Should School Shootings be national news?

1. Maybe. Maybe not.
2. Maybe the national headlines focus more on mass shootings.
3. According to a CNN study: While school shootings disproportionately affect urban schools and people of color, mass shootings are more likely to occur at white, suburban schools.

Sadly, there may be some truth to this statement.

I think they generally do treat school shootings as a local story, just as long as it's not a mass shooting.

I agree.

Really, I don't think so. I certainly don't think it would be given the "we need to understand these troubled teens from middle class homes" treatment. I suspect the press would immediately assume a drug connection, would search social media for anything that could be construed as gang related and would pull up a twenty year old conviction on the parents.

Let's look at facts.

Black teens are twice as likely likely to die of shooting more than White teens. When White teens get shot, it is news.

It is the race of the victims that makes it a sensational story, not the race of the shooter. We sensationalize crime where White people are the victims. We ignore crime where minorities are the victims. This crime was sensationalized because it happened in a white suburban school.

You never heard of shootings in majority Black schools? Of course they happen, they are just not national headline grabbing stories. Google East Wichita High School for example, there was a shooting there. I had to Google it because it didn't make the news.

Let's talk statistics. We are throwing different numbers around. We should keep them straight.

We can define a mass school shooting as a "single event with more than 4 deaths not including the shooter".

We can define a school shooting as a discharge of a gun in a school whether or not anyone is injured or killed.

1. Mass School Shootings happen about 1 a year (they are extremely rare). For some reason they are almost always committed by a White person.

2. School Shootings happen about 29 times a year (still rare) with about 35 deaths (and 25 injuries according to the link Hightor posted). They are committed by all races, but seem to happen more often in minority dominant schools.

3. A Black teen is twice as likely to die than a White teen. When a Black teen is murdered, most of the time (95%) the murderer is also Black. This statistic is balanced, the vast majority White teens are murdered by a White person (murder seems to still be segregated).

My point is that out of the several thousand of murders involving teens per year. Why is this one the one singled out to be sensationalized and splashed across nation headlines.

There are murders in mostly minority schools. They don't make national news.

I touched on this this earlier:

You could blame it simply on racism but I think it's a little more complex than that and the correlation with poverty might be more accurate.

Right. It's the weird kid thing, the lone psychopath, not gang violence and drugs-related incidents that sells papers and drives clicking computer mice. "Man bites dog" – I'm not defending the media, but it's not that difficult to see why these patterns of news coverage exist. As someone already pointed out:

No Hightor... it is not a "weird kid thing". Demonizing weird kids is one of the dangers of this hyped up, exaggerated overreaction.

There are millions of kids who are "weird". Some of them are exceptionally creative or possess an inspired oddness. Some of them have mental illness. Some of them are just non-conformist.

Weird is something that should be celebrated and encouraged in adolescents. Weird does not equal murderous. Weird does not equal psychopathic. Weird just means different or not conforming to the social norm. We need more weirdness.

The danger to this overreaction is that schools will clamp down on any non-conformity. You already see calls for schools to expel more students.

Hightor is confusing the terms. On one side he says there are 29 school shooting. But this number includes what Hightor calls "gang violence and drug related incidents". If we are talking only about the cases where a kid goes with the intention of killing random classmates... that is 1 per year.

Hyping this up into a national incident and instilling fear in middle-class White women is an overreaction. The cost of this overreaction comes from the drive to force conformity and to punish perfectly decent kids who don't fit in. Demonizing 10,000 weird kids who have done nothing wrong because you are afraid of 1 shooting a year? That doesn't make any sense.

That is a bad thing.

Any killing of a child makes it in the national news in Germany - but we are a much smaller country, and the deadly use of guns is not a frequent routine here like in the USA.

But generally, I think, even in the USA schools are not the places where you would expect gun killings, not only by the age of the students but by the kind of institution.

Are you sure, Walter? You would have to compare the number of homicides of children with the number of homicides reported nationally. Have you done this?

Yes, Germany is a smaller country with about one fifth of a murder rate per capita. But journalism and news filters work the same way there as they do here.

Statistically, Schools in the US are one of the safest places. There is a problem in perception; from the media people get the impression that violence in school is common. It is actually exceedingly rare.

A child's chance of being killed in school is one in two million. A child is 1000 times more likely to die in a car crash than a school shooting. A child is 100 times more likely to die by suicide than a school shooting. A child is 5 times more likely to die by drowning than a school shooting.

People watching the US media leave with a grossly exaggerated idea of the risk of school shooting.

I could now go into the nature of violence in accidents, suicides and swimming pools. Or also the number of persons (in schools certainly primarily adolescents) who were injured - physically and psychologically.

