(Image Credit: KeterMagick at Morguefile)
For the past two weeks I have been examining the U.S. News and World Report Timeline of School Shootings first published February 15, 2008. I have been working through their list one incident at a time, using online resources to piece together the basic facts.
This slow, painstaking process is gradually leading me away from the common assumptions (of both Right and Left) about school shootings. It is becoming obvious that both sides have selected a single idea- for example, "Guns are Good!" or "Guns are Bad!"- and then assembled a list of shootings whose circumstances appear to support that idea.
This is akin to a scientist deciding that red M&M candies cause cancer and then "proving" it by only collecting data on cancer patients who ate red M&Ms. The methodology might be shaky but the logic is seductive.
You can see a hint of this type of seductive logic in the U.S. News and World Report list. It shows up at the most basic level: before we can examine what causes a school shooting, we have to define what a school shooting is.
The definition on the U.S. News and World Report list seems a bit broad and disorganized. For example, it includes the controversial Kent State shootings in 1970, when U.S. National Guard soldiers fired antiwar demonstrators at Ohio's Kent State University.
Kent State was (and is) a school, there were guns and there was shooting. But does this incident really qualify? The shooters were trained soldiers called in by state authorities after days of violent unrest, not a troubled teen or young adult opening fire without warning on a campus.
Another example on the list is the infamous Newark School Yard Killings, which took place on August 4, 2007. The bodies of three young college students were found shot, execution style, on the playground of the K-8 Mount Vernon School in Newark, NJ. (One victim survived.)
Although the shooting did take place on school grounds, neither the killers nor the victims attended the school. The victims were also robbed and sexually assaulted. The incident also took place late on a Saturday night, not during school hours, and was found to be gang-related. It might just as easily have happened in a public park or in an alley. Does the school backdrop alone qualify it as a "school shooting?" If so, why?
Before we can take effective steps to protect our schools we have to be honest about our definition of "school shooting." The kinds of solutions that work for reducing gang violence or promoting nonlethal riot control are not likely to work in an actual school situation.
No matter how tempting it might be to expand the list by including them.
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