By now, we’ve all heard the news from Minnesota: A lone gunman opened fire during morning mass at a Catholic elementary school, claiming innocent lives and traumatizing a whole community. As a former elementary school teacher and administrator, I can tell you that news of school shootings hits differently when you work in one.
You notice thin windows and the vulnerability of dismissal and outdoor recess. You reflect on the responsibility to protect the students in your care and wonder which student in your class might crack.
These scenarios are not abstract to me. As a building administrator, I had to think through how to prevent a mass shooting—consulting with police, analyzing our policies, and wondering where in our budget we could find millions to replace windows.
Through it all, I’ve come to a conclusion that I don’t like: There’s not much schools can do to prevent mass shootings. The best, or even the only, approach may be to focus on the everyday threats to student safety that receive far less attention.
Conservatives tend to support “campus hardening”—security measures intended to make schools less vulnerable to attack. But some measures might only make matters worse. TSA-style single points of entry and exit create a chokepoint for lone gunmen. Since most shooters are themselves students, active shooter drills may only broadcast where the most potential victims will be and when. To date, according to one review of the research, there is simply no “empirical evidence” that campus hardening can “diminish firearm violence in schools.”
Anyone intent on violence will find a way and any system will have a loophole.
The left champions gun control, but the correlation between school shootings and gun ownership are weaker than they admit. Rates of gun-ownership had been declining for four decades prior to the pandemic. Yet, by any measure, school shootings increased during that period. And with 500 million firearms in America, the only regulation with any possible hope of eliminating school shootings would be universal confiscation, which is unconstitutional, a political nonstarter, and also likely wouldn’t fix the situation.
A bipartisan approach might champion early warning reporting and threat assessments. Alas, school loners are plentiful, but few turn violent. It’s worse than trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s more akin to seeking a slightly grayer shell on a vast beach of gray shells. Deputizing students and teachers into threat assessment experts is no workable solution.
To assess what schools can actually do requires an honest assessment of the issue, which is harder to do than one might think. According to Education Week there were 39 school shootings in 2024. But that statistic doesn’t capture the reality. A revealing 2023 paper from JAMA Pediatrics analyzed 253 school shootings across 26 years and found that the majority arose from personal disputes and involved a handgun.
They were instances of targeted interpersonal violence, not mass killings. I’ve never been in a building with a Columbine-style gunman, but I have experienced this more common occurrence. Gang members have threatened to kill a rival in our building and a criminal once flashed a gun when a brawl spilled onto our playground.
In the face of such violence and uncertain remedy, what can teachers and administrators do to keep their students safe? The JAMA paper provides insight: Focus on the everyday threats to student safety that you can control.
Here’s the harsh reality: It’s unlikely that we can do much to prevent mass shootings, but better policing can reduce the crime that spills over into our classrooms. Stronger discipline policies can secure the more prosaic safety—hallway fights and weapons stashed in backpacks—that every student deserves. Moreover, cellphone bans, stronger family policies, and more community institutions create the sense of belonging that keep potential shooters from a path of isolation and violence.
What should schools not do? If there’s one thing that I advise against, it’s safetyism. During the early 2000s, child abduction scares led many parents to lock their children up despite the relative safety of the decade.
I worry the same may happen here. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, homicides on school grounds have halved since the 1990s. Statistically speaking, these buildings are safer than they ever have been. It would be an error to host fewer outdoor assemblies, spend vast sums on metal detectors or facilities updates instead of better curricula or pay raises, or constantly preach to our children that they’re in danger. None of this is a call to complacency, but an attempt at a sober reckoning of what we can do to mitigate the effects of these horrifying tragedies. Schools can’t stop every mass shooter, but they can make students safer by addressing everyday threats—and by resisting the temptation to overreact to rare ones.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.
