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What We Know About Foiled and Failed Mass School Shootings

Tragic gun violence incidents in schools—including Columbine High (1999), Sandy Hook Elementary (2012), Marjory Stoneman Douglas High (2018), and Robb Elementary (2022)—have made mass school shootings one of the greatest social and political concerns of the 21st century. Although these events are rare relative to other forms of school violence and gun violence at large, their negative impact on the emotional well-being of students, teachers, parents, and society cannot be understated. To address this concern, much academic research has been directed at understanding mass school shootings as a subtype of the public mass shooting phenomenon. Public mass shooting research has largely focused on completed incidents involving four or more victim fatalities. Despite these advancements, current research often excludes relevant cases that are characterized by mass shooting intent—resulting in fewer than four fatalities. In other words, research thus far has largely overlooked foiled and failed mass school shootings: incidents that are planned (foiled) or initiated (failed) but never manifest into an attempted or completed shooting (i.e., involving gunshot casualties).

There are a variety of ways that mass school shootings may be foiled or fail. Some mass school shooting plots are foiled before an offender can progress past the planning and preparation stage into actualized attack initiation. For example, in 2019, a 19-year-old student was planning to carry out a mass shooting at his university. He had been studying previous mass shootings for over a year so he could learn how to complete his attack. He purchased two firearms a week before his intended attack; however, his plot was foiled by fellow students who reported him to campus security after seeing the guns. During a search of his dorm room, police found ammunition and detailed plans (including a timeline) for completing his attack in addition to the firearms. In the end, the other students’ recognition of this potential threat and notification to school officials and police lead to the prevention of this mass school shooting attack.

In other situations, initiated mass school shootings may fail due to the rapid response of potential victims and guardians at the scene. For example, in 2018, a 19-year-old student arrived at his high school with a semiautomatic rifle, intending to commit a mass shooting during graduation rehearsal in the gymnasium. At the entrance of the gymnasium, however, the offender ran into a wrestling coach and opened fire, alerting students, faculty, and the school resource officer (SRO), all of whom responded quickly. Students and faculty engaged in lockdown procedures and the SRO pursued the shooter out of the building. Ultimately, the offender’s intentions failed, as he was the only casualty during the attack after being shot and injured by the SRO. This research brief explores what we know about both foiled and failed mass school shootings—referring to plots and incidents that resulted in zero victim casualties. These thwarted mass shootings—whether foiled or failed—are the ideal outcomes of a planned mass shooting. They are particularly useful for determining effective strategies to prevent incidents or intervene before innocent victims are harmed.

Schools and Gun Violence: What Do We Know About the Prevalence and Effects?

As the 2021-22 academic year came to a close, the United States was rocked by the news of another school mass shooting, this time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen fourth-grade students and two of their teachers were killed when an 18-year-old former student entered the school through an unlocked door, made his way to his former fourth-grade classroom, and opened fire during a 77-minute rampage. Seventeen others were injured in the attack.

The tragedy in Uvalde conjured up memories of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Nearly 10 years earlier, 20 first-grade students and six of their educators, including the school’s principal, were killed after a 20-year-old shot his way into the building. Two others were injured during the six-minute attack.

In the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, administrators and policymakers struggled to implement policies and procedures that would prevent a similar attack in their schools or minimize the loss of life if one did occur. These included, but were not limited to, increases in the numbers and presence of school resource officers, authorization to arm teachers, and even supplying schools with ballistics shields, despite the lack of evidence to suggest these measures would achieve their intended goals in situations like Uvalde.

Amid growing fear and apprehension about another Sandy Hook or Uvalde happening and the proliferation of purported school safety measures, two questions occupy the minds of many: Are schools a safe place for children to be? And what actually works to make them safer?

As policymakers, school administrators, and other vested stakeholders continue to grapple with these questions, it is critical to plan for every instance of firearm violence on school grounds. In doing so, it is important to implement strategies that are based in research where evidence supports their efficacy in achieving prevention and/or harm mitigation. At the same time, it is imperative to consider not only the short-term effects but also longer-term impacts of both gun violence and the associated strategies for prevention and response on students. Researchers will be key in cultivating this evidence and must continue to work closely with policymakers, school administrators, and the public to protect children from the harmful effects of gun violence.

