Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Panic About School Shootings Won’t Help! P.S. They’re Going Down!

There was another school shooting in Washington bringing the gun control debate back, which is the only thing they discuss, even though it is almost certainly not the most important contributing factor, although preventing emotionally unstable people from getting guns will almost certainly make it less likely that they can shoot up schools.

There was more talk about armed guards or teachers as a way to prevent this from escalating and talk about how school shootings continue to go up.

But it's actually been a while since the last big school shooting and after glancing at the list of school shootings, it appears that the number of school shootings peaked in 2014 when there were thirty-six shootings with seventeen deaths. This wasn't the year with the biggest death toll which was 2012 with a total of forty-two thanks to the exceptionally large number killed at Newtown Connecticut. When there are exceptionally large death tolls it skewers the statistics, for what it's worth.

There were only fifteen shootings with nine deaths in 2016, and with only about three months left to the year only five shootings and six deaths in 2017, which is still too much of course, but it has dropped sharply, with little or no notice until another shooting happened, and even then some automatically assumed it was continuing to rise.

But why has it dropped so significantly?

Has anything been done to bring these shootings down? If so why isn't the media reporting on it so that it can be brought down even further?

I can't explain why it has dropped so much but, as I have reported in previous articles there's plenty of research about the leading causes of violence and how it escalates starting with early child abuse escalating to bullying hazing and other forms of violence later in life including domestic violence murder and even blind support for wars, often based on lies.

This research can often be found in libraries alternative media outlets or academic reports on studies, many of which are available on the internet; however they're almost completely absent from the traditional media. This conclusion isn't a fringe conspiracy theory, since it is based on information that is publicly available and can be confirmed, assuming people don't limit themselves to sources provided by the traditional media and political establishment.

There might be some research showing why and how these shootings have gone down, but the media hasn't reported it to the vast majority of the public. I can't say for certain but I have seen some evidence to indicate that a growing number of people are acting at the local level to learn from alternative media, once they recognize how incompetent and corrupt the traditional media is, whether it is because they're catering to oligarchies only concerned with maximizing profits regardless of what their policies do or not. One of the most obvious examples that I have found was Richmond California.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason for the reduction of school shootings has a lot to do with well informed people acting at the local level.

However more should be done to inform the people at other areas of the most effective ways to reduce violence including school shootings. If we could do this not only would school shootings continue to go down and stay down but so would all violence. If more isn't done to educate the public about the leading causes of violence this could just as easily be reversed and shootings could go back up.

A large portion of this should be obvious, however many of the people that make the decisions about public policy are more concerned about controlling the public and serving corporate interests, so instead of acting on the best research they act on ideological grounds that enable them to push their agenda, often to increase profits for campaign donors, one way or another, even though it may not seem related to violence or school shootings.

When the Columbine shootings happened there was a lot of reporting about bullying and that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were often targeted and the latest shooting, as well as many in between, also clearly seem to involve retaliation or anger for bullying. Some reports about the Washington school shooting indicate that the person he killed was one of the kids that had targeted him for bullying, although the shooter didn't necessarily seek him out, while other claim that he was a hero that tried to talk him out of it. It will probably take some time to sort it out and this is similar to what happened after Columbine, unfortunately some of the people with the most political clout that also were partly in denial got the most attention then, and only those that looked closely at the details would have been able to recognize it.

Part of the problem might be that some of the "coolest kids" might, in some cases, feel less need to respect the rights of those that are considered outcasts, often including athletes or children of wealthy families, which might have been the case in Columbine; and instead of admitting that their bullying might have been a major contributing factor they down play it and they often have the support of adults running the school or the press. Once a shooting happens then it's tempting to put all the blame on the perpetrator without trying to figure out if there were any additional contributing causes.

This may have been demonstrated with David Cullen, who wrote "Columbine" released on the ten year anniversary, and worked for Salon, and on numerous occasions was invited to appear on television. His book states, "There's no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High." (p.158) This is almost all he wrote about the problems with bullying, dramatically downplaying the impact the most reliable sources reported about how angry Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were about the bullying that went on at Columbine ignoring some of the incidents reported by Brooks Brown who was a student at Columbine and had a disagreement with the shooters about a year before it happened.

