Armed With Reason: The Podcast - Episode 26
David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database
David Riedman (photo courtesy of David Riedman)
Today’s new podcast is an in-depth and often alarming discussion with David Riedman, Founder and Independent Researcher at K-12 School Shooting Database, and a podcast host himself.
As his organization’s name states, Riedman has been committed for six years now to keeping an updated database of all manner of school shootings in the United States. As he explains in this interview though, the base definition and research around what a school shooting even entails has never been officially codified — federally or within states — which leads to the chaotic and misguided attempts to fix this growing problem. Add in the fact that domestic violence situations and suicides are often not added into school shooting statistics, plus the impossibly inane ideas of hardening schools and arming teachers are all covered in eye-opening detail.
You can listen to the podcast via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Caitlin: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us here on the Armed With Reason podcast brought to you by GVPedia. Today is our third and final back to school-themed episode. And I must admit I have some mixed emotions about the topic for today, because while the information is critical as a parent, I don't think I'll ever be able to fully accept the fact that we live in a country where such a data collection tool has to exist. But it is our reality. And I'm very grateful to our guest for the work that he has contributed to this field.
Today, we're speaking with David Riedman, who is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database. He's also chief data officer at a global risk management firm and a tenure track professor. He hosts a weekly podcast appropriately named Back to School Shootings. And publishes articles in the school shooting data analysis and reports substack. So David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to speak with us today.
David: Yeah, unfortunately, this is a topic that becomes relevant again, you know, this year. And yeah, there's the tragedy at Apalachee High School that so many people are familiar with. But, you know, there have been a dozen or more shootings at other schools and these first couple weeks of the year.
Caitlin: Right. I think every school year, maybe there's some hope that something has changed and that our students will be safer. But unfortunately the reality is that that's not the case. So, I'm going to segue into our first question here, which is what motivated you to get into this line of work and start the school shooting database?
David: This was a project that I never intended to work on. It wasn't a topic or even an approach that I had considered. I was in a post graduate think tank program at the at the Naval Postgraduate School, and it was focused on emerging homeland security issues, and thinking about the challenges that we would face as emergency management and security practitioners over the next decade. And as I was sitting in a classroom, the Parkland shooting occurred. And I'd been working in homeland security for, you know, more than 15 years at that point. And I'd been to countless briefings about the Boston Marathon bombing or other terrorist attacks where two people were killed, or no people were killed, or it was a near-miss. And I had never heard a homeland security community discussion around school shootings. Yet there were 17 kids killed in that school, 17 more injured. That is a major national level, international level incident.
So I originally was interested in using some of the threat assessment tools from counterterrorism and applying them to school shootings. And there have been lots of people that have taken ideas and technology and policies and procedures and armed security and so on from the terrorism realm or the military realm; and they've said, let's just apply this to schools. But when I came up with an idea and a concept for what a threat assessment tool might look like, I wanted to test it against all of the prior incidents. How many incidents would this actually stop? How many shooters would this actually identify?
And what it turned out is that information wasn't available. So everybody that was implementing school security strategies, from Columbine all the way up through Parkland, was just taking guesses. They were just making up solutions. So the school shooting database started as just a spreadsheet of incidents to say, would this threat assessment tool have worked here? Yes or no? And from there it turned into a data collection effort because there were far more school shootings than I expected. There were far more suicides at schools than I expected. Actually, there was this entire scope of gun violence on school property that wasn't being captured anywhere.
So then the project shifted from being creating a threat assessment tool to just capturing data about school shootings. And unfortunately, there are so many incidents, so many threats, so many averted attacks, even, you know, thousands of guns found in schools every year, that just doing this data collection is a six-year project that I work on every day, and is nowhere close to over.
Caitlin: Yeah, I would imagine in the beginning it was hard to even know where to start. Probably so much information that's terribly overwhelming and probably a little discouraging. You know, we hear about the biggest incidents at schools, but like you said, there's so many things that aren't being, information that's not being collected or being reported on.
David: But think one of the biggest shocks to me when I started the research collection process is I was, you know, in middle school when Columbine happened. That was something that that defined my time in school, that kind of defined generations. And people talking about since Columbine, or how everything changed since Columbine, or Columbine was the first school shooting. I've recorded 230 planned attacks at schools all the way back to 1966. And there have been planned attacks pretty much every year. And looking at the highest casualty attacks, roughly half of them happened before Columbine. So we actually have a much broader issue than people realize.
