There’s a link between high school bullying and active-shooter incidents in school. As with other bullying issues, some researchers suggest the evidence is murky, but there’s plenty of it.
Both bullies and their victims and more likely to carry guns to their high school, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s “Pediatrics.”
A 2014 “survey of the surveys” conducted by Mitch van Geel, PhD; Paul Vedder, PhD; Jenny Tanilon, PhD, titled “Bullying and Weapons carrying: A Meta-Analysis,” looked at 45 previous studies for trends.
They found them.
The studies examined had looked at bullies, victims, and bully-victims, which are victims who turn to bullying as a response.
“Victims, bullies, and bully-victims report more weapon-carrying than their peers,” the authors wrote.“In itself, this finding is already cause for intervention because adolescents that carry weapons are more likely to get into fights, be hospitalized, be injured, or injure others than their peers who do not carry weapons.
“Furthermore, perpetrators of high school homicides were more likely the victims of bullying than their peers and the combination of bullying victimization and access to and interest in firearms is characteristic of the perpetrators of high school homicides.”
This is not a surprise.
In 12 of 15 school shooting cases examined, the shooters had a history of being bullied, according to the stopbullying.gov website. There’s certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence, from Columbine High School in 1999 onward, to support the argument that bullying is strongly tied to school shootings.
Then there’s this: according to the State University of New York / Buffalo State, “Bullying has been present in 2 out of 3 school shootings that the US Secret Service has investigated.”
“In a number of cases, bullying played a key role in the decision to attack. A number of attackers had
experienced bullying and harassment that were longstanding and severe. In those cases, the experience
of bullying appeared to play a major role in motivating the attack at school,” the National Institute of Justice Journal said in a report.
The conclusion reached by the Secret Service: “In a number of cases, attackers described experiences of being bullied in terms that approached torment. They told of behaviors that, if they occurred in the workplace, would meet the legal definitions of harassment. That bullying played a major role in a number of these school shootings should strongly support ongoing efforts to combat bullying in American schools.”