But that is useless.

Actually it is. A normal kid doesn't kill fellow students. When school violence is related to gangs and drugs these are understood as aspects of criminality which are often found in marginal communities. As a result, they don't tend to make national headlines. In wealthier communities, schools often have less problems with discipline. So if we take your claim that cases where a kid enters school with the intention of killing random classmates is only one per year, that is all the more reason for the media to pick up on this as an isolated statistically rare incident which fits into a pattern, a frightening pattern which has tended to follow a program based on the Columbine massacre.

And when just one of them takes a gun to school and shoots other students it makes the headlines.

I doubt that. There have always been weird kids, loners, people who didn't fit stereotypes. When I was in high school we were lectured about "non-conformity". In the crowd I hung with, that inspired us to pursue a non-conformist lifestyle. We never envisioned killing anyone, though.

No. You're the one who is confused. The article I referred to said there were 21 school shootings since August 1st. Are you saying that they're not significant if they're related to gang violence and drug related incidents and shouldn't be included in the aggregate number of shootings?

It is a nationally significant incident. Precisely because it doesn't happen often. "Man bites dog". The media reports this stuff.

Look, if people are so sensitive and fearful that they can't take the time to look at the facts which you have laid out – that the chances of a mass shooting incident happening in any one school are really slim – the answer isn't to bury the news. These "middle-class White women" you're so worried about, as if that were the only demographic significantly concerned, you're basically saying that they're too stupid to see the picture that you present. I think they are a lot more resilient than you give them credit for.

You've got it backwards. No one is "demonizing weird kids". When a traumatized, likely suicidal, kid shoots fellow students at random he simply fits the picture of a troubled loner, one among many varieties of weird kids, most of whom are harmless. We do this all the time. We refer to jocks, geeks, and nerds, too. If they don't seem to march in step with the rest of the student body they may get labeled as "weird". It doesn't mean they are likely to kill anyone. It doesn't mean they are "disturbed". It doesn't indicate sociopathology.

The real problem is the place of firearms in our cultural imagination, the sheer number of weapons out there, and the ease of their procurement.

I'm a person and I don't think violence in school is common.



I'm a person and I don't have a grossly exaggerated idea of the risk of school shooting, and if your statement were true, there'd be a lot less kids in schools. How do you explain that? Are parents running around screaming and removing their kids from schools en masse? No. Their kids went back to school, installed a tribute and had a vigil.

To not handle these killings as something horrific is kinda like ignoring ONE bombing pr year . I think you shoulnt split these murders into categories of attenace (schools, chrch affairs, rock shows, racs an marches) The violence is what is the issue, the targets shoul be included within the news story.
I can somehow see the weird goal that gun freaks an Ultra consevrative-Originalists would wih to ignore all these, you collectively add up gun killings of kids, we have a real problem, (especially whn guys like you wish to duck it all)

Thank you Farmerman. That is an excellent connection to make.

I feel the same way about the security theater we had in response to 9/11. And I made the same argument, the chance of terrorism is such a low risk that our overreaction was shameful.

The civil right stripped away by the Patriot Act, the automatic suspicion Muslim and spying on houses of worship... these are all a ridiculous overreaction to a extremely low threat. And there is a cost here too, violence against Muslim Americans skyrocketed.

All of this happened because Americans overreacted to something that in the worse year was an extremely low risk to them.

One highly publicized terrorist attack and everyone wants restrictions on Muslism. One highly publicized school shooting and everyone wants the schools to clamp down on kids who don't fit in.

Yes, these two issues are connected.

I agree that there was much overreaction.

Um...do you have any evidence that, "everyone wants the schools to clamp down on kids who don't fit in" – what do you base this claim on? What measures have been taken, or proposed, to enforce some sort of acceptable psychological conformity? How would this even be attempted?

I think it's more likely that school personnel would be more interested in helping the kids who show evidence of depression or trauma, not taking the extreme measures that you suggest against any kid who doesn't "fit in". Your contention is ridiculous and would be opposed by the parents of kids stigmatized because they wear odd clothes, read strange books, or don't measure up to some arbitrary and culturally-prejudiced criterion of "normal".



No, they are very different. And they have been treated very differently by the news media.

Sure glad that wasn't policy when I was in school.

Well because they are so rare it makes news and because it is so horrifying for a parent that a place they are supposed to be safe can be so unsafe.

Most really horrific situations make the news because it sells it is something the general population watches and talks about.

I mean look on here it gives Izzy the chance to brag about how wonderful the UK is and how us American are barbaric and shot each other up.

How many conversations do you have around the fact that say that 95% of American children had a successful day at school with lots of learning?