There are plenty of things we can do about mass school shootings, if we focus on what is possible.
There are plenty of things we can do about mass school shootings, if we focus on what is possible.
I f you listen to Democratic politicians, progressive pundits, and liberal celebrities, you might be under the impression that America faces two choices after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: Enact major new federal gun regulations or restrictions, or do nothing and simply accept the horror of mass school shootings as routine. This is a false choice.
To start with, as always, it is useful to remember the basics about proposed solutions to problems that get forgotten whenever there’s a gun debate: (1) Every solution has costs; (2) most solutions are far from 100 percent effective; (3) we should ask which things are worth doing if they’re not 100 percent effective — some are, some are not; (4) not every solution should come from the government; and (5) not every government solution should come from the federal government.
There are three sides to the school-shooting issue: the shooter, the weapon, and the target. We can try to identify and stop shooters before they decide to do the deed, or catch them before they take action. We can try to keep weapons out of their hands. And we can try to harden the targets so they are better able to withstand an attack and defend themselves. There are ideas for all three, some of them better than others.
The Biden White House is ruling out proposals to better protect schools or focus on mentally disturbed shooters, apparently in the hopes of forcing the political debate onto guns and guns alone. By contrast, Texas governor Greg Abbott is convening a special session of the Texas legislature “examining and developing legislative recommendations on school safety, mental health, social media, police training, firearm safety, and more.” Doug Ducey proposed a package of changes in 2018; he could not get it through Arizona’s Republican-run legislature, but he signed a narrower bill the following year enhancing the reporting of dangerous behavior in schools. Rick Scott, in Florida, signed new laws in 2018 creating a “red flag” law, imposing age restrictions on long guns, and improving school safety. It is not Republican executives who are proposing to “do nothing.”
Where should we start? Do some simple math, because the numbers matter in getting a handle on public-policy issues. While precise data is often difficult to obtain, it is broadly estimated that there are around 400 million guns in the United States. Some sources place the number of gun owners at around 81 million. Others estimate that around 40–45 percent of the nation’s 130 million households own a gun, which would be 50 million households; if we assume that gun-owning households have an average number of people, that would mean that around 130 million Americans live in a home with a gun. And those numbers grew at an accelerated pace in the past two years amid rising crime rates.
Regardless of the exact numbers, that is a lot of guns, gun owners, and people with access to guns in the home. Dramatically reducing that number or the types of guns that are available would be a huge undertaking requiring a sustained campaign by the government against a very large segment of the American people. Yet the vast and overwhelming majority of those 400 million guns and tens of millions of gun owners are never involved in a crime, much less a mass shooting.
It is never ideal to try to solve a problem of criminal behavior with a solution when 99 percent of the burdens of that solution fall on innocent, law-abiding people. There are good reasons why broad-brush gun control remains politically unpopular as well as unconstitutional. Solutions that focus on the weapons should be tailored much more narrowly to the actual problem.
What about the schools? The United States has nearly 100,000 public elementary and secondary schools (even leaving out colleges), with something on the order of 50 million students, plus about 32,000 private schools with around 5.5 million students. Making significant changes to those schools — their physical layout, their permanent security personnel — is, again, a very large undertaking. Yet the vast majority of those schools and students will never face any sort of gun crime, much less a mass shooting. Modest improvements to school safety should be pursued, but a sweeping overhaul would, like major gun control, be a disproportionate response.
What about the shooters? There have been 13 mass school shootings in the past 56 years — all of them since 1989 — if “mass school shootings” is defined as one in which “four or more victims are murdered with at least one of those homicides taking place in a public location and with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.” Twelve of the 14 shooters (counting the two Columbine shooters) were former students at the school they attacked.
Now, we’re talking about a much more manageable universe — if anything, the number of school shooters is a harder problem to tackle precisely because finding a dozen people over three and a half decades in a nation of 336 million people presents some serious needle-in-a-haystack issues. Also, only after it’s too late do we know for certain who the shooters are.
Stopping the Shooters
But we generally have a lot of clues. Jim Geraghty walked through some of the recent research on this, as did Robert VerBruggen. Even more so than mass shooters as a whole, mass school shooters are especially likely to reveal themselves in numerous ways in advance: not just in ordinary ways such as amassing long disciplinary records and acting out, but in specific ways such as animal cruelty and telling other people that they intend to shoot up a school. In hindsight, these shooters are almost never subtle.
Given that there are tens or hundreds of millions of innocent people affected by changes to the laws on schools or guns, whereas changing our law-enforcement and social-services approaches to potential mass school shooters is a very targeted solution, it ought to be the most logical thing in the world, in a liberal democracy, to focus most intensively on identifying people self-advertising as potential school shooters in advance rather than defaulting only to gun regulation or fortifying schools.
That means rejecting the approach of the Obama-era federal restrictions on schools disciplining students or creating records of discipline — restrictions that were repealed by Betsy DeVos during her term as secretary of education and that the Biden administration must be discouraged from reviving. If we prevent any records from being compiled, there will be no dots to connect. If your goal is to keep troubled young people out of the criminal-justice system, you are guaranteeing that nothing will show up on a firearm background check.
