Abstract |
School shootings are on the rise, and affected communities are reaching out to legislators in every way that they can, including the March for Our Lives on Saturday, March 24, 2018, all across the nation. The purpose of my research is to identify additional warning signs and orient assistance to children who may be most at risk for violent outbursts of that nature. It is important, now more than ever, to be identifying students' potential for violence as systematically and authentically as possible. From 1960-1990, a 30-year period, there were 53 school shootings. From 1990-2018 there have been over 200. The only thing they have in common is that they were committed by boys. Active shooters have invariably been men, but our discussion of prevention targets students indiscriminately. It is not possible to understand this definitively, but there is evidence that it is due to the differences in frontal lobe development, verbal skills, myelination, and testosterone levels between boys and girls. In addition to reading several academic journal articles, I interviewed a high school teacher with experience dealing with at-risk youth to supplement my findings as well as interviews with the teachers and parents of school shooters conducted by third-party interviewers. It is impossible to say with certainty what causes school shooters to do what they do, but through the analysis of the shooters we can begin to discern areas of concern where we can focus our efforts to stop this violence. Men are not inherently the problem, but between biological and social factors they are the overwhelming source of gun violence both in schools and out.
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