Choose to Change: Your Mind, Your Game

Research Brief

Gun violence disproportionately affects youth and young adults living in our city and our country’s most historically under-resourced neighborhoods. The fundamental disparities in basic safety that exist mean that young people growing up in some Chicago neighborhoods are exposed to gun violence at rates almost 30 times higher than their peers just a few miles — or even a few blocks — away. For the children and families living in the communities most affected, consistent exposure to violence and trauma can be detrimental to their mental health, emotional development, and academic engagement.1 While undoing the decades of systemic disinvestment that have created inequity in opportunity will take time, in the immediate term we need to find ways to better support the young people bearing the greatest burdens of violence. Recent research from Chicago and elsewhere suggests providing behavioral and mental health supports can help decrease violence involvement and increase academic engagement.2 These programs, based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, seek to give young people additional tools to navigate their difficult environments — return a sense of safety, slow down their decision-making processes, and increase their social-emotional skillset. Despite the promise of these approaches, there is a dearth of programming for youth who are no longer consistently attending school and those who are already interacting with the justice system.

Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago about their work in the formal, informal, and criminal sectors. Noncriminal work is common. Two-thirds of respondents specialize solely in the criminal or noncriminal sectors, both earning about minimum wage at the median. Those who mix across sectors typically earn higher wages. We describe workers by type to demonstrate how better understanding sectoral specialization could inform program design.

Is electronic monitoring contributing to gun violence?

Amid a historic rise in gun violence, debates about the underlying factors driving the surge in Chicago have grown to include electronic monitoring (EM), a condition of pretrial release that equips people who have been arrested and assigned to EM with a GPS-monitored ankle bracelet while awaiting trial from home instead of jail. However, the lack of easily accessible public data makes it difficult for all sides to agree on the basic facts about EM and its potential effects on public safety. Analysis of the data we’ve received from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) allows us to ground the debate about EM in a few essential takeaways: for one, it’s an oversimplification to say that EM is driving gun violence in Chicago, given the timing of the relevant changes in the justice system and the small number of people arrested for gun violence while out on EM compared to overall victimizations. Nonetheless, the makeup of who is on EM has changed over the past few years: while the largest increase in the use of EM was for gun possession offenses, the number of people on EM for a homicide or shooting is also much higher than it was in 2016. We also see in the data that people out on EM are themselves victims of violence at a much higher rate than others in the city, suggesting that there’s more to be done to connect people on EM to helpful social services. In any data analysis, there are numerous details about both the data and analytical methods that can be important for understanding the nuances of what the data can and can’t tell us, as well as reasonable alternative choices about how to analyze the data, interpret and present the results, and address some of the limitations of the data themselves. Because of the space constraints in the article, we have omitted many of those details and sensitivity analyses from the published version. We provide those additional details here.

Injury Prevention Science and Firearm Injury in Pediatric Health

In this issue of JAMA, Wolf et al found that during the period from 2019 to 2021, the US experienced the greatest increase in all-cause pediatric fatalities (aged 1-19 years) in more than 50 years, with increased mortality disproportionately resulting from preventable injuries. Importantly, the authors identified widening racial and ethnic disparities across these preventable health outcomes, particularly for American Indian or Alaska Native and Black populations. The most stark differences were observed for homicide and suicide, with Black youth 10 times more likely to die by homicide and American Indian or Alaska Native youth almost 3 times more like to die by suicide compared with White youth. Among both populations, firearms remain the dominant mechanism of injury underlying homicide and suicide deaths, and firearm fatalities were identified by Wolf et al as one of the largest factors in observed disparities. Such findings are consistent with the trends that have been observed in the US throughout the past decade, where the firearm injury epidemic has continued to advance unabated and has now superseded motor vehicle crash deaths as the leading cause of death for US children and teens.