Shortly after starting an account at Open Salon in 2010, I realized that he was also there and informed him of an article that I had reposted there, as a courtesy, which initially he ignored. After he made similar statements that seemed to ignore the root causes of violence I brought it up again on his Blog, in a public forum and raised my objections, which are reported in an article below. One of the so-called experts that he cited was Robert Hare, who has many awards, and he considers very credible, however even some of his statements seemed to imply that he believed that child abuse and bullying lead to escalating violence. I wasn't very familiar with him at the time but a simple search through his most popular book, "Without Conscience" which was on Google quickly turned up some of these comments, but David Cullen insisted and after I got around to reading the whole book it was clear that he was supporting David Cullen's views, however as I pointed out in Children Psychopaths? And Mitt Romney’s Bullying History he was incredibly incompetent, despite all his credentials awards and political support. Amazingly he has a history of using the courts to suppress his critics instead of making arguments to refute them. His book was full of appeals to emotion, and his alleged arguments for the "nature" cause of violence were primarily based or upbringing that really should have been in the "Nurture" category. As pointed out in the previous article mentioning him there were many other problems with his work.

I was surprised at how much he was in denial at one point saying, 'I researched it heavily, and just found no data to support it, so I said so in the book briefly and moved on. The last thing I wanted to do was to perpetuate more myths As for child abuse, again, there is no evidence of any. Of course we can construct all sorts of scenarios of what MIGHT have happened to the two kids, but I believe that would fall under the category of "making stuff up."'

However I cited numerous examples where there was serious bullying, and numerous experts that reported that there was a pattern of behavior of escalating violence that is much more common when children are abused at an early age, that leads to escalating violence. I did not claim that I had evidence of child abuse; however it is often not easy to find and I cited several experts that found that almost all if not all violent mass murderers suffered from early abuse, and that after a closer look it was worse than what most people suffer from. One of the experts that I cited was James Garbarino, who does some very good work but apparently didn't look at some of the legitimate myths about Columbine, including the trench coat mafia, and Dave Cullen argued that the experts I cited didn't directly research Columbine; however another one that I added on was Barbara Coloroso, who I wasn't as familiar with at the time, and she did look closer at it.

She lives in Littleton, and apparently was familiar with the culture there and may have even known the two killers and other children from the school. However one of the subjects that she writes about in at least one of her books are the teachings of James Dobson, who is also from the same area and apparently his religious teachings are very popular there and they involve using corporal punishment to educate or discipline children in a very different manner from Barbara Coloroso and her books point out the reason why she disagrees with him. I suspect, based on the views of the two and the stories that followed the Columbine shootings that the majority of the people in her area were more inclined to follow James Dobson's teachings than hers.

I went into James Dobson's views more in Dobson’s Indoctrination Machine where I explained that his strict authoritarian methods of child rearing, that involved starting to use corporal punishment on toddlers when they're no more than eighteen months old, before they even learn how to talk well, develop critical thinking skills or understand why they're being punished, teach children to obey out of fear, not because they understand what's wrong with what they might be doing to incite punishment. It teaches them to blindly obey orders and believe what they're told to believe without question and it leads to escalating violence and blind obedience to authority.

These child rearing methods are even more common, and more severe in the Southern Bible Belt, which also has the highest murder rates. On any given year six to nine of the states with the highest murder rates are among the only nineteen that still allow corporal punishment in schools; and only one, Idaho, which doesn't use it nearly as often in schools, routinely makes into the bottom ten states for murder rates.

Many claim, of course that not all people that suffer from child abuse turn into mass murderers, which is true, of course but they're more likely than those that aren't abused and if they don't become mass murderers, they suffer other problems that result from it. Excessive violence as an adult is just one of many problems that children have, as adults, as a result of the long term psychological abuse at an early age. Other problems include increased amounts of mental health issues, which are also associated with higher rates of violence, and it should be clear that the best way to treat these mental health issues, when possible, is to prevent them from developing in the first place by stopping child abuse and teaching better child rearing tactics as Barbara Coloroso and James Garbarino do.

