Solutions To Prevent Mass School Shootings In America

Noblesville West Middle School, Santa Fe High School, Highland High, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Forest High School, Raytown South Middle School, Stoneman Douglas High School, the list goes on. As of recent, mass school shootings has become an often occurrence in our country. Every incident is a tragedy that puts fear into the hearts of our children. We as a nation should be working towards solutions to prevent shootings and ensure safety.

The lack of mental health support especially in young men, bullying along with isolation, and easy access to guns has sparked an epidemic in America; we can combat this with compassion, mental health support for those who are in need, and rallying for stricter gun control laws. While mass shooters come in all different shapes and sizes, “the only thing almost all of them have in common is that they are men. But those men come from varying backgrounds, with different mental health diagnoses and criminal histories. ” Mental health in younger men is often overlooked due to the stigma surrounding masculinity, and what it means to be a man. Western society often perpetuates the idea that men shouldn’t share their emotions or show weakness. This keeps a lot of young men from reaching out when they need help. This is proven by the fact that in the United States 7 out of 10 suicides are completed by men (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention). This doesn’t mean men are more depressed than women but that men are less likely to get the help they need to cope with depression and other similar mental illnesses. This combined with the bullying they endure at school, it’s no surprise a student would accumulate enough anger to carry out such an act. If we want to ensure our children’s safety, we should push for the allocation of resources for support between students and teachers and creating more spaces for students to go when they are seeking help.

America has a bullying and isolation problem, and schools are not dealing with it properly. According to Andrea Cohn and Andrea Canter, more than 67% of students believe that their school responds poorly to bullying, and many also believe that adult intervention is both rare and ineffective. While bullying can happen anywhere, it happens most often in or near school. According to the Politifact article By Greensberg, Jacobson, and Valverde, the Congressional Research Service defines a mass public shooting as “a multiple-homicide incident where four or more victims are murdered with firearms in one or more public locations, and that includes schools”. From 1999 to 2013, there were 66 mass public shootings, with seven of those incidents happening in schools or universities, making up 10. 6 percent of the 66 shootings. We need to start encouraging more kindness in students, and teachers need to be armed with more tools and resources so that they able to react more effectively and be more proactive when faced with bullying. We can have more conversations with children about compassion and the effects of bullying to ensure their understanding of how big of a role it can play in one’s mental health, and instead of arming teachers with firearms we should arm them with the knowledge to recognize isolation and how to deal with it. Easy access to guns might not be the largest contributing factor to mass school shootings, but it definitely plays an important role. By making small, yet critical changes to the laws we could be taking one step closer to safety and security as well as staying within the rights of the Second Amendment. One common misconception that we see often is the idea that if we were to take care of all mental illness, we would be able to take care of all gun crime but that is not necessarily true. A lot of the time people will use the Second Amendment as a way to avoid the talk about strengthening gun control laws, but in reality stricter gun control would make the public a generally safer place to be.

Wintemute proposes that we enforce background checks when purchasing firearms to reduce gun crime. It offers a simple approach to a complex problem, and it makes more of a difference than some would think. As stated by Senior Contributor Tara Haelle in her Forbes article, a study done in 2016 found that states who have a law that requires background checks when purchasing firearms, prevalence of school shootings was cut in half, yet only 13 states enforced a law of it’s kind. A lack of mental health support especially in young men, bullying along with isolation, and easy access to guns has sparked an epidemic in America; we can combat this with compassion, mental health support for those who are in need, and rallying for stricter gun control laws. Enforcing laws such as background checks, having critical conversations with our youth, and making sure there is an abundance of support for troubled young men can all help reduce mass school shootings significantly. The prevalence of public shootings has gone up as of recent, and as Americans we should be actively looking for ways to advocate and contribute to the prevention of such incidents.