The School Shooting Solution

HWFO’s Final Word on the Topic

School spree shootings aren’t actually a problem statistically, but that doesn’t matter because they are a problem emotionally. They represent near zero homicides, but they represent almost all of the attention that homicides get, because they’re so horrific. The fundamental problem with prior HWFO articles on the subject such as this:

..is that I can’t share them with my girlfriend yesterday, because she’s a high school teacher one school over from Apalachee High School in Georgia, where some 14 year old freshman apparently brought a rifle on the bus (or something?) and killed four people. Quoting numbers at her on the phone while she’s freaking out would make me the worst boyfriend ever, and you should also seek to avoid that mistake in your own personal relationships.

Statistics don’t matter in situations like this because human beings are not always rational, nor should they be, and that’s fine. It’s a hard lesson for a math nerd like myself to learn, but a valuable lesson, and it’s a lesson yesterday’s two dead math teachers might endorse. Emotion matters. Charitably, school shootings matter more than gang crime shootings because they damage the emotional zeitgeist of the public more. Cynically, they matter more because they scare the privileged white suburban women and cause them to go Facebook Crazy. Charitably or cynically, they matter more, so they deserve a hard look at how to solve them.

Solution Tree

Three possible solutions to school shootings exist as far as I’m aware. I don’t see a fourth, and if you have a fourth that’s not just a troll response, post it in the article comments. Here are the three:

1. Gather up the military and national guard and kick down the doors of 47% of the country to seize all the guns, invoking a civil war that will kill millions, starting with black people in Ferguson MO and “blacks and Latinos ages 14-24” in New York, or

2. Harden the schools against attack, or

3. Address root causes. See below.

I’m an open minded individual, and I’ll listen to an “option four” if someone has one, but if you offer one to me you better take a hard look at its efficacy first. “Ban the AR-15s” doesn’t work, because you can kill kids with any gun. Virginia Tech was one of the most lethal school shootings in history, so then you’re banning pistols, and when some dork kills three people and injures nine with a revolver and a speed loader you’re banning every gun design since the late 1890s. 

Gun taxes or bullet taxes or gun insurance or similar ideas don’t work because the perpetrators aren’t the ones impacted by the tax, and insurance doesn’t cover willfully illegal acts. Currently any criminal can get ten guns if they want, and seizing or buying back 200 million guns would just mean criminals could get five if they want. To save one life with a buyback, you’d have to buy around $86 million for every life saved, so that doesn’t work either.

(1) Take the Guns

If you want to solve this problem by creating England level scarcity, you need to seize 98% of the country’s guns, which amounts to over half of all guns ever produced in the history of the human species by any country ever. Which means you’re going to have to stage a war and you’re going to have to convince all the gun owning red tribe infantry to kill their neighbors, when they mostly also own guns, in order to save four high schoolers a year. So that’s option one. 

You can probably tell I don’t think option one works particularly well. Option two on the other hand is mathematically intriguing.

(2) School Shootings as Terrorism

Governments like to define “terrorism” specifically to include “crap that is trying to influence government,” but academics broaden the definition to include violent acts that are literally done to sow anxiety and fear. Perplexity.ai has this to say:

School spree shootings fit most or all the bullets on the academic definition of terrorism, and we tend to treat terrorism completely differently than we do “regular murder” in the USA. We do this because terrorism is scarier than regular murder, and gives us more anxiety, which fits nicely with the effects of school shootings. Naming school shootings “terrorism” also gives us new and different ways to approach the idea of “hardening schools.”

How much money does the federal government spend against terrorism? It’s hard to say. TSA’s budget alone is somewhere around $11.2 billion, which is a shit pile of money for making us take our shoes off and go through a porn scanner. It probably doesn’t even reduce 9-11 style bombings anymore, since all you actually need to stop those is locked pilot doors and an air marshal. Even if a terrorist were able to make it onto a plane nowadays, the worst they could do is probably what Boeing technicians are already doing by forgetting to put the bolts on the doors. 

The TSA is mostly there to give us a sense of security when boarding a plane, so in some ways it’s just an advertising campaign for airlines to make us think they’re safe, and in other’s it’s exactly what we need for school spree shootings.

Sending your child to school for a year is already safer than it is for you to board an airplane once, so efforts to reduce school spree shootings mean very little statistically. But emotionally they mean a lot to the Public Zeitgeist and/or Privileged Suburban White Women, so we must undergo these efforts. Also, don’t send your girlfriend this link after a school spree shooting either:

Let’s say we only took half our shoes off, and TSA only screened half of us through their porn scanner, and we redirected half of the $11.2 billion to each of the 24,000 high schools in the country. That would be $233,000 per school per year. Schools could easily afford to hire two ex-Afghanistan combat vets to sit in lawn chairs with M4 carbines and plate carriers out in front of school all day, and that would be well enough to dissuade any fourteen year old nitwit from hopping off of Bus 320 with a rifle. They wouldn’t even need any training, because their job is literally to sit there.