The following article which shows a correlation between bullying, schizophrenia, and being a loner with violence and school shootings also shows that escalating violence "comes from a deep rooted traumatic experience or bad upbringing:"

Why do school shootings happen? 11/05/2015

April 20, 1999. 21 people injured. 12 people killed.

That day marked a catastrophic school shooting at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado. Although this wasn’t the first mass shooting, it seemed to be a catalyst for the next 16 years of gun violence in America.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the shooters at Columbine, left the nation shell-shocked. Explanations for this massacre varied from extreme to nonexistent. Since Columbine, numerous mass shootings have taken place and left a mark on American culture, such as Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, and more.

As each day the world hears of dozens of shootings, they must ask themselves the same question: “Why do school shootings happen?”

Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, recently wrote an article in the New Yorker called, “The Thresholds of Violence,” in which he referenced sociologist Ralph Larkin who argues that Harris and Klebold laid down a “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. It was like a contagion, and according to Gladwell, this type of behavior must be looked at from a group perspective. ....

However, this hypothesis can only go so far. Besides this being a cultural phenomenon, according to psychologist Dr. Paul Lazor, the health and psyches of the individuals must be considered.

“Most school shooters, my understanding is, have some kind of mental health problem. Most of [the infamous shooters] have mental illnesses, but it doesn’t mean that if you have mental illness you’re going to be a mass killer, but you have a higher risk of that than the average population,” Lazor said.

The idea behind those who decide to terrorize schools often comes from a deep rooted traumatic experience or bad upbringing. Gladwell theorizes that shooters are those who have been abused or blame the world for their sadness and want to seek revenge by harming the person and/or the world.

Then there are people like 17-year-old John LaDue, who was planning to kill his entire family, plant bombs in the recycling bins, and start shooting at his school. LaDue was detained, and as it turns out, LaDue wasn’t seeking revenge at all: he was autistic and had Asperger’s syndrome.

Along with gun control, mental health care has been a popular topic of contention when addressing the problem of mass shootings. “A lot of these people have chronic schizophrenia or some related illness, which probably contributes to them doing some of these acts, ” Lazor said.

When looking at a person, it’s impossible to judge a person’s capability for violence. But, by looking at a person’s past behavior, psychologists and families could better assess those in their lives who may express violent behavior. Complete article

Not all experts agree on everything of course, and understanding the most effective ways to reduce violence shouldn't be based on just one or two articles, especially since it's clear that there is a lot of controversy about these subjects, however most of the experts either believe that early child abuse is a contributing factor causing various mental illnesses including schizophrenia, or if child abuse doesn't cause schizophrenia, it makes it worse, some different views are posted at the bottom but the following is one of the typical studies showing that schizophrenia is more likely among abused children:

Childhood trauma linked to schizophrenia April 19, 2012

Researchers at the University have found that children who experience severe trauma are three times as likely to develop schizophrenia in later life.

The findings shed new light on the debate about the importance of genetic and environmental triggers of psychotic disorders. For many years research in mental health has focused on the biological factors behind conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychotic depression, but there is now increasing evidence to suggest these conditions cannot be fully understood without first looking at the life experiences of individual patients.

The research, conducted by teams at Liverpool and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, is the first of its kind to bring together and analyse the findings from more than 30 years of studies looking at the association between childhood trauma and the development of psychosis. The researchers looked at more than 27,000 research papers to extract data from three types of studies; those addressing the progress of children known to have experienced adversity; studies of randomly selected members of the population; and research on psychotic patients who were asked about their early childhood. Complete article

When sorting through contributing causes for escalating violence and the controversies that surround them, recognizing ulterior motives might help, and there are far more of those in the ideological push for Charter Schools and School Choice which Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol often point out in a lot of their research. These Charter Schools weren't initially intended to be part of a corporate take over of schools where a profit motive became a leading factor; however in many cases that is exactly what happens, as Ravitch often points out. they were initially intended to try some different teaching methods, often for special needs, on a small scale basis, to learn new teaching methods.

