In the Headlines: Kids Shooting Kids at School

There have been a couple of headline stories recently about K-12 school shootings involving minor shooters (a 15-year-old Kentucky boy and 12-year-old L.A. girl). School violence is always disturbing, but the idea of school children shooting each other is especially upsetting. I began to wonder just how common it really was and what steps at prevention we could take short of armed guards. I found some interesting research by Everytown for Gun Safety on K-12 shootings between 2013 and 2015. In that period, an average of two school shootings took place at K-12 schools each month, and, among the shootings in which the age of the shooter was known, 56% (39 of 70) were perpetrated by minors under age 18. Before parents of elementary-school children begin looking askance at their child's classmates, note that it is still rare for a child under the age of 14 to kill anyone, and especially rare for that homicide to take place at school. Approximately 74 children under age 14 commit murder in the United States each year, per other 2017 research. This is less than 1% of all homicide perpetrators. The majority (90%) are boys between the ages of 11 and 14. However, 75% of the time, the child kills someone older, not a school classmate. The older victim/victims are most often relatives (usually a parent or grandparent), adults shot during the commission of crime (usually a robbery or break-in), or victims killed in gang violence. But even one incident of a kid shooting up a school is one tragedy too many. How do we protect children from armed children? The research shows that children's access to guns is a big part of the problem. Guns are the weapon of choice for all child school shooters, about 60% of the time, per Everytown. When the source of the gun was known, more than half of young shooters obtained the gun at home—often because an adult did not store it locked and unloaded. Also, nearly one in six of Everytown's studied school shootings occurred after a confrontation or verbal argument intensified because of the presence of a gun, rather than in spite of it. In fact, the surprise is that more violence does not occur at schools given the common presence of guns on school grounds. A survey by the U.S. Department of Education found that, during the 2009-2010 school year, one in every 30 K-12 schools took serious disciplinary action against at least one student for use or possession of a firearm on school property. For more school shooting research, see https://everytownresearch.org/reports/analysis-of-school-shootings/

Mass Shootings' Only Mystery: The Motive

After the Las Vegas massacre of concert-goers by a heavily armed gunman firing from high in a hotel, it dawned on me that, while there are often fictional treatments of family annihilators or terrorist attackers, mystery writers rarely dwell on the more typical American mass murderer represented by the Las Vegas shooter: a white male using legally purchased firearms. Of course, the who-done-it element is missing, since the shooters are almost always captured or suicides. Second, the means is known; only details on the extent of planning, the existence of confederates, police response, etc., are hashed out after the fact. The victimology and opportunity can offer some hope of detection and prevention if there is a relationship to the killer or his expressed grudge, such as a gathering of workplace, racial, governmental, religious, or familial "enemies." But what if the killer chooses strangers in a place that optimizes kill zone, as in the Las Vegas, 2012 Sandy Hook elementary and 1966 Austin clock tower massacres? Then the opportunity becomes any time and anywhere people gather, and the victims are anybody. So the only mystery left to decipher is the motive. The "armed white male" can be amended to "angry armed white male" or "disturbed armed white male," but what explains the destructive fury? In this country, there are a lot of unhappy loners, losers and loonies, and many own scary arsenals. They all don't aim their bullets at crowds. Unfortunately, no matter how deeply we dig for motive, for a "trigger event," grievance, violent creed or mental aberration, that mass shooting motive is likely to remain incomplete or incomprehensible. So mystery fiction, without satisfying solution or justice to offer, avoids this kind of crime. But the real world pays a terrible penalty for ignoring mass shootings. It's time to talk about the fact that, on average, there is a mass shooting (4+ victims including shooter) every day in America. While dwelling on the everyman "who" and the unknowable "why" is likely to be nonproductive and nonpredictive, we can discuss the very concrete "how." For more about the reality, not the fiction, of gun violence, see these statistics: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts