Leading School Shooting Researcher Says He Was Wrong

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

But that’s exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the country’s leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in front of other researchers at the annual meeting in April 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 responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.

Those programs have benefited the students in many ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools are generally safer.

But school shootings did not go down.

“I had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.

That change happened after he stepped back to look at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two solid graphs. One follows a steady decline in students bringing weapons to California schools in the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. Another graph showed a sharp increase in school shootings across the country.

Different trends

The graphs capture the painful realization. Astor says he and other researchers have not understood what causes so many school shootings.

Astor noted that many school shooters were abused, were bullies themselves or had experienced trauma, and believed that shootings would decrease if teachers reduced bullying and strengthened relationships among local students, one school building at a time. “We were tough,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention.”

“What was missing, I believe, was that each shooter wanted to make sure that this was national,” said Astor. “Their main audience was the media. That’s really clear to me now.”

Astor now believes that many criminals are driven by a desire for recognition. Shooters study past massacres, learn from online communities and seek public exposure following mass attacks.

“Most of them kill themselves, they decided to be killed to be remembered,” said Astor.

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

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

Astor compares school shootings to the contagion of suicides or terrorist outbreaks, where widespread publicity can encourage copycats. He admits it’s a tall order to persuade social media companies or the dark web to change, and he can’t prove that change will work to reduce school shootings. “But we have to try,” he said.

What makes Astor’s argument remarkable is not just his innovative perspective. It is his willingness to publicly denounce the old after concluding that the evidence no longer supports it. It’s never easy to change course but Astor’s openness can save lives.

This story is about to prevent school shootings was produced by The Hechinger reporta non-profit, independent media organization covering education. Sign up Evidence Points and so on Hechinger newsletters.