This is a truly multi-generational American issue that's affected every sized community, every part of the country, every different economic class, demographics. It is an American issue that can happen at any school tomorrow.
Caitlin: What would you say is the most critical thing that the database has taught you over the years?
David: It's another finding that I didn't expect. And I went into this project looking to find out information about planned attacks. But every time you're searching through newspaper archives or extensive Google searches for keywords around gun in school, students shot, what it turned out is there were lots of students that were shot that were not during planned attacks. There were actually suicides, and domestics, and accidents. And what kept coming up over and over in the '60s ,and '70s, and '80s, and '90s, and the 2000s, the 2010s, and then still today is students are shot during fights at school.
So there's a dispute; a student happens to be carrying a gun; they didn't plan to shoot anyone that day; they didn't have a hit list, or a manifesto, or the motivation to cause mass casualties. They're carrying a gun. And when they get in a fight with someone, that fight turns into a shooting. And it might be a bystander student or multiple bystander students who are shot in the hallway. And these escalations of disputes are far more pervasive than even the planned attacks. And looking at the last couple of years, the number of school shootings from, you know, the 2010s compared to now, now is ten times as many incidents every year. It's gone from about 30 incidents a year for a 50-year period to more than 300 in the last three years. And that increase is almost all because students are carrying guns and they're shooting somebody when they get into a fight. It's not planned attacks. It's not things that behavioral threat assessment team would see. It's a kid who's a habitual gun carrier, gets into a dispute, and in the heat of the moment, they start firing shots. That happens every single day somewhere in the country.
Caitlin: I apologize. I probably should have started with this question. But can you tell us quickly what you use to define a "school shooting?"
David: That's very difficult. And that's really, you know, the heart of this project. You know, if you want to drop it in the show notes, there's a recent published paper that explores all of the different definitions of school shootings and why there are all of these different definitions. And really, it comes down to the federal government should have taken leadership, should have taken a role in collecting data about gun violence in schools and violence in schools in general. But the federal government doesn't collect that data. There's no unified collection strategy at the state level. There's no specific law about school shootings, or active shooters, or mass shootings. Those are all just colloquial terms that aren't, you know, defined by any government agency or any legal precedent.
So ultimately, if you're a researcher and you're doing data collection, whatever you decide something is is going to shape every other piece of research that's based on that data. So I didn't want to be somebody that's going to introduce my biases into other research. If I say a shooting that's a suicide doesn't matter, that's me deciding that that's a data point that I'm going to take out of this. If it's a shot that was fired and it just missed someone, that's just chance. They could have been killed, they could have been wounded, or maybe it missed. A gun was still fired. So I'm now deciding, was that an important shooting or not?
So what I decided to do is just go with the most basic, inclusive definition possible. A gun fired on school property any time of day, any reason, any day of the week. Because what someone else can do is go into the database, download the spreadsheet. If you're not interested in shootings at night, that's a category you can sort by night and click delete. And now that's deleted from whatever analysis you want to run. If you're not interested in suicides, you can select suicide. Hit delete on the spreadsheet. That takes somebody five seconds. Trying to find every suicide that happened at a school in the last 60 years is an effort that takes weeks. So my goal is give as much information as possible. Any shooting that has a nexus to that school campus that's occurring on school property is something that I record. And that enables hundreds of other people who've published with this data to then use it for their own purposes and filter it however they want.
Devin: Yeah. And that kind of reminds me of just the broader discussion, debate over gun violence as well, where you'll have like lots of people talking about how it's like, Oh well, suicide shouldn't count, or if it's gang violence that shouldn't count, or it's just like, all right, well, in the end, what does count for you? And it's interesting as well that you mentioned that many of the school shootings, and it's a rising category, are due to arguments. And that's one of the things that I've seen in gun violence data overall. And even like mass shootings, depending on how you define them, it's still mostly argument based. It's not planned gang turf wars, it's not people who spent months researching and then going to attack. It's just some sort of fight escalates. And what would in previous years have been a fistfight or something, because of guns involved, people reach for what's available, and it's vastly more likely to turn lethal if the gun's involved.
