School Shootings

     The mass shootings shown in the media are unfortunate acts carried out by individuals who did not receive the help which they needed.  These acts are tragic and any sympathy shown to the victims is deserved.  The media however took these events as a chance to boost ratings by playing to people's fear.  In the period after the Columbine shootings and in the midst of all the media hype, schools implemented new safety measures including metal detectors, emergency plans and drills, and profiled the very students who they claimed to be protecting.  I know this because my school, Sweet Home High School, sent the police to my house twice to search my house because, as the officer told my mom when she asked what was going on "Your son IS planning to blow up the school."  As I am not currently in prison for conspiracy to commit murder, I am sure you can guess that I had no plans to harm anyone in the school.  Instead a girl who overheard part of a conversation which had nothing to do with school shootings, in a lunch period I wasn't present for, told school administrators that the people behind her in lunch were plotting to blow up the school.  I occasionally talked to these people (I had gym with them) and so I was thrown into this conspiracy which did not exist.
     But shouldn't we be worried about mass school violence or even school violence in general?  Why are schools so violent?  Why aren't we as safe as we used to be?  These are all trick questions, as can be seen in the following graph, violence in schools has been going down steadily since the early '90s.

     This is a graph of school violence related deaths (k-12).  Most of these were, interpersonal disputes (120), suicides (88), gang related (53), accidental (16), bully related (12), during a robbery (9), sexually motivated (3) and hate crimes (2) (National School Safety Center).  In addition to this, only in six cases were there more than two people killed two of which were bullying related and one being related to interpersonal problems (National School Safety Center).  So there have been three mass killings between fall 1992 and spring 2010 claiming 29 lives (National School Safety Center).  While these incidents do deserve media attention, the fear generated by the media was not entirely justified.  With 311 million people currently living in the US, it would be safe to assume that over 40 million of those people attended school during the time frame listed above. When compared to the entire amount of violent school deaths (468), this would suggest that our schools, even with the occasional mass shooting, are extremely safe. 

As can be seen in this clip, the message of the story is that you need to be afraid and always be looking out for the weird, depressed, isolated kid which, at least when i was in school, was a lot of innocent and good people.
     Using Andrew Tudor's guidelines, we can see that the media is using discrete phenomena and classes of phenomena to create a reason for people to be afraid of their environment.  The culture of the media also pushes people towards being fearful because increased fear will cause increased viewership.  In the interview, Dr. Lipman points out how many will blame violent media.  This is an example about how changing social structures can make many people feel afraid.  Finally, the media also plays to the "Body" parameter of fear because bullets, no matter how strong someone is, will cause severe harm to a persons body.

National School Safety Center. 2010. "School Associated Violent Deaths" National School Safety Center. http://www.schoolsafety.us/media-resources/school-associated-violent-deaths

Tudor A. 2003. "A (macro) sociology of rear?" The Sociological Review 51: 238–256.