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Local Exposure to School Shootings and Youth Antidepressant Use

While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4 percent in the following two years. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.

Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

We examine how shootings at schools—an increasingly common form of gun violence in the United States—impact the educational and economic trajectories of students. Using linked schooling and labor market data in Texas from 1992 to 2018, we compare within-student and across-cohort changes in outcomes following a shooting to those experienced by students at matched control schools. We find that school shootings increase absenteeism and grade repetition; reduce high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion; and reduce employment and earnings at ages 24–26. We further find school-level increases in the number of leadership staff and reductions in retention among teachers and teaching support staff in the years following a shooting. The adverse impacts of shootings span student characteristics, suggesting that the economic costs of school shootings are universal.

The consequences of high-fatality school shootings for surviving students

This paper examines the impact of high-fatality school shootings on the subsequent outcomes of the survivors of those events. We focus specifically on the shootings at Columbine High School (Littleton, CO), Sandy Hook Elementary (Newtown, CT), and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School (Parkland, FL). We assess the subsequent educational record, including attendance and test scores, and the long-term health consequences of surviving students. In all analyses, we treat the timing and location of these events as random, enabling us to identify causal effects. Our results indicate that these high-fatality school shootings led to substantial reductions in attendance and test scores. These educational effects appear to be larger than the effects of shootings with fewer fatalities estimated by others. Children who survived the Columbine shooting were more likely to die by age 30, particularly among boys. They experienced higher levels of suicide and accidental poisonings (overdoses).

School Nurses Can Reduce Firearm Injuries and Deaths

The most effective approach to creating safe and supportive school environments requires a comprehensive, coordinated effort including school-wide, district-wide, and community-wide strategies. School nurses, healthcare partners embedded in school communities, can guide these efforts. This article reviews data on school located gun violence through a public health lens, as well as outlines a framework for levels of prevention, including downstream, midstream, and upstream strategies.