And also given the scope of your work going back 60 years, I'm kind of curious, because one criticism of many existing databases tracking almost any form of gun violence is that, well, it's not that incidents are really increasing. it's just that there's more media coverage now, and it's much harder to retroactively find like "minor incidents." So how do you approach this potential problem in your work? Whereas just the further you go back, the harder it may be to find incidents.
David: Yeah, that's just a limitation of the research that you need to be transparent about. And I also recently recorded an episode with a criminologist who specializes as a methodologist, and we spoke extensively about how you overcome limitations and flaws in data. And that's unfortunately just a situation that we have when, again, the federal government and state governments haven't taken a concerted effort to collect this information. I've spoken with police departments based on incidents that I found in the 1980s and 1990s where it seemed like from the news story, there's more information that we need to gather about this incident. Like this might have been a really significant incident, it's kind of hard to tell from the newspaper article, so I'll contact the police department and ask if I can do an open records request or if there are reports available. And police departments have reached out to about these incidents in the in the 1980s and 1990s, they say we don't have any records of it because either the police department has gone from paper records to a first hard drive electronic system, to a first server system, to a second generation server system, to a cloud server system. And they've lost records along the way. Or they only need to retain records for 20 years or 25 years. So unfortunately, even within official sources, once you get back before the 2000s, there just may not be any information that's available.
So newspaper archives, people that have reached out to me and sent me information about incidents that happened to them, funeral cards from, you know, students that were killed at a school in the '70s or the '80s — you really have to crowdsource a lot of this. In terms of looking at the rise in incidents. Almost every major newspaper in the country has been digitized since, you know, the early 2000s. So I think that there's a very accurate count of incidents from the 2000s through today. And just looking at that time period, there is unquestionably an increase after 2018. And then after 2021, when students return to school after Covid closures. And it's after 2021 when there's been this significant spike in those escalations of disputes turning into shootings. And that follows national patterns of violent crime and shootings in public. And I think that, you know, that's a data point that we can correlate eventually between a lot of other data sources, and show that it's it's a pretty valid trend that this has captured.
Devin: Kind of a side question on that, given the rise of and kind of like since 2021 spike in incidents where it's just fights escalating. Is there any geographic pattern that you've noticed with that? Because in the past few years, the only real policy that I've seen change substantially on a national scale that might impact is the rise of permitless carry. So I'm just curious if there's a correlation there or it's just kind of too small of an end to go forward and carry on any of those conclusions.
David: You know, most of these cases involve teenagers, so they're too young to be the legal gun owners in any state. And that is a much broader problem where if adult gun owners aren't required to lock their guns and securely store their guns, and then potentially face civil or criminal action if their gun is used in a crime when they weren't responsible with its storage. Kids are getting guns in schools because there was a careless adult that owned it and left it accessible — whether it was in a home or a car, even if it's stolen from your home or car, it means it wasn't locked securely there. So the kids, you know, they don't have permits to carry these guns. But what's interesting is adjusting per capita, the prevalence of shooting incidents is significantly higher in the South, in the Midwest, especially in Mississippi and Georgia and Louisiana and Tennessee. Those states by far have the highest per capita rate of shooting incidents at schools.
Devin: So there can be kind of potentially and — obviously more rigorous study should be applied — but like a trickle down effect where it's like, hey, looser gun laws for adults then might result in adult behavior being, I'm just going to leave this gun out, or like just carry it where they shouldn't get stolen, etc…
David: Well, socialization of kids and advertising to kids as well, because adults are being taught and adults are showing children that you carry a gun with you everywhere because that's the way that you protect yourself, that you need to constantly be fearing victimization. And your only way to combat victimization is if you constantly have a handgun with you. And these kids that are carrying guns habitually at school, they're not planning to shoot anybody that day. They don't have a hit list. It's that they fear victimization, and they're carrying these guns for protection.
There was a kid who was arrested just on Monday, and I saw the interview with police about that. He had a gun in his waistband inside a school. And he said that he carries the gun with him because he was fearing other students, carrying it for protection. I have another podcast with a former school police officer and a school security director in Missouri. He said kids carry guns inside the schools there every single day, and it's because they're scared of getting victimized, going to school, at school, or from school. And that's a whole different problem where gun industry advertising has taught adults that you live in fear and you carry a gun for protection. What are kids going to think?
