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School shootings research essay
School shootings introduction
School shootings introduction
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In a masterly crafted and scholarly researched study of the Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, doctor Katherine S. Newman, takes a deeper look into the sociology of school shootings and concluded that gender, social class and bullying can affect and lead young children to these violent acts. Research on gender profile of the shooters suggests that in the culture today males’ masculinity is linked with violence, but that does not necessary mean that if one is a male they are a shooter. However, it has been proven that throughout the history of school shootings no female has acted in a mass killing using guns. For example, through Newman’s credible research,
April 20th, 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, experienced a mass shooting. Thirteen people were injured and more than twenty were injured. Twelve were students and one was a teacher. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their high school for forty one minutes before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. School shootings are notorious for making headline news but in 1999, school shooting were not as prevalent as they are in the present day. The media blew up on the catastrophe that was Columbine and many questions were raised, who were these kids and why did they do this? Speculation arose about why they did it. Maybe they were bullied for being goth and social outcasts or maybe they
Unlike most of the country, I knew about Columbine High School on April 19, 1999. I knew that the Columbine Rebels had a good football team, I remembered how they beat Cherry Creek for the 1999 football championship. I knew what Columbine's building was like from when I was inside it in January for a debate tournament. I had friends that went to CHS. We had gone on a trip to Hawaii together to learn about biology. The rest of the country found out about Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. They didn't hear about their football team, the debate tournament they hosted, or my friends, though; they heard about two angry students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, that went on a killing rampage killing 12 other students, a teacher, and themselves. The nation, the media, the killers, my friends, and me all have their own view of what happened that day. Many people tried to understand how something so terrible could happen, while the killers thought that the killings were a wonderful thing, and still other students were trying to comprehend that this tragedy had actually happened so close to home.
The United States will not soon forget the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut that came just two weeks before Christmas last year. This tragic event resulted in the death of twenty students and eight adults. Although the event shocked the nation, rampage shootings are nothing new. Over the years, many families have lost loved ones to these horrific events. As a result, these mass shootings such as the one that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary caught public attention leading to a push to find the cause of these events. Out of this research a variety of possible causes came to light consisting of arguments stating that high school bullying, availability of guns, mental illness, violent movies and video games are the cause of mass shootings. However, these researchers and debaters tend to ignore the role of massive media coverage in the increase of copycat shootings in the United States.
School shootings seemed like a new phenomenon, but they occurred for the majority of American history. The first school shooting occurred On July 26, 1764, when a Lenape Indian shot and killed nine children and the school master of the Greencastle, Pennsylvania school (Galvin): as noted in Appendix A. Since 1764, the number of school shootings rose exponentially. In the 1990’s, eighty-six school shootings occurred and between 2000 and 2014, 110 shootings transpired since 2000 (Killam,2008). The development of semiautomatic weapons lead to an increase in deaths. A study conducted in 1990 found through the years of 1986 to 1990; 71 people died, 201 wounded, and 242 people held hostage by school shooters(Galvin). While the area a school serves as one factor in the number of violent acts committed per year, school shootings have not been connected to this. The schools in Chicago dealt with more violent acts, but Sandy Hook Elementary, a small city school had relatively few violent acts committed by students.
It is a sad time in American history when one can easily recount recent school shootings in their own area. This ease stems from a sharp increase in the number of firearms brought into elementary and middle schools across the country, with an intense focus on the issue beginning after the shooting of 20 children from Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. Most school shooters are male, white, and often upper middle class. They are also more, often than not, under some type of mental stress that is causing them to create this type of violence in our communities. In fact, many school shooters are never suspected of doing any harm to their peers and teachers until it is much too late.
When children commit a horrible act such as a school shooting their parents often look for someone or something to blame rather than looking at what role they, as parents, may have had in the tragedy. The often targeted entertainers, video game developers, teachers, drug companies, and writers are rarely, if ever, responsible for such tragic outcomes and, unfortunately, often become victims as a result of lawsuits filed in an attempt to place blame on them. The parents of dangerous children must be scrutinized and sued alongside every other entity being blamed for the heinous crimes that children commit.
The first thing people cling to in the wake of such terrible tragedies is a simple question: why? Why did the murderer do what he did? When did they develop the mindset that made them commit such a heinous crime? How could any healthy, functioning, moral human being perpetrate perhaps the greatest ordeal of death our society has ever known? They look for action, for reason, for some concrete absolute that can somehow lift the shroud of sorrow that has overtaken their lives in such an awfully tremendous — and yet, however simple this question may be, the answer is never clear, and it is never enough. In the absence of a grounded conclusion as to why school shootings occur — or homicide of any kind for that matter — many people seek answers in what is known — in the few things we can take away from all the innocent deaths, and the person who caused them.
Although no one can be entirely sure what motivates teens to commit mass shootings, there are theories that must be examined to develop solutions. One theory states that there are ten factors that contribute to the likelihood of a teen committing murder. These factors include an unstable home life, being bullied at school, obsession with violent entertainment, being suicidal, involvement with drugs or alcohol, involvement with gangs or cults, and mental illness. Usually at least four of these qualities are present in homicidal teens (Khadaroo). While many of these causes stem from home lif...
