The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy became one of the deadliest mass shootings at an elementary school in US history. Roughly 10 years later, 19 kids and two teachers were shot dead after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. According to research compiled by the independent K-12 School Shooting Database research group, there have been 189 shootings at schools around the US since Sandy Hook that have resulted in at least one fatality.
"[N]ot enough restrictions and background checks for people interested in gun purchases, not enough training for law enforcement to respond effectively and in a timely manner, not enough specialized units to monitor online threats and not enough law enforcement personnel to perform effective surveillance, when a suspect is actually flagged. Overall, the availability of guns and lack of security measures at the school level. One or two security guards are not going to stop the threat," Professor Maria Haberfeld, chair of the Law and Police Science Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Sputnik, summarizing the reasons behind the failure to ensure security at American schools.
Not much has changed since 2012 with regard to mass and especially school shootings, acknowledged Dr. David Thomas, a retired police officer and professor of forensic studies at Florida Gulf Coast University.
"Many states have enacted red flag laws, meaning that if a person has a mental health condition or is committed for an evaluation that they should not be able to purchase a firearm," Dr. David Thomas told Sputnik. "However, that is only good if the police complete the paperwork and submit it so when background checks are done, the person attempting to purchase the firearm is denied the purchase. In addition, it does not stop someone from taking a relative’s firearm if they have access or buying a firearm that is advertised for sale and the purchase is from a private citizen. When you purchase from a private citizen then there is no background check. So there are a number of ways to obtain a firearm in the US."
The lack of training at police departments makes the situation even more complicated, according to the retired police officer.
"Theoretically, there are no gaps that were until Uvalde," Thomas observed. "Officers are trained to enter and engage the shooter if it's one officer or twenty. However, the system failed in Uvalde and I will argue that it is a lack of training. It was a complete system failure. The response should be automatic, no need for a command center because time is critical, and life is associated with every second."
It's the highly decentralized nature of American policing that creates pockets and gaps in effective tactical response and training, argued Haberfeld.
"If we had one police force in each and every state, instead of hundreds, we could have had a much better training and procedures that would be identical in case of active shooter and would not leave any room for wondering who is in charge and what needs to be done," she said.
How Schools and States are Addressing the Problem
"While no meaningful legislation has been passed to prevent or reduce the numbers of mass shootings in the United States, schools have worked with experts to fashion new ways to keep children safe," Professor Benjamin Dowd-Arrow, director of the Bachelors in Public Health Science program at Florida State University who studies gun violence, told Sputnik. "Lockdown drills have recently been shown to be effective in saving lives and reducing gun mortality and injuries. However, meaningful legislation is needed to combat these events. States with stricter gun laws have fewer of these events than states with looser laws."
The professor insists that "Congress needs to act" to reduce the mass shooting spree.
"The last piece of meaningful gun legislation was passed in the 1990s," Dowd-Arrow said. "Even the recent Safer Communities Act offers little aimed at reducing these types of tragedies. We also see groups like the NRA filing lawsuits meant to repeal existing gun laws and states with looser laws have higher rates of gun mortality across the spectrum - accidental, homicide, suicide, and mass shootings (…) These laws and Court decisions have made it very clear that the public good is less important than individual rights."
Meanwhile, some states have responded with armed law enforcement officers known as School Resource Officers (SROs), according to Thomas. The authorities in his home state, Florida, kicked off the "Guardian Program," where armed civilians are trained to act as security officers where no SROs are available or there are limited law enforcement resources.
Some schools also have limited access to its facilities. However, as one saw in Uvalde, limited access is only as good as the maintenance of the doors and locks, the retired police officer remarked.
In addition to that, many school districts have created Threat Assessment Teams to evaluate students who may appear on the radar because their behavior has become unusual, according to Thomas. He explained that the team assesses the student and provides resources to assist the student and if he/she needs to be evaluated. The team has the ability to recommend evaluation as a form of intervention and prevention, he added.
Moreover, some states have even gone so far as to enact legislation to allow certain teachers to be armed in the classroom, the academic continued.
"I used to think that was a bad idea until you realize that time is the greatest enemy in a school shooting," Thomas noted. "Meaning, that an active shooter can kill 10, 20 or even more if an SRO is in another building, two minutes is forever in an active shooter situation."
For her part, Haberfeld deems that there is a need for "well qualified security guards in schools, authorized to respond immediately with deadly force, onсe a threat of a deadly shooter materializes on the scene."