There are broader issues as well. Addressing students with obvious mental-health problems is one. Fighting cultural growth of alienation is another: We have too many kids growing up in broken or fatherless homes, a decline in churchgoing and civic involvement, and many people disconnected from extended families and neighbors. Some of those are problems well beyond the government’s capacity to fix except at the margins, but they are no less urgent.
There’s another major factor the government can’t control: publicity. School shootings are very much a social-contagion issue, and the more the media lavishes attention on it, the more shootings we will have. That is a blunt reality that can only be addressed by some voluntary self-restraint. The name of a shooter should be used as little as possible. Policy-makers need to know what these people said and what motivated them, but those facts don’t need to be on TV or the front pages of newspapers. Media figures who are quick to tell ordinary gun owners that they have blood on their hands are somehow immune from self-reflection on their own role in pouring gasoline on the fire.
Disarming the Shooters
We can also take steps to disarm school shooters, steps that do not require across-the-board limits on gun rights. “Red flag” laws modeled on Florida’s law — which allows citizens or law enforcement to go to a court and get an order disarming a person who presents a particularized risk of violence to self or others — may not be a perfect solution, but those laws have three major advantages over a background-check system. One, they apply to gun owners, not just gun buyers. Two, they can consider evidence other than formal criminal records. And three, they provide due process of law before a local judge. David French makes the case for those laws here, here, and here, although I would disagree with him on involving the federal government in what is a quintessential local community-safety issue.
Age restrictions such as those passed in Florida in 2018 may also be appropriate — at least for some types of weapons, or at least requiring some kinds of additional limits on younger buyers, particularly men under age 21. Ross Douthat proposes some fairly sweeping ideas; I offered more modest ones, such as requiring young men to get a good-character reference from an adult unless the young man serves in the military or law enforcement (most American law-enforcement departments have minimum hiring ages these days). There are fair debates around how to structure these rules, and they, too, should be state and local rather than federal rules, but there is no shortage of ideas. It may be particularly useful to look at restricting the sale of body armor, which can play a larger role in prolonging a mass shooting than the caliber of weapon or the rate of fire.
While mass shooters are often young men with long rap sheets of the sort of misconduct that doesn’t get you prosecuted, we should nonetheless be addressing the broader problem of gun crime by enforcing the laws already on the books: Confiscate illegal guns and throw the book at gun offenders. There is a big partisan divide on this issue, and it is typically law-and-order Republicans (and the NRA) who want the laws enforced, and progressives who object. Peter Hermann of the Washington Post has a deep dive today on how progressive politics stands in the way of enforcing D.C.’s restrictive gun laws:
About half the people charged with murder typically have a prior gun arrest, according to police, though not necessarily a conviction. In the week the men in the Bonneville were stopped, D.C. police arrested 23 people for gun offenses; prosecutors did not pursue charges against 13 of them. Of the 10 people charged, six were convicted. . . .
The aggressive tactics police use to seize guns have long drawn scrutiny. The Police Reform Commission, a panel formed by the D.C. Council after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, argued in an April 2021 report that officers on special squads such as the Gun Recovery Unit “use aggressive stop and search tactics” and recommended sweeping changes, such as barring officers from citing “high crime areas” as a partial justification for stopping people. Social and racial justice advocates have called for D.C. police to disband the unit altogether.
Hardening the Targets
By the time you are thinking about fortifying school buildings, arming teachers, or getting cops to charge the shooter, something has already gone terribly wrong. Improving school security is the last-ditch solution. Schools should not be breaking their budgets to handle the one-in-ten-million chance of a student being shot by a mass shooter. But there are things we know that work, or at least help.
School buildings should have only a single entrance, and this can be done while providing multiple exits that open only from the inside, to allow those inside the school to escape a fire, a shooting, or any other sort of disaster. That is the ideal. But it is also impractical for a great many of America’s schools that were built years ago, often with multiple buildings on a single campus. It is not a panacea in a world of limited school-building resources.
Armed security at the school — whether armed teachers or a dedicated security guard — is likewise a solution that can help in some cases, but really should be left to local school districts who can best gauge the overall safety profile of their school, whether they have teachers who are already responsible, licensed gun owners, etc. Again: This can help. It won’t be worth doing everywhere, and it won’t solve everything.
Local police and any school security can also improve their training. Training isn’t everything, though: It appears that the Uvalde cops were actually properly trained on how to handle a school shooter and simply failed. As in the Parkland shooting, humans will sometimes fail to do the one job they are there to do. That’s not a reason to give up on cops or armed school security, but it is yet another reminder that no solution fixes everything on its own.
Can we eliminate mass school shootings? Maybe not. But that doesn’t mean we should, or will, “do nothing.” As with many other problems in our society, including lots of other life-and-death matters, there is no substitute for understanding what is possible and doing that, instead of dreaming of what is ideal and using that as an excuse to politically posture while actually getting nothing done.