Or we could expand the scope of our financial analysis to the “global war on terror” instead of just TSA. The USA has spent $808 billion on the “global war on terror” since 2001. That’s $16.8 million per high school. One percent of that is $168,000, which is enough to hire a dude in a plate carrier. 

Point being, if you just call a spade a spade and call a school shooter a terrorist, there’s a near infinite amount of money available for school hardening. And it won’t take much, because all you need to do is dissuade maniacs with a show of force.

Having attended an urban school with urban stressors I’m not a fan of arming teachers, but I think that a gun safe in the principal’s office with a few AR-15s in it alone might dissuade school shooters. At a minimum it might give your high school football defensive coordinator the option to run for equal firepower before confronting a kid with a gun. Either of these act as deterrent, and deterrent is what you need when hardening schools. That solution works, unlike the “raid 47% of households” solution. 

The more humane and smart and progressive thing to do, however, might be to start finally talking about root causes.

(3) Root Causes

We know the root cause for murder is not “the guns,” because of international comparisons. 

Despite a household gun ownership rate over 50% and vastly exceeding the rest of the world, the U.S. White demographic has a murder rate comparable to the World Bank High Income nations and lower than the G20 and Europe. U.S. Hispanics are also lower than both the G20 and Europe. U.S. Blacks have the fewest guns in the USA by ratio and have a murder rate double that of Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not the guns. Within the black community, the culprit turns out to be a plague of fatherlessness, paired with teens and young adults resolving beefs through duels in an honor culture instead of through legal channels. While that problem is totally unrelated to school shootings, you can read more about that here:

Or in Issue 69 of RECOIL Magazine hardcopy:

When speaking of school shootings specifically, a growing body of research shows that these instances are much more closely linked to suicide than they are to homicide. Over 92% of school shooters were found to be suicidal. Many shooters engage in “leakage,” which is when they share their plans as a cry for help. Spree shootings are 3.8 times more likely to be premeditated than regular homicides, but only 1.2 times more likely to be premeditated than suicides. School shooters are more likely to have a history of suicidal ideation than even people who actually die by suicide. Society has broad and deep resources to approach and deal with suicide, but they could be improved, and these resources are the way to approach the root cause of school spree shootings. 

Severe Action

Someone down at The Trace or CNN or MSNBC is writing the same lying article as last time right now, where they define normal criminal activity as a “mass shooting,” they make people think that school spree shootings are happening daily, they kite those people into sharing those articles on Facebook, and they maniacally rake in piles of click-pennies on their way to moral and financial bankruptcy while increasing the chances of a future spree shooter by 30%. The First Amendment prevents us from stopping them from doing it, but perhaps we can leverage their moral decay into a part of the solution. Here me out.

In Uvalde, the cops jerked each other off for an hour, only went in after some border patrol guys showed up and instructed them on how to properly stack up, and went in to discover a bunch of kids who’d bled out over the past hour while the cops ate donuts and prevented parents from rescuing their kids on their own.

In Nashville, the cops were there in a matter of minutes, stacked up within ten, started room clearing, plugged the shooter two minutes after entering, and released the body cam footage of the lead rifle guy in the stack the same day to thunderous applause on Instagram. 

Nashville was a textbook example of doing everything right, Uvalde everything wrong, both in terms of on the ground procedure and in media management. Plugging the shooter in an embarrassing way and releasing the footage immediately disincentivized future shooters instead of incentivizing them. “Severe action” to adjust the incentives of the spree shooting machine might look something like this, if I were President of the United States:

1. Get on a C-130 in combat fatigues and fly to Joint Base San Antonio where I meet a dozen Marines, hop on a Black Hawk, land in Uvalde Police Chief Pete Arredondo’s front yard, drag him out into the grass, and beat the shit out of him in front of his wife and kids, while having one of the Marines film it for World Star Hip Hop (if that’s still a thing),

2. After he’s bloody on the ground, drop my trousers and piss on his head, taking a selfie while doing so,

3. Post that to Twitter with a caption that says “Feeling Frisky, OMW to self-pardon”

4. Send Police Chief John Drake, officer Rex Engelbert, and officer Michael Collazo of the Nashville police department congressional medals of honor on the C-130 ride back to DC.

That action, without need for Executive Order or other government procedure, would put every police chief on notice to get their ducks in a row regarding response times for school spree shooters. It would put them on notice because the click hungry media vultures would talk about it for weeks, which in turn would disincentivize the potential next crop of shooters as well. It might not eliminate school spree shootings, but that 30% media bump might instead turn into a 30% reduction in shooters, which would be nice. Even Uvalde Police Chief Arredondo can sleep well knowing he was responsible for saving some children in his pile of presidential urine. 

Combine this with “define as terrorism, treat as terrorism” and “maybe start figuring out what the nuts is going on with teen suicide,” and you’ve got about the most effective plan you can have, based on all the available research, data, and realities on the ground. 

So if you want to bitch about the “thoughts and prayers” crowd, don’t direct that bitching my way. I just gave you three options. Pick one.