The American culture has been tainted with school shootings that are becoming a sort of tradition found in America. Most twenty-first-century school shootings have taken inspiration from the Columbine shooting, an event that has left a remarkable imprint on the future of school shootings and made the ones responsible infamous among them. In fact, Dave Cullen explores this idea in his nonfiction novel “Columbine”, where he illustrates the story of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and how the Columbine shooting was orchestrated, how it was carried out, and the aftermath that ensued, along with the pair’s psychotic paths that led to that event. Cullen’s argument was Eric being the manipulate genius behind the organization of the shooting while Dylan, who was not as psychotic, followed Eric through the event. One of the many
Family environment and the press are two major influences resulting in the recent tragic school shootings. As much as society continues to focus the killing rampages on factors such as television and music, what children are exposed to in reality contributes to the violence. The most recent school shooting in Michigan involved a six-year-old first grader who killed a classmate with a .22 caliber pistol. The news coverage had vanished after two or three days, and I was left wondering what had happened. Considering the fact that the media wore the Columbine incident out, I wanted to know why they did not pay more attention to this school shooting. As evidence did arrive, it was discovered that the child lived in a household where cocaine, heroin, and many other illegal drugs were commonplace. Also in this “home” guns were easily accessible to the child. Children growing up in this type of environment certainly are likely to be held accountable for future violence. Even though I am against the news media presenting too much school violence, Americans should have been deeply disturbed by this shooting because of the child’s young age. The Michigan shooting should have enlightened Americans to the dilemma we face in this country. Two weeks after the Columbine High School shooting, information on the mass murder was still being broadcast on television. The press was feeding young viewers ideas on how to kill their classmates. News was reported how the teenage murderers acquired information regarding building bombs, obtaining guns, smuggling guns into the school, and proceeding to kill their classmates. A mentally unstable teenager could simply watch these news reports and write a book entitled, “How to Slay Your Classmates”. This onslaught was ridiculous and the news coverage should not have been permitted to continue for countless weeks. Society has determined three reasons on which to blame the shootings. First, the nation blamed it on television’s violent programs. Following that, Americans gave the music recording companies the evil eye as well as attacking the gun manufacturers. All of these reasons involve material objects that are unable to think for themselves. Televisions and CD players do not control themselves, people control them. Finally, boundaries controlling the television programs children view should be set by the parents. The same explanation applies to firearms. How can it be a gun’s fault that a person killed another human being?
If someone were to rely solely on television media, it wouldn’t surprise me if he/she thought that America’s schools were being taken over by these so-called “juvenile super predators.” The American people would assume that every quiet kid who gets picked on is going to turn around in school one day and start unloading his newly acquired firearms on his peers. This is hardly the case. While there may be an occasional “super-predator,” the media has highly over publicized these rare, extraordinary events.
School shootings have altered American history greatly over the past two decades. From 1997 to 2007, there have been more than 40 school shootings, resulting in over 70 deaths and many more injuries. School shoot-outs have been increasing in number dramatically in the past 20 years. There are no boundaries as to how old the child would be, or how many people they may kill or injure. At Mount Morris Township, Michigan, on February 29th, 2000, there was a 6 year old boy who shot and killed another 6 year old girl at the Buell Elementary School with a .32 caliber pistol. And although many shootings have occurred at High Schools or Middle Schools, having more guns on those campuses would not be a good environment for children to grow up in. However, on a college campus, the pupils attending are not children anymore; the age range is from 17 to mid 20’s. Therefore they understand the consequences associated to the use of weapons and have gained more maturity. In April 16th, 2007, at Blacksburg, Virginia, there was a shooting rampage enacted by Sung-Hui Cho (23 years, from Centreville, VA) who fired over 170 rounds, killing 32 victims, before taking his own life at the Virginia Tech campus. Colleges and Universities would be a much safer place, for student and teacher, if guns were permitted on campus for self-defense purposes.
Cho poked his head in the room a couple of times and looked around before exiting and entering a different room. The first shots were heard across the hall, in the hydrology class. It sounded like a nail gun or hammer hitting concrete blocks.
“The more energy they have to gin up to execute their plan, the harder it will be to do so” (Newman). When “Would be shooters” are faced with a challenge they most likely don’t go through with their plan. The dedicated shooters are those who intend on finding guns and shooting people, those who have the drive. “Totally dedicated shooters” are the type of people who wont give up whether the guns are accessible to them legally or illegally. Dedicated shooters have a plan of action and intend on going through with it. These types of people likely suffer from mental illnesses. “The abnormally high level of school shootings in America is not solely a gun issue a mental health issue, or a media issue, but rather a problem caused by a combination of mental illness problems, social inequality, gun control policies, and the structure of schools”(Gupta, 2016). Structural inequalities in the United States cause stress, which lead people to turn to radical measures. Factors such as economic change, racism and social changes cause constraints on behavior. Mental health is also a leading factor to school shootings. “Metzl and MacLeish’s research shows that up to 60 percent of mass shootings in the United States since 1970 involved shooters displaying symptoms of mental illnesses—including paranoia, depression, and delusions—and the evidence suggests that
However, for many children, because of the pressure to fit into specific gender roles, it is not the case. The Bully Society correlates the violence of school shootings to the pressure adolescents face to fit into a gender category. Children and teens “continue to feel forced to conform to a narrow set of gender expectations in order to be accepted” (Klein, 2), and school shootings become children’s means of conforming. The majority of school shootings are committed by males, taking place in predominately white, middle to upper class suburbs. In schools where shootings take place, one of the main parts of everyday culture is gender policing, “pressure to conform to gender expectations” (Klein, 4). Students hold more power in school by demonstrating hypermasculinity, the dominant male gender norm, through activities like sports, fighting, mistreatment of women and bragging about sexual exploits. Dominant students use power gained from their masculinity to bully, attack and taunt peers who may appear gay, less aggressive or fail to demonstrate manhood. The pressure bullied students are put under forces them to prove to their dominant peers and teachers that they are still a man, often through committing violence in the form of school