Devin: And it's basically the defensive gun use myth being applied all the way down. And this also kind of reminds me of a trend that I've been seeing in recent years where it's like the the blending of guns and toys. Where like I was at the NRA convention in Dallas earlier this year and one of the booths there had a Barbie Kalashnikov. And when looking at it's like, is that toy or is that real? And same time I've seen ads for like ADHD fidget spinners that look and feel like guns. And there's just kind of been this blend on either side of toys that are looking more and more like real guns, and guns that are looking more and more like toys -- blending that line.
David: Yeah, I've been trying for the last year — just because I see so many Google alerts every day about students arrested with guns — to get the characteristics of, you know, students who are habitually carrying guns in schools. And talking about blending toys and guns, one of the most common guns that students are arrested with is the Taurus G2c. It's a $250 compact handgun that comes in every color you can imagine, like bright blue, and pink, and red, and neon, and all this. It's almost entirely plastic. It looks like a toy. It does not look like a gun. It's tiny. It's compact. It's difficult for a metal detector to detect because it's almost all plastic. And the next generation scanners that schools have spent millions of dollars on, they can't detect compact handguns or on their sensitivity that won't set it off for cell phones. And they can't distinguish between a cell phone and one of these, you know, super cheap plastic handguns. We've created this situation where there are incredibly cheap guns. I think most people don't realize how cheap they are. Like $250 is a grocery bill. And you can buy a gun that can kill somebody and that's lightweight and plastic, and it looks like a toy that a kid can carry around all day. And when that's normalized and your parents carry that gun or you see your older brother or sibling carrying that gun, a kid starts thinking, You know, I should carry this gun in school every day.
Devin: And I encountered that when going to a gun range in Kentucky last year as well, where like there are some of the guns, like the Colt 1911, where it's like, okay, this is clearly a gun. It has the heft and such. But then there's like the plastic ones, like you said, that can be in any color. It's like, this feels like a toy, and it shouldn't. And there's just, like, if it's not directly marketing towards kids and teenagers, it's getting awfully close.
So it's kind of closing up that tangent. And I imagine we could have dozens or hundreds of tangents here, but I'll restrain myself. Back in April, you wrote about how definitions of school shootings can vary, and you mentioned that earlier on in the podcast, and the substantial impact those definitions can have on the number of school shootings. So with that kind of range in mind, how many school shootings have occurred according to the records you keep?
David: And again, that's ultimately up to a lot of the other researchers who use this data to decide and filter. Because if you look at any time a shooting has happened on school property, I've recorded almost 2900 of those incidents and there were about 30 of those incidents every year from the 60s through the mid-2010s. Around 2018, it went up to 150. And then post-Covid, it's gone up to more than 300 every year. That's any type of shooting on school property.
Now, I have a lot of different categories that I code these incidents by. Was it a preplanned attack? So in that case, did somebody have a map, a hit list, a manifesto, had made prior threats, had told people they were intending to commit a shooting? That is something that's more akin to kind of what somebody would think of as the school shooting they see on cable news. Those incidents, there have been 230 of them. But many of those only had a couple people that were wounded or in some cases no people that were wounded. Because what happens when a kid has a thousand rounds of ammo stashed around the school? They pull a gun out, it jams during the first shot, and they get tackled. Well, it's not a mass fatality incident. There weren't four people killed. It's not a mass shooting of four people, you know, killed or wounded. It's not in some other databases because there wasn't, you know, one victim. But there is somebody that intended to commit a school shooting. They had the ammo, they had the planning, they had the capability. There just was something that went wrong at the last minute, or went right at the last minute, in a lot of these cases.
So there can be anywhere from, you know, a couple dozen incidents where four-plus people were killed at a school, all the way up to hundreds of incidents where somebody wanted to kill a lot of people at the school, but something went wrong. I categorize those as near miss incidents. And then looking across the much broader area, how many shots were there? How many times were people shot during a fight? There are about a thousand of those. And adding together everything.
