We are long past the time when we can consider school shootings to be isolated events – tragic moments of an unusually disturbed person slipping through the cracks and unleashing havoc.
Just counting the actual school shootings this year – 3 per week – does not even include the thwarted events in Everett and California.
We have a chronic and progressive cultural phenomenon, and to respond to it we need to begin to think about it in blunt and real terms: How many more shootings are likely to occur this year? If nothing changes, what is the body count we should anticipate? In other words, how many children’s lives could be saved if our politicians actually did something other than blow smoke and wait for the anger to die down?
Obviously, we lack the nuanced psychological and sociological research to make accurate predictions. What percentage of children truly have suicidal-homicidal thoughts? What percentage of them are likely to move into an active state?
A thought experiment might help us in the early stages of quantifying the situation.
- There are currently 41,731,233 teenagers in the US
- Let’s say 1% are extremely disaffected. A very conservative estimate, if you know teenagers. These are just the ones with suicidal-homicidal thoughts (as opposed to suicidal thoughts, which are much more common). That is 417,000 individuals.
- Staying conservative, let’s say 1% of kids with suicidal-homicidal thoughts have shifted to highly active fantasizing about shooting. Maybe they are “training” by playing call of duty and imagining classmate faces. Perhaps they are reviewing the details and methods of previous shooters. They are acquiring or figuring out how to acquire their arsenal. That’s 4,170 kids in strong fantasy/early planning stages.
- If just 1% of those kids shift into go-mode in the next year, that would mean we should expect 41 school shooting attempts in the next year.
Thinking about the problem in this way points to the urgency, immediacy, and predictability of the problem. It shows why the activism is bubbling out of our high schools – it is simple self-defense. These kids know they are fish in a barrel, at the mercy of thousands of dangerous individuals, unknown in their midst, who have access to a nearly unlimited arsenal of war.
We will never have precogs, a la Minority Report, who will be able to see which disaffected individuals are about to break, and swoop in and stop the crime before it happens. People who blame “mental health” and law enforcement are imagining, literally, science fiction.
Arming teachers and “hardening the target” is an idea that would be laughably bad if it weren’t so scary. For some of these kids, who are going for the record books, this just adds to the challenge and the “glory” they hope to achieve.
Reducing the arsenal, and individuals access to it, is the only viable solution.