offices, these rampages stopped as the opportunities for mass casualties dried up. Other mechanisms exist to limit opportunities outside a global pandemic. For example, 80 percent of school shooters obtained guns from family members, but no federal law and few state rules require parents to store weapons out of the reach of children. Such laws exist in six states including California, where parents can face arrest for keeping unlocked guns at home. Public information campaigns that promote safe storage could save lives, the book concludes.

“I want people to read this book and feel hopeful, which is not necessarily what you think when you pick up a book about mass shootings,” she said. “There are things that each of us can do.”

The voices of the perpetrators

To understand the motives of mass killers, Peterson and Densley approached the work with a strong dose of empathy. They didn’t lose sight of the reality that the perpetrators had committed horrendous crimes, but their harsh life experiences added context. Understanding the root causes of violent behaviors, they argued, is critical.

Peterson came to that realization on Rikers Island, the notorious jail complex in New York City where she worked early in her career. As a special investigator for the city’s public defender’s office working death penalty cases, she soon recognized: “The worse the crime, the worse the story.”

Densley had a similar experience inside New York City’s public school system, where he worked as a special education teacher before pivoting to researching youth gang violence. The system treated many disabled children as though they were disposable and could never succeed, he said. But Densley wasn’t buying it.

The duo applies a similar framing to mass shooting prevention and as they compared the shootings, clear patterns emerged.

For many, issues began with childhood trauma. Of the shooters where such data was available, 55 percent had experienced significant childhood trauma, compared to roughly 15 percent in the general population. The trend was even higher among school shooters, about 70 percent of whom had experienced adverse childhood experiences. To understand the role these traumas played, interviews with incarcerated gunmen were especially illuminating, Peterson said.

“They have so much knowledge in terms of how they got to this point,” she said. “We can build datasets and do all this data analysis but, at the end of the day, it’s the voices of these perpetrators saying ‘Here’s how I got here,’ that I think I learned the most from.”

The book intentionally excludes the shooters’ names as part of an effort to deprive them of notoriety, and Peterson declined to disclose their identities due to confidentiality agreements. One in 10 mass shooters sought fame from their attacks, they found, and often idolized other gunmen. For example, at least 20 school shootings have been inspired, at least in part, by the infamous 1999 attack on Columbine High School in suburban Denver. Among them is the 2012 mass school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 26 people, including 20 first-graders, were killed.

Among those interviewed for the book was “Perpetrator B,” a school shooter who recalled how his father would sometimes hit his mother, telling the researchers he developed depression in elementary school and became suicidal by 17. People knew he was struggling, he said, “but they never knew how bad it was.” A caring relationship between the perpetrator and an adult mentor could have put him on a different path, the book concludes. Instead, he became obsessed with studying other shooters, including a visit to Columbine High School. He attempted to die by suicide before attacking his former high school.

More than three-quarters of shooters were in a state of crisis before their attacks and left signs that could’ve been identified by those around them. In fact, 86 percent of mass shooters 20 years old and younger leaked their intentions, including in chat rooms and on social media.

The most profound discovery, both researchers agreed, was a significant connection to suicide. Though mass shooters made meticulous plans about their attacks, escape was never part of the equation. A third of mass shooters were actively suicidal prior to their attacks and 40 percent specifically planned to die in the act, they found. Those who were suicidal were more likely to telegraph their plot, suggesting that they may have been crying out for help. Both the shooters at Columbine and Sandy Hook died by suicide after the attacks.

Following the shooting in Newtown, the parents of two victims founded , which trains students and educators to recognize signs that someone could hurt themselves or others and offers a tip line that allows youth to intervene anonymously.

The reality that many shooters are suicidal “just opened up a whole different line of thinking” Peterson said. For decades, efforts to stop school shootings have centered largely on hardening schools with security. “But if some is actively suicidal, a lot of that stuff doesn’t work.”

The Violence Project’s conclusions are not universally accepted within the community of school-shooting researchers, and Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Oswego, is among the group’s critics. She argued that some of the Violence Project’s findings aren’t sufficiently backed up by research and some of their recommendations “are very dangerous,” including those that critique school security measures.

Schildkraut said that social-emotional learning is important, but the group’s focus on shooters’ traumatic experiences “comes across as, ‘Well, we’re not nice enough to these shooters,’ or ‘We’re not giving them the attention that they need in a more emotional way.’” The data also rely heavily on media reports rather than mental health records, which she said makes it impossible to reach definitive conclusions.

A roadmap to safety

The Violence Project adds a major wrinkle in a violence prevention strategy long employed in schools — an approach Densley called “security theater.” School-based police have grown exponentially in the last several decades, but in measuring their effects on mass school shootings, researchers reached a counterintuitive conclusion.

Of 133 mass school shootings in their data, armed guards were on the scene in 24 percent when the shooting began. In shootings where guards were present, fatalities were three times higher. Because gunmen are often suicidal, the authors speculate that perpetrators could even be drawn to places with armed security.

Schools spend nearly $3 billion on security each year, but the data suggest a softer approach that focuses on addressing the root causes, like adverse childhood experiences, Densley said. Specifically, the book calls for a heightened focus on trauma screenings in schools and doctor’s offices that identify people who are struggling and get them help while avoiding punitive consequences like arrests.

“Instead of spending billions of dollars on all of that unproven technology, let’s hire school counselors,” he said. “Violence prevention is not just building metal detectors. Violence prevention is also crisis intervention in our schools and mental health support in our schools.”

Civil rights groups have long called on schools to hire additional counselors in place of physical security measures like school-based police, a concept that gained momentum after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

But Schildkraut isn’t convinced by the Violence Project’s takeaways on school-based police, arguing that a host of factors contribute to the number of fatalities during an attack. Similarly, while the Violence Project has highlighted the potential harms of lockdown drills, that they are key to “fostering a culture of preparedness in schools.” It’s important to explore the root causes that motivate people to become violent, she said, but prevention is only part of the solution and shouldn’t come at the expense of emergency response and preparation.

“My concern is that their claims are made from personal perspectives and not evidence-based perspectives because the evidence that’s out there on lockdown drills doesn’t say, ‘These are bad,’” she said. “I would love to live in a world where we don’t need active-shooter drills and contingency plans and everything, but that’s not the society we live in.”

Mental health services are just one part of a multi-pronged approach to violence prevention highlighted in the book, which calls for changes at the individual, cultural and political levels. Individually, for example, people must become more willing to speak up when they believe someone close to them is in crisis, including through anonymous tip lines, and gun owners should lock firearms out of young people’s reach. At a systems level, government programs could expand the social safety net to promote community health by addressing issues like educational inequality, hunger and homelessness.

The authors don’t shy away from what may be the hardest sell: gun control. Specifically, they call for universal background checks and wait times on firearm purchases that “are the functional equivalent of counting to 10 before doing something impulsive,” and “red flag” laws that remove weapons from people who pose a threat to themselves or others.

Densley is acutely aware that his book asks a lot from society. But if everybody plays a small role, the authors believe, we can beat back the ever-recurring “monsters.”

“We can’t just be helpless, we can’t just wait,” he said. “A lot of other books, the final chapter, the conclusion, is ‘Well, all we need is a mighty act of Congress to shut down the gun lobby and we’ll live happily ever after.’ It’s like, ‘Well OK, what do we do between now and never?’”

Lead video by Joe Raedle / Getty Images