Are Mass-Murderers a
Failure of Soft Technology?
Listening to Students
By Rob Morse. Aug 15, 2023
Article Source
Protecting our children at school sounds simple. Maybe it is the influence of Hollywood entertainment on our culture, but some people assume the first thing you do is hand out guns to teachers in order to protect students. While that fits the Hollywood script, I don't think that is where you start. If you want to make your children safer at home, then there are lots of things you do well before you run to the gun shop. The same is true as we protect schools and churches.
Technology includes both hardware and software. We tend to ignore the training, practices, and procedures as we focus on the hardware. As was said thousands of years ago, the best solution to win a battle is a solution that avoids the conflict in the first place.
One of the best pieces of "technology" is to look at what stopped mass-murderers in the past. Most celebrity seeking narcissists are furious that society hasn't showered them with the attention and honor they think they deserve. That bizarre attitude is almost impossible to hide over the long term. One of the most effective ways to stop the crazy people from attacking our kids is to look for them and listen to them.
We've looked at the personal histories of mass-murderers. Time and again, we saw that someone knew there was a problem. The parents of mass murderers were often missing, and it was often a grandparent or foster parent who saw problems coming. Teachers knew, and so did school counselors as well as other students. The first piece of technology to put in place is a program to listen to the people who are telling us there is a problem child or problem adult in our community. Narcissists show typical behaviors. Those behaviors themselves may not be a crime, but they absolutely are a clue.
It is actually pretty easy to get information into the hands of police and school officials. It is frustratingly hard to know exactly what to do with that information because we're judging matters of degree. Lots of kids can exhibit troubling behaviors without ever resorting to lethal attacks.
Making that judgment call is easier when the entire case history of a mass-murderer is laid out in retrospect. Looking at the facts in hindsight is easy but not as useful as finding the problem before the narcissist becomes violent. It is harder to see the picture when half of the puzzle pieces are still missing. We live in an imperfect world, and it has to be someone's job to look for problems and put the pieces of information together. That is often a school counselor and someone in law enforcement. Let me remind you that teachers see these kids every day and have a pretty good understanding of their behavior and their problems.
One obvious solution is to give these mentally ill people the treatment they need. Unfortunately, mental health treatment is neither cheap nor foolproof. Getting good care is a problem. We've seen that parents often do what they can and then ask for help once they've called a psychiatrist and the bills start to stack up. Mental health treatment isn't always effective. Lots of mass-murderers were in a doctor's care and the doctor never flagged the patient as a danger to society. It is unrealistic that counselors, social workers, therapists, or doctors will suddenly get better at reporting a dangerous patient to the police. To the best of my knowledge, we've never held these mental health workers held accountable when they failed to report a dangerous patient who turned violent.
As imperfect as it is, our system of reporting threats has actually stopped attacks at schools. The problem we have with reporting those "saves" is the same problem we have on reporting the behavior to a school authority in the first place. When is an emotional outburst considered a threat of violence that should be reported? Certainly, we want to report the threat whenever it includes methods, places, dates, or names. We want to report threats of self-harm also. We think, but are still documenting, that anti-bullying campaigns reduce the level of violence at schools. That helps, but it is not a complete solution.
We don't know how many students make violent threats because mental health and law enforcement records on someone under 18 years of age are usually sealed. School principals reported that 1-out-of-50 students were violent each year. During the same period of time, only 1-out-of-250 students were reported to the police. For more perspective, 1-out-of-2,200 students in the Denver public schools were diverted to a high risk program. These students were patted down and searched every day before they could enter campus because these students had a history of bringing guns to school. I'm assuming elementary students were less violent than average and highschool students were more violent.
Again looking at Denver as an example, 2,200 students are a lot of troubled teenagers to monitor. Their 89-thousand students are a lot of children to protect.
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Sources-
Denver students who are searched at school every day
Number of students in Denver public schools
The scope of violent crime in schools
Violent and Criminal incidents in schools