Domestic violence, which is overlooked. The government reporting on mass shootings specifically excludes domestic violence. I don't understand why, because a school is one of the most vulnerable situations for a spouse who's separated from a violent partner. Because if there's a restraining order, if that person is not allowed to go near their workplace, they might have an unpredictable workplace. The thing that you know is they're going to be at this school where the kids go, and they're going to be there at a certain time for drop off and a certain time for pickup. And I've recorded more than 100 domestics, and most of them were targeting a spouse who's either working at the school or is there during pick up or drop off. That's a really important thing for schools to think about, because maybe if you have a threat assessment team, if you have security professionals, if you're doing risk assessment in a school, you should be thinking about how many partners of or how many parents of a current student either have domestic violence charges or have restraining orders against them. That's something you should have a security plan for. But if you don't collect any information, if you say domestic violence doesn't matter, then that's not even on the school's radar as something to think about.
Suicides — another thing that gets excluded from government reporting. I've recorded about 200 of those. Most of them are really public suicides. Kids kill themselves in the front of the classroom, in the cafeteria, on the stage at graduation. In Ohio, two years ago, right after Uvalde, a kid killed himself in the cafeteria. And all the students are running, they're all traumatized, and an active shooter alert goes out to parents. And so a parent grabs their gun and comes to the school thinking that they're going to stop the next Uvalde. And that parent gets into a gunpoint confrontation with police. And thankfully, nobody was shot, but that parent gets arrested on felony charges. There's no active shooter. It's a suicide in the cafeteria. But if that school doesn't have a suicide plan, doesn't think about anything other than active shooters or, you know, these mass fatality attacks, then you overlook the most common things that are really happening. So gun violence at schools, thousands of incidents; fights at schools, you know, a thousand incidents; near misses, about 400; deliberately planned, kind of carried out attacks, about 240; and ones where four or more people are killed, fortunately, are very, very rare. And there have only been a couple dozen of those over the last sixty years.
Devin: I think that's an excellent point with domestic violence as well, because like I've definitely seen reports by organizations linking domestic violence with mass shootings overall. But, I might have missed it, but I really haven't seen that report widely for school incidents and domestic violence. And it's in a particular area like pick up and drop off where no matter how much you harden the school with only one entrance — which is a terrible idea to begin with — or like have the bulletproof windows or doors locking. None of that is going to stop a domestic violence incident during pick up and drop off.
And one of the things that consistently irritates me was the whole like, Oh we just need to harden these areas, is every time you harden an area, you're creating a new weak point, because there's going to be somewhere outside of that hardened area where people are going to be entering and exiting, and you just can't continue to expand the security perimeter. And particularly if it's a targeted domestic violence type attack, that's going to happen regardless of hardening measures. And there just needs to be a more comprehensive approach and thinking like how do we prevent the domestic violence abuser from obtaining this lethal weaponry in the first place, and have warning systems there.
David: And it also overlooks the broader issue that it's very rare for a random person to commit a school shooting. Hardening schools overlooks the fact that most of the people that commit a school shooting are allowed to be there. They're allowed to be inside the hardened building. Most deliberate school shootings are committed by current students or recently former students who know the facility. They've been trained in the procedures. They probably have an access control badge, or they know the code for the door, or they know the whatever cryptic warning there's going to be about a lockdown. They know the secret knock to get into a locked classroom.
Fortification is, in terms of military theory, that's a flawed issue that we've recognized for hundreds of years. There's a reason they stopped building castles in Europe a couple hundred years ago, because a fortress actually performs very poorly against any sort of adversary who's planning an attack against it. Because as soon as you define the defenses of something, you tell somebody exactly what you need to do to defeat them. In the case of the school shooting, it's somebody who's a member of your village inside your castle, who's allowed to be there every day. They know the fortress better than the police officers do. They know the ins and outs of the campus. And just like Apalachee High, the kid knew that he could sneak the AR-15 in his backpack. He knows the school day. He knows he can leave the room and come back in. And that's the case. Most school shootings are surprise attacks that take place inside of the school building where they start. And this fortification doesn't do anything to stop that.
Devin: And also increases the risk for stuff like actual fires or other stuff. And yeah, it's just always frustrating when hearing like, Oh we just need to harden the schools and it's like you're training the potential shooter on everything as well, and it doesn't stop any of these particular threats. And adds millions of dollars in costs.
