Preventing School Shootings
Enormous effort has been expended on addressing the threat but security can be imperfect.
Mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and now Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, are tragedies that should never disappear from the public consciousness.
Saving Lives
They are also examples of a terrible dilemma—as of July 1, 2024, there had been 413 school shootings in the United States since the assault on Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, the Washington Post reported. The 46 incidents in 2022 were the most since 1999, if not earlier, according to the newspaper.
Enormous effort has been expended on addressing the threat, says Jason Stoddard, director of school safety and security for the Charles County Public Schools in Maryland.
Over the past 25 years, school, law enforcement, and community leaders have learned from active shooter incidents and improved active assailant prevention with measures including assessments of potential student threats, he adds.
“The U.S. Secret Service has documented that more than 90% of all active shooter suspects leaked information about plots prior to attacks,” Stoddard says. “These types of assessments have been instrumental in identifying possible bad actors and providing support and completing notifications to partners that need the information to investigate these types of situations.”
Another widely used method in K-12 schools are anonymous reporting systems, Stoddard says. This allows individuals to inform authorities of potential threats without “fear of identification,” he notes.
Many school districts over the last quarter century have also established school safety director roles often filled by emergency response professionals, according to Stoddard.
“Security directors are the coach that brings together the different portions of the school system (IT, instruction, supervision, facilities) with the vendors, public safety officials, integrators, [and] so on. In systems where a security director has been appointed and provided the required authority and access up and down the chain of command, school safety systems have improved.”
Large amounts of state and federal grant money in the past 25 years have also funded physical security and technology to safeguard K-12 schools, through measures including security guards, metal detectors, camera systems, panic buttons, doors that can be locked from the inside, and buildings with fewer entries, Stoddard says.
One of the latest technological responses is the artificial intelligence gun detection system ZeroEyes, which is deployed at K-12 schools and many other locations across the United States, from shopping malls to Fortune 500 corporate campuses to Department of Defense facilities.
The system uses video cameras enhanced by AI, which share images with a remote operating center staffed at all times by specially trained U.S. military and law enforcement veterans.
“Why have a security camera that just sits there doing nothing?” asks former Navy SEAL Sam Alaimo, ZeroEyes co-founder and chief revenue officer. “Why not have that thing detect a gun before the shots are fired?”
Alaimo says that perhaps the most important service ZeroEyes provides is accurate source information about a gun danger or shooter event earlier and better than eyewitnesses are likely to provide.
Other technology-based security techniques cited by sources interviewed for this article include advanced metal detectors, integrated security systems featuring security guards and other technologies, and social media and internet threat monitoring.
“The ability to monitor not only an individual’s online community but also their dark web activity can help detect violent escalation,” says Graeme Hudson, associate director for all hazards response, crisis, and security consulting at security risk management firm Crisis24.
Imperfect Security
The May 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed and 17 others injured, demonstrated that all these methods can still fail. The school district there had a safety plan, substantial safety official staffing, and a social media monitoring and threat reporting system. Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies have also been criticized for failing to quickly confront the 18-year-old shooter upon arriving at the school.
The danger also extends beyond the mass shootings experienced by communities such as Newtown, Uvalde, and Winder.
“Community-based gun violence is a growing threat to schools,” Stoddard says. “Since the reopening of schools after COVID, we have seen the number of gang-related incidents, domestic violence, community-related violence, and escalation of assaults to gun violence within our schools increase.”
These incidents are harder to predict and react to than active assailant shootings and require different strategies, Stoddard says. He emphasizes the value of anonymous reporting about threats and weapons but says behavior threat assessments or other standard prevention methods are less likely to catch a spur-of-the moment act targeting a particular person or group.
“Further, physical strategies such as window film, AI-driven gun detection, shot spotter, and other target hardening strategies will not prevent these events,” according to Stoddard.
High-tech security is also not necessarily the full answer, he adds. While these systems may function as advertised, he worries about investing limited funds to deploy advanced technologies when there are frequently major holes in more basic aspects of active shooter preparedness, such as being able to lock school doors from the inside or having good communication systems for those in the building.
The roots of such violence also must be addressed through the much harder work of addressing underlying socioeconomic drivers, Stoddard notes. “To reduce the risk of community-based gun violence, prevention strategies likely must include more of the community, likely need to include more social emotional learning especially at a young age, as well as changes to backpack rules, dress codes, or even exploring weapons detection at an entry control point,” Stoddard says.
