A Leading School Shootings Researcher Says He Was Wrong

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

But that is exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation’s leading scholars of school violence and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow 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 policymakers 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 initiatives have benefited students in many ways. Fewer students report bringing guns or knives to school, and schools have generally become safer.

But school shootings have not declined.

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

That shift came after he stepped back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two stark graphs. One traced a steady decline in students bringing weapons to California schools over the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The other graph showed a sharp rise in school shootings across the nation.

The graphs capture a painful realization. Astor says he and other researchers had misunderstood what was driving 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 decline if educators reduced bullying and strengthened relationships among students locally, one school building at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention.”

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

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

“Most of them are suicidal, and they decided to be homicidal so that they would be remembered,” Astor said.

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

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

Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions or spates of terrorism, where extensive publicity can inspire copycats. He acknowledges that it’s a long shot to persuade social media companies or the dark web to change, and he cannot prove that changing will work to reduce school shootings. “But it’s worth a try,” he said.

What makes Astor’s argument noteworthy isn’t simply his new hypothesis. It’s his willingness to publicly abandon an old one after concluding that the evidence no longer supported it. It’s never easy to change course but Astor’s openness could save lives.

This story about preventing school shootings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.