One of the biggest problems with Charter Schools is that they often siphon off the resources from public schools and take the easiest kids to teach as a way of distorting the results, which is why Kozol, Ravitch and teachers unions have been so critical of them. Another major problem is that most of them also rely on authoritarian discipline methods as some schools in Chicago and other parts of the country have been exposed doing, including the following example from New York, where the Nation Magazine demonstrates that an increase of of violence in 2015, being used to justify more Charter Schools probably should do the opposite:

Why Has Charter School Violence Spiked at Double the Rate of Public Schools? 03/09/2016

A few weeks after The New York Times released a controversial video of a Success Academy Charter School teacher lashing out at a student, New York City’s deep-pocketed charter school advocates are looking to shift the public narrative on who is committing violence in city schools.

Over the last few weeks, Families for Excellent Schools, a charter school lobbying and advocacy group with close ties to Success Academy, has placed TV ads, held a press conference, and taken to social media, claiming New York City public schools are in a violent “state of emergency.” The charter school campaign appears to be a response to the public backlash that Success Academy has received for its controversial disciplinary approach.

Taking state data, which includes “violent” incidents not involving the police, Families for Excellent Schools asserts that between 2014 and 2015 schools suffered a 23 percent uptick in violence. The public action was meant to undermine New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently claimed school violence has gone down, thanks to his administration’s softer disciplinary approach.

A Nation analysis of the charter school group’s data, however, suggests the move may backfire, since the numbers also show that charter schools themselves reported a far higher spike in incidents of school violence, 54 percent, more than double that of the public school average between the 2014 and 2015 school years.

Breaking the data down further, The Nation also found that while NYC public schools, perhaps responding to the district’s disciplinary reforms, actually dropped in nonviolent offenses like “criminal mischief” and “other disruptive incidents” at -6 percent and -23 percent, respectively, charter schools had a 65 percent surge in reported incidents of “criminal mischief” and a 33 percent surge in “other disruptive incidents.” Notably, charter schools also had far higher reported surges in drug and weapons possession incidents, at 53 percent and 27 percent respectively, whereas public schools only had 5 percent and 9 percent jumps for the same categories.

New York City charter school students represent a relatively small amount of the city’s overall population, and therefore make up only 4 percent of total violent incidents in New York City schools, but these drastic disparities raise questions about how charter schools’ controversial disciplinary cultures relate to the dramatic increase in reported school violence.

Brenda Shufelt, a recently retired librarian who served public school and Success Academy Charter School students at a colocated school library in Harlem, said that as charter schools rapidly expand, they may be taking in more high-needs kids, many of whom cannot conform to one-size-fits-all disciplinary approaches.

“In my experience, what would often happen is that charter school students would be so rigidly controlled that the kids would periodically blow up,” says Shufelt. “At PS 30, some of our kids would have meltdowns, usually because of problems at home, but I never saw kids melt down in the way they did in charter schools. They were just so despairing, feeling like they could not do this. I was told by two custodians, they had never had so much vomit to clean up from kindergarten and elementary classes.” Complete article

I have no doubt, based on an enormous amount of credible research, that one of the biggest contributing factors to escalating violence, if not the biggest is child abuse leading to bullying, hazing, domestic violence murder and even school shootings; however it isn't the only contributing factor, as I have pointed out in some articles listed below. Perhaps the second biggest contributing factor is abandoned inner cities where there are no educational or economic opportunities. These abandoned inner cities are often where they're pushing the flawed Charter Schools the most. They're also closely related to economic inequality, and lack of Democratic input on the education and economic system from local communities, which are additional major contributing factors.

A large portion of the problem is the lack of resources for schools especially low income schools, and lack of efforts to educate all children equally. Additional problems include a social and economic system that is forcing both parents to work two jobs spending less time educating their own children while still being unable to make ends meet. A large portion of this is being driven on ideological grounds controlled by a small fraction of the public that control the political, economic and media establishments, and are reluctant to listen to the most effective researchers on any given subject.

