Prominent researcher on school shootings says he was wrong Clio

Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-held ideas has failed.

But that’s exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of America’s leading experts on school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told fellow researchers at the April annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

“We were wrong,” Astor told the audience.

For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national policy makers and issued recommendations. Schools have responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling, and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.

These initiatives have benefited students in several ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools have generally become safer.

But school shootings have not decreased.

“I completely changed” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.

This change happened after he took a step back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two striking graphics. One tracked a steady decline in the number of students bringing guns into California schools in the quarter century since the Columbine, Colorado, high school massacre. The other chart shows a sharp increase in school shootings across the country.

Divergent trends

The graphics capture a painful realization. Astor said he and other researchers had misunderstood what caused many school shootings.

Astor noted that many school shooters had been bullied, were bullies themselves, or had experienced trauma, and he believed that shootings would decrease if educators reduced bullying and strengthened relationships among students at the local level, one school at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention. »

“What I think was missing was that every shooter wanted to make sure it was national,” Astor said. “Their number one audience was the media. That’s very clear to me now.”

Astor now believes that many perpetrators are motivated by a desire for notoriety. Shooters study previous massacres, learn from online communities and look for the publicity that follows a mass attack.

“Most of them are suicidal and they decided to commit homicide to be remembered,” Astor said.

This new way of thinking led him to a very different recommendation. Rather than focusing on prevention in schools, Astor believes journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce focus on perpetrators, delay the release of manifestos and videos, and focus more media coverage on victims.

“I’m not saying don’t do social-emotional or anti-gun efforts,” Astor said. “These things are important. But if we want to see a reduction in school shootings, we have to work with the media.”

Astor likens school shootings to suicide contagions or waves of terrorism, where widespread publicity can inspire imitators. He acknowledges that it’s difficult to persuade social media companies or the dark web to change, and he can’t prove that change will help reduce school shootings. “But it’s worth a try,” he said.

What makes Astor’s argument remarkable is not simply its new hypothesis. It’s about his willingness to publicly abandon an old system after concluding that the evidence no longer supported it. It’s never easy to change course, but Astor’s open-mindedness could save lives.

Contact staffwriter Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about prevent school shootings was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Register for Proof points and others Hechinger Newsletters.

The article Prominent School Shooting Researcher Says He Was Wrong appears first in the Hechinger Report.