David: Yeah, and if you ignore that it's an insider attack by a current student at the school, the things you're doing might be counterproductive. So in 2019, at the Stem school in Colorado, only a couple of miles from Columbine — so a community, an area that should be really familiar with school shootings — there was a planned attack by two students. They snuck the guns into the school and they walked into a classroom. And what the classroom had on the doors is the doors were always locked, but there was a magnet strip over the door that would be on so students can go in and out. But if there's a lock down, you pull off the magnet and now the door's in the locked position. So when these two students entered the classroom with guns in a guitar case and a backpack, the first thing they did was peel the magnet strip so that the security guards and other people couldn't get into that classroom to stop them. And then the shooting starts inside the classroom.
So now schools have drug house-style fortified doors with drop bars where there's no patrol police officer who has the tools to get through that kind of door. You're going to need the Swat team to blow it off with explosives or, you know, to drive a vehicle through the wall. And you're not realizing that a student who wants to commit a school shooting, most and end in the same room. You've now created a barrier that's going to stop help from getting there. And look at just what a closed door did in Uvalde. And schools are putting fortified drug-house doors that you can't break down into classrooms without realizing, without looking at the data that school shootings start in classrooms. It's crazy.
Devin: And sort of extending off of that, one of the things at GVPedia that we heavily focus on is countering the gun lobby's firehose of falsehood and disinformation in general. And kind of extending off this, what are some of the most common pieces of disinformation that you encounter in your work?
David: This came up in the aftermath of Apalachee and a lot of the political statements about this, saying school shootings happened because schools are "soft targets." My formal education is in terrorism and counterterrorism and national security. Soft target is a term that became popular after 911 for a public place that a terrorist group might try to target; a public place where they'd have the highest probability of likelihood for committing mass casualties. A terrorist group is trying to do something that is going to have impact, that's going to get attention, that's going to push a political agenda, and strengthen the standing of their group. So they want to do highly visible actions for that.
School shooters, teenage school shooters are not transnational terrorist group members. They don't have a social identity tied to a group's broader issues with society and the agenda that they're trying to move forward. These are kids that have sustained a trauma that's linked to the school. It's not resolved, and they develop a grievance. And as the grievance grows, it becomes violence that's directed at that school because they see that as their only pathway to be heard, and to be noticed, and to take action against this kind of perceived grievance against them. It's highly personal. They are not thinking about other places. The school is the only target. There's no deterrent factor that adding a guard or a gun or a gate or lights or a biometric sensor — none of those things change it because the school was their only target all along. Completely different from terrorism.
So we've taken these terrorism theories from 25 years ago, and we've applied them to school shootings without anyone understanding the difference between terrorists versus teenage school shooters who have a personal grievance. That is this incredible falsehood, that somehow an armed person, an armed teacher, an armed guard, a building that looks like a castle. This is going to drive away the school shooter? No it's not, because the school shooter is a member of that school, and their only interest is in attacking that school. They really don't even care how many people they hurt or kill. They ultimately want to die during the attack. It's a violent public suicide. And that's one of the theories that based on peer reviewed research, when there's a school shooting in a building with an armed guard, there are three times as many fatalities as when there's not an armed guard on campus. So it actually may be something where you're making it even more of an incentive because that school shooter thinks this is a fair fight. I'm going to go out in this blaze of glory. I'm going to die at the hands of the school police officer. You may be just incentivizing that school as a target for a young person with a grievance against it.
Devin: It's the whole gun-free zone myth that's been applied to mass shootings in general, and is based off of actual data fraud, and just a complete misunderstanding. Even with mass shootings more broadly, it's grievance targeted. There are very rare shootings where it's trying to maximize casualties. It's a grievance and specifically targeted towards that. And it's just this whole mythos around that further feeds into, Oh if we just have more guns to prevent this person, they'll be deterred and never do it, it's like no that's not the psychology behind it. That's not any of the research behind it.
David: So the terrorism theories are misapplied. And then in a lot of the political statements right after the Georgia school shooting, you know, a prominent candidate said we need to stop psychos from thinking they can walk into schools. Well, there's no nexus between diagnosed mental illness and school shootings. Most often it's people that are completely lucid during the shooting. It's somebody that has spent months or even years making a really calculated plan about the attack. They may be suicidal, they may be depressed, but they're not people that are in psychosis or suffering from schizophrenia or severe mental illness.
And then the thought that it's this psychotic person coming in. There's this illusion that a school shooter is an outsider. It's this crazy outside person. And if we just have a locked door and a school police officer that can kill them when they show up on the campus, then that's going to solve this problem. Well, that almost never happens. It's somebody who's either allowed to be there or knows that campus inside and out because they're a former student or somebody in that community. So they're not crazy. They're not deterred by security or fortifications. They want to die, and they know the campus. So that's this myth. Scary, mentally ill outsider. It is not true. And building fortification of schools and putting money into stopping that imagined scenario is completely counterproductive.
Devin: And before I turn it back over to Caitlin for the final couple of questions, that tends to also mirror the myths around gun violence in general. And whenever you look at political statements, it's like, Oh it's this outside group. Right now it's focusing on immigrants, or Democrats in blue cities, or it's always like this crazy outsider theory that's causing it. Whereas in reality it's domestic violence. It's the people you know. It's deeply personal. And then it's accelerated and accentuated by the presence of a firearm.
And when you look at the U.S. versus other countries, we have vaguely the same general rates of simple crimes, like fistfights and stuff like that. And if you ever go to England, they have vastly more. It's like there's a soccer game, and then afterwards it's like, all right who can I go punch? But it stays at that low level where lethality is very rare. But then in the U.S., we add on top of all those potential personal grievances, firearms that make things substantially more lethal. And so it's just an entire, as you've mentioned, miscalibrated application of deterrence theory, terrorism, and such to something that's not that. And it leads to wrong conclusions.
David: It leads to deadly conclusions. Because if you invent this idea of a psychotic outsider, then you might think it's a good idea to arm teachers inside a classroom because these teachers are going to protect these kids against that psychotic outsider. But when you realize that the school shooter might be a six-year-old kid with a gun in Richneck, Virginia. You have a six-year-old kid in a classroom. And if you have an armed teacher in that classroom, is that armed teacher supposed to shoot and kill a six-year-old kid in their classroom? Or a ten-year-old kid, or 12 year-old kid, or a 14-year old? Whatever the case is, school shootings most often are students at the school. And if you realize they're students at the school, you're putting a teacher into a position of in a split second, making the decision to take a life of one of their students, and do that inside the most dangerous environment possible. like a teacher needs to, in a split second, see a six-year-old pull a gun out of a backpack, get into the mental state of I'm going to kill this six-year old, and then accurately fire with a handgun with just a couple of hours of training maybe or maybe even no training, You're going to fire in a crowded classroom, somehow not hit any of the other six-year olds, and then that's going to be chalked up as a success?
Devin: Yeah, like, mission accomplished, normal day teaching, which it's just a mind boggling, very sad theory. And speaking of that sad theory, like four or five days ago there's this headline at Real Clear Politics, a very right-wing publication, says, "Don't blame parents for school shootings, arm teachers." And I think we can all guess who the author of that piece was. But yeah, it's just insane.
David: Yeah, once you break down the fantasies, you realize that these multi-billion dollar investments are completely misguided. That the idea that more guns in the school are going to somehow make it safer. And that completely ignores everything I see in my Google alerts. They're guns found inside schools. They're people that lose guns. They're school resource officers who accidentally fire guns. They're staff members who accidentally fire guns. They're parents who accidentally fire guns. You're creating incredible risk. You're creating an insurance liability. You have a situation where a teacher now isn't thinking about being a teacher. They're thinking all day long about either being mentally ready to kill one of their students, and then you've put them in in these situations where they may have to kill a kid. They may have to think if there's a fight in the classroom, do I start shooting?
We've jumped to the highest level in the police continuum of use of force in the classroom without any training, without any supplies, without any of the education and knowledge and hands-on training that police officers have. We've said, you you are going to jump to deadly force without having anything that a police officer puts into trying to prevent a situation from getting there.
Devin: And then we're going to pay that teacher minimum wage, force them to buy their their supplies, and then ban what books that they're going to teach. But at least they can use lethal force. Now, Caitlin, over to you. After my ranting on this.
Caitlin: Well, my own personal tangent. The hardening of schools and classrooms, like you said, doors closing and locking behind you. We are forgetting a real threat that is present everywhere, which is what happens when there's a fire in your classroom, right? The fuel load, the fact that fires burn hotter and faster than they ever have before, your ability to get out of a space is severely limited. It's very short, especially when you're trying to corral 20 kids outside of a classroom. And we've just put a teacher and those students in a scenario where — whether it's smoke inhalation or burns or whatever — but by the time you get that door open, nobody inside is going to have survived that. Especially when there are certain schools that are teaching that when you hear the fire alarm, don't leave.