Does this sound like a fringe conspiracy theory?

Before you come to that conclusion consider one of the most extreme efforts to take over the education system by an online for profit organization as exposed by numerous researchers including Mary Bottari From Junk Bonds to Junk Schools: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades 10/02/2013 She exposed how Michael Milken, former junk bond king who went to jail for epidemic levels of fraud in the eighties has been successfully making a fortune off of cyber education system that is incredibly ineffective.

Amazingly not only was Michael Milken a notorious scam artist allowed to start this school and rake in enormous amounts of money, but even after well over a decade of being exposed at the grassroots level it is still running, and the mainstream media refuses to report on it, or at least not in a high profile manner! This isn't because it isn't a major scam or because the reporting that Mary Bottari provided is false, it's not; there are occasional news articles from the mainstream media admitting to parts of it and other grassroots researchers like Susan Linn, and Juliet Schor have also exposed it.

If this isn't some kind of a conspiracy it is ideological fanaticism and an oligarchy run amok!

Michael Milken and K12 is only the most obvious of these scams, but a closer look which the best researchers like Jonathan Kozol or Diane Ravitch are doing clearly indicates that the school reform movement is being run by economist, lawyers, lobbyists, and ideological fanatics far more concerned with maximizing profits for Wall Street investors than they are with providing good education and addressing legitimate social concerns. Researchers like Susan Linn, Roy Fox and Juliet Schor have also exposed how the school privatization movement is also turning schools into indoctrination centers with the help of advertisers that are being relied on to partly finance education, however it has interfered with education by making commercial interests far more important than education; and the best researchers like Barbara Coloros or James Garbarino have done far better to expose how early child abuse leads to escalating violence than the people the media cover to promote either gun control only without mentioning educational reforms or even worse, the plan to turn schools into armed camps to defend against school shooters.

I try to be a rational skeptic and don't want to sound like a fringe conspiracy theorist; however the political establishment is routinely ignoring all the best researchers on any given subject, so I can't rule out the possibility that this is some kind of conspiracy; either that or it is authoritarian fanaticism running amok!

An article shortly after the Washington school shooting, Md. Teachers Take Firearms Training In Response To Uptick In School Shootings 09/20/2017, falsely claims there's an "Uptick In School Shootings" which appears to be typical of news reports from the traditional media which often doesn't even do the simplest fact checking. The article also says, “Never in a million years would I have guessed that one response to what happened in our town would be to arm teachers,” said former Sandy Hook teacher Abbey Clements. “Can you imagine if children were hurt by you in that situation? How would you live with yourself.”

Where is all the reporting about school advertising, school inequality, or most important psychological research into the effects of how child abuse leads to escalating violence?

It's not in the mainstream media which has turned into a fanatical corporate propaganda organization controlled by a fraction of one percent of the public, but it is available in alternative media outlets or in libraries.

If arming school teachers or shooting down school shooters is the most effective way of solving this problem, where are the reports where it actually worked? They don't seem to exist that I know of but even if they did, they could only have limited success since it won't take long for a suicidal kid with emotional problems to shoot one or two people before either being killed by an armed guard or teacher or committing suicide.

What about reports where it has already proven to back fire or at least the potential for arming teachers is there like this report about Juvenile found gun that teacher brought to NKY school 08/31/2017 This is just one of many reports where the armed people that are allegedly going to defend us either allow children or crooks to get a hold of their guns or accidentally shoot themselves or others, or ins many cases they go on killing sprees or commit suicide. Anyone that follows gun control advocates on Twitter can find dozens if not thousands of these examples. Of course in all fairness those that follow gun-rights advocates on Twitter can find examples where guns are used to stop crime; however after close scrutiny the gun-rights advocates often prove to distort their data more than the gun control advocates.

But if teachers and parents did more to address social problems, which many of them already are, then it would do far more to reduce school shootings even more and keep them down. Those that are already doing a better job could probably teach those that need the help the most if the media that is catering to ideological fanatics would give them some air time!