School Shootings - a Crime Event

Chapter summary by Alana Parker

School Shootings and Guns

By Wayne Petherick, Brent Turvey and Jared Kreeger

From ‘Crime and Deviance‘, 2009

School shootings are not an occurring crime event linked to a specific area of the world. The United States have had the greatest issue in the world where most of the school shootings have taken Place and where the highest number of victims of such crimes have been recorded. Banning ownership of firearms is not a possibility as it is a constitutional right to be in possession of such weapons. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that even if firearms could be banned or placed under more strict regulations in the US, the homicidal rates would most likely remain constant, and thus the nation remaining as the country with the “highest homicide rate of any advanced industrial nation” (p.232).

So what defines a school shooter? According to the chapter, a school shooter is “an individual who enters an academic institution or environment and begins firing a weapon, resulting in one or more victims being killed or wounded” (p.232). Even though the media covers school shootings extensively, the actual number of events are low. Furthermore, the impact of the media on the fear of the public as according to a study presented in the chapter, where 409 students were studied, showed that 33 % of the students believed that such incidents could occur in their schools. Limitation to study school shooting incidents were reported as very difficult, due to the rarity of its nature, the low number of offenders, the fact that the attackers rarely live to face charges after their attacks and because some offenders are minors and therefore protected by confidentiality laws or simply not willing to provide necessary information for research.

Factors