David: Yeah, Tennessee passed a law saying schools can't be evacuated until staff confirm a fire alarm. And your scenario also overlooks that about 15% of students in the U.S. have some sort of access or functional needs, and most of them can't open or operate a lot of these doors that now have non-NFPA compliant pushers and closers. So if you have doors that automatically lock, can a kid in a wheelchair, can a kid with limited vision, are they able to navigate that building at all? That's something that's been completely forgotten.
And then what's far more common, unfortunately, than shootings is assaults and sexual assaults in schools. And if you put a lock on every door, then that can be a situation where a student is raped inside, when other people either don't see it or can't get in to help them; that a student that is going to be beat up by another group of students, all you have to do is go into a classroom and shut the door behind you. That unfortunately there are school police officers, there are teachers that rape and molest and sexually abused students. Now they have a locked door, and a door without a window in a lot of schools where they now have a completely private space where there's no way for that student to get help. People are missing, you know, the highest likelihood for these incredibly improbable kind of imaginary scenarios that have been created.
Caitlin: Well, now that we've talked about all the things that don't work, what sort of sort of change should we be championing in order to truly make our schools safer?
David: The number one biggest thing is children and teenagers can't buy guns. They can't legally carry guns. They can't go to a store and get a gun. So any time a teenager, a kid has a gun at school, that is a legally owned weapon that somebody wasn't accountable for. So there needs to be mandatory storage laws where guns are kept secure, safe, ammo separate. And if the gun is not stored in that safe, there needs to be criminal and civil liability for the legal owner of the weapon.
Now in terms of when things have gone wrong and a kid does have a gun or a kid does want to commit a shooting, whether it's guns found at schools, averted plots near misses, overwhelmingly, the most common circumstance is that a classmate knows there's a problem and they give a tip to school administrators or teachers or some adult that they trust in that community. More than half of the guns found in schools come from tips. I have a study that's in peer review right now of 125 averted attacks. More than 80% of those averted attacks came from a tip from a classmate. So you need to have an environment where the students are willing to say something when there's a problem And if they feel like they're being treated like a criminal every day, if they feel like they have to go through a metal detector, and a pat down, and wear a clear backpack, and practice a lockdown drill every month where they're hiding in the corner — that kid does not feel like they are in a safe, trusted environment. So we need kids to be comfortable reporting, be comfortable saying something.
And then for that to work, we need to not criminalize or have zero tolerance policy when it's related to a weapon or a threat. Because a kid doesn't want to ruin the life of one of their friends. A parent doesn't want to ruin the life of their own child or another child. They just want to stop violence from happening. Zero tolerance discipline means that a kid is not going to graduate. You don't graduate it's a high correlate to being a lifetime criminal. Early justice intervention. So being arrested as a juvenile is the strongest correlate to being a lifetime incarcerated offender. So if you arrest a kid for a gun, for a threat, for a tip, you're creating a lifetime criminal. So we need to take those tips, take that supportive environment and put it into crisis intervention programs where figure out the root cause, figure out why this kid has a gun, figure out why this kid has a grievance. Address those things at the community level. Fix them at the community level. And then that person isn't going to want to resort to violence. We don't want to create lifetime criminals.
Caitlin: I don't know if this is petrifying, this conversation, or enlightning or a combination of the two, but we certainly appreciate your time and doing a deep dive into all of this. Here at GVPedia, we really strive to make sure that the facts are what's out there, and that disinformation and misinformation are are not what prevails. So we really appreciate your time. And we're wondering if you just want to give a pitch as to where listeners can learn more about the K-12 School Shooting Database in case they have any more questions.
David: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. So I'm sure it'll be in the show notes, but K-12 school shooting database — you can search it on Google, k12ssdb.org. It's also @k12ssdb on all the different social media channels. k12ssdb on Substack. You can also just search my name on Substack, and I publish weekly the articles in a podcast there as well. So thank you all so much.
Caitlin: Yes. So hopefully you aren't busy. We hope you have a very quiet school year.
David: I hope so too, But unfortunately, that's probably not the case.
Caitlin: Absolutely. Thank you.