"Waiting for the local law enforcement to arrive is not an option," she suggested. "Alternatively, there should be a police presence in schools, beyond the SROs but, given the struggles police agencies experience trying to recruit new officers I do not think that this will be realistic."
26 September 2022, 10:54 GMT
Numbers of Mass Shootings Soaring Along With Overall Number of Homicides
The Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization that tracks gun violence incidents across the US, found that 2022 had become the second-highest year for mass shootings in the country. According to the entity, there were at least 607 mass shootings through November 22, 2022, with at least 3,179 people having been shot, resulting in 637 deaths and over 2,500 people wounded.
For comparison's sake, there were a total of 690 mass shootings in 2021 and 610 mass shootings in 2020. The Gun Violence Archive defines mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the assailant. The entity and the US mainstream media admitted that mass shootings in 2022 have become part of a three-year uptick that started in 2020.
Furthermore, a May 2022 report by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington demonstrated that the firearm homicide rate in the US was 22 times higher than in the European Union as a whole.
Apparently, mass shootings and gun violence should not be ripped out of context of the overall rise in homicides in the US. Open source data aggregator Macrotrends has presented a graph showing US murder/homicide rate between 1990 and 2022 (based on World Bank estimates). The graph shows that even though the present level of homicides in the US is lower than in the period between 1990 and 1996, the country is obviously seeing an upward spiral.
In October 2022, the FBI reported a 4.3% increase in homicides between 2020 and 2021. Analytics company AH Datalytics, which maintains an up-to-date study of murders in every major US city hosting over 100,000 residents, reported similar figures — a 5.7% spike between 2020 and 2021.
When it comes to 2022, the US media quotes midyear figures saying that homicides appeared to drop 2.4% this year in US major cities, but if compared with the 2019 figures, the same cities in total have seen a 50% increase in homicides.
"Crime, including violent crime and homicides, is a function of multiple factors," said Professor Maria Haberfeld. "Breakdowns in societal norms, as a function of a major crisis, like the pandemic is one of them. The overall perception of lack of individual and general deterrence, based on a very liberal approach to offenders who commit violent crimes is another."
Dr. David Thomas suggested that the emerging upward trend is "part of greater social ills that are associated with poverty, poor education, families in distress, and drugs/addiction."
"It is a trend that really started after COVID," the retired police officer presumed. "However, we were moving that way before COVID. The victims and suspects are oftentimes are inner city African American youth between the ages of 15-25. Much of the pre-violence and post-violence can be tracked through social media."
"The problem is that law enforcement does not have the resources to track all the posts and all the gangs, it is almost impossible," Thomas continued. "Some cities have adopted sophisticated algorithms as a prevention tool, the agency and social workers meet with potential victims identified by the algorithm, before they become victims and offer the potential victims intervention services such as jobs, education, transportation, even relocation and in some cases it works and has been proven to be effective."
Safety in Numbers?
However, problems also emerged with accumulating and analyzing data coming from states by US federal agencies.
In particular, in 2015, the FBI announced that it was transitioning away from its previous data reporting system in favor of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data collection, which provides detailed reporting on dozens of different types of crimes.
The idea per se looked great. Indeed, understanding patterns and trends could assist the FBI in solving crimes, according to Thomas. "If we don’t know the why it makes solving the crime more difficult," he stressed.
However, Haberfeld doubts that the FBI "involve[s] enough academics who study crime correlates in their advisory committees."
"They would be well advised if they had recruited, as consultants, a significant number of social scientists, who study and publish empirical research on these topics," she pointed out.
To complicate matters further, despite the FBI spending tens of millions of dollars training law enforcement agencies across the country on how to use this new system, several agencies failed to report any NIBRS data to the FBI in 2021, according to the US mainstream press.
"The failure to report has always been an issue," said Thomas. "Agencies don’t report for a number of reasons, the data may make their city look bad, law enforcement in that jurisdiction may be viewed as failing, or the agency just doesn't have the personnel to input data. Participating in these programs is voluntary and the agency may not see any benefit in participating. However, that has been a downfall in US law enforcement, a failure to share information."
For her part, Haberfeld insists on further centralization and imposition of strict oversight over hundreds of autonomous agencies in each state.
Apparently, there is a need for a broader law enforcement reform in the US, or, at least, the federal government should think about additional funding of police departments at state levels.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden authorized $275 million in military aid for Kiev last week, bringing the figure of Washington's security assistance provided to Ukraine since February 24 to about $19.3 billion. Perhaps in the eyes of Biden administration officials and some American congressmen, the crime problem is not as urgent as the proxy war in Ukraine for their nation.