Ways To Prevent School Shootings
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School shootings are terrifying to think about, but there are ways to help prevent the massacres from ever happening again. The first known school shooting was at the Texas Tower at the University of Texas in 1966 where Charles Whitman shot and killed 16 people while injuring 31 others. Who would have known since that date that we would have more then 200 deaths on school campuses? The most storied shooting in the 90’s was probably the Columbine massacre where on April 20, 1999 Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 32 students and faculty before turning the guns on themselves. The horror scene from the day will always be remembered in many lives and will continue over the years. There were many other horrible shootings over the years as well almost too many to count but here lately the latest mascaras that have happened have been on college campuses at Virginia Tech University where 33 lives were lost and Northern Illinois where 5 lives were lost. After all these years and all the lives lost it’s time that the school massacres with many lives lost come to an end.
The first step to help prevent another massacre on a school campus is to have a good emergency notification system in place to help warn students when danger happening. Right now some colleges are using a notification system to send a text message to student’s cell phones to help warn them. This way could really help out a lot with many of the kids that go off to college have cell phones, but there will be those few students that don’t have cell phones, so what’s going to happen with the notification for someone who doesn’t have a phone to get the message with, so it’s really not fair to people that don’t have a cell phone to not get the message to warn them of danger on campus. Schools also use e-mails to alert as well, but there is always going to be a glitch in the system where not everyone finds out. The cell phone notification is a good system to use those where it will run the smaller colleges around $10,000 to use and the bigger universities will run $100,000 (Galuszka, 2008). With all the emergency notifications on college grounds there still a lot of work that needs to be imposed to more then just text messages and alerts to e-mails. It could be a long shot but what would hurt by having an emergency siren to go off in cause of an emergency, who knows what will work for colleges but it has come a long way and I believe every bit of notification that can be used will be one less person put in danger during the terrifying time.
Elementary, Jr. High and High Schools need to be frequently practicing throughout the year what to do in case of the intruder. Practicing the lock down procedures will help so if that small change of danger there wouldn’t be a single person confused on what to do. The elementary teachers should really talk it over in class with the students so the kids know what to do in case of danger and let the kids ask all the questions that there little mind might be thinking about when they hear about a shooting or things on the news about bad things that happen on school grounds. All schools should have security guards on school grounds at all times which now days a lot of the schools will in the bigger cities and you will have a few security guards in the smaller towns that will make the rounds to each school throughout the day. Today’s stats are good with the guards on school grounds with 85% of school security guards actually work in the school buildings with 44% at the high school , 27% at middle schools and 14% at elementary schools. 84% of these security guards work full time, 42% are males and the average age is 48 (Rosales, 2008). The numbers are looking good for the risk of a big violence act to happen should continue to drop but there still is that little chance.
Going from the notification to the ways to maybe prevent the school shootings from even happening are huge. From the pictures above showing some the main points to prevent shooting, bullying and loving parents, which aren’t all the main points to prevent a school shooting from happening but is a big key and start to hopefully preventing our children from pulling off a major crime. Noticing some early warning signs and not being scared to report them can help someone from making the biggest mistake of their life and saving people from harms way should start with the love shown from the parents. Having the parents be in the kids life knowing his or her surroundings at all time can be the key for prevention. Showing our kids love and attention will not make them want to do harm to others and having your child talk to you if something is bothering them. When you aren’t in the child’s life and not knowing what’s going on with them could easily make them feel lost inside and can turn to depression like our parents don’t care about them, a key fact is no matter how busy our lives with our job and anything else that we might do in our spare time parents should always find time to spend with our child each day, even if its only for a half hour, each time that we show love can be a key for our child not to do the unthinkable.
The key facts from kids that do the shooting is a lot of times from being bullied at school or make fun of that will keep there anger all bottled up inside until one day the anger explodes and the worst scenario happens and that is a school shooting. Parents should also talk to their child to let them know not to be scared to report things that might seem out of the ordinary. Kids should always report to authority or a teacher is he or she hears a student talking about violence, don’t just act like you didn’t hear anything, because the best thing that can happen from that point is helping stop violence before it starts. If you see someone bullying or threatening someone you should let someone know, and if you are on the end of being threatened or bullied, you do not have to take it, speak up and make it stop. A good sign as well that someone can be subject to do harm is if you witness someone doing harm or being cruelty to an animal or pet (Dowshen, 2008). Seeing the warning signs can be a big plus to help stop the violence, and it all mainly starts with how the parents are with their children.
Questions will always surround the causes of school shootings. What was going on in the head of the person doing the crime? A big question that seems to wonder some people is that why is it only boys who are doing the shooting. A report done with famous psychologist Elliot Aronson reports that boys seem to have testosterone which isn’t used just as a sexual combination but usually will turn to anger as well and girls just