School Shooting: A Social Problem and Its Impact on Society

Running Head: SCHOOL SHOOTING
SCHOOL SHOOTING
Name of the Student:
Name of University:
Author Note:

1SCHOOL SHOOTING
School shooting has become a common phenomenon primarily in the developed
countries. Over the last decade a number of shooting incidents have occurred and most of the
cases the educational institutions were the primary target. One of the biggest reason behind such
a phenomena was the easy to pray approach of the gunmen. The perpetrators came from varying
backgrounds and assaulted in schools or educational institutions out of frustration or any other
psychological disorders. In this regard, this essay aims to illustrate the school shooting as a social
problem and its impact on the society. Furthermore, a policy briefing to mitigate the issue is also
incorporate into the discussion with the purpose to curb down the incident predominantly.
This essay is going to investigate on United States where the school shooting incidents
are high and fatal also. According to Baird et al. the shooting incidents are reported to increase at
a rapid pace since 1981 and there are despite of several attempts by the school authority and the
government by imposing policies to prevent the violence, the problem still exists in the society.
the CNN report suggested that the rate of school shooting was growing in such a pace that in
2018 the average incidents was more than 1 shooting a week. The report of Coughlan articulated
that over 1,300 school shooting incidents have been occurred in US since 1970 and 2018 scored
the highest number with 82 recorded incidents. As a matter of fact, California, Texas and Florida
are the top three states in US with most of the shooting incidents. The research of Sommer et al.
tried to project a demographic statistics over the gunmen. As per the research at least 690
incidents were occurred where the shooter was the current student of the school. Besides this, an
astonishing fact is that the percentage of male shooters are more than females and in 861
incidents where the shooter targeted specific victims.
Besides the government initiatives, it is also important for the public to take some
responsibility in order to reduce the school shooting incidents. There is a two faced policy that

2SCHOOL SHOOTING
can deal with the school shooting and reducing the practice as well. The first one is associated
with the checking the background of the buyers. It is a very debatable and over high criticism
from every corner of manufacturing companies. Despite of such obstacles it is important to run a
background check on the gun buyers and then sell it is the most useful and easy to practice
mechanism. The report of Rand Corporation advocated that the universal background check
system would prevent more than 1000 homicides per year. On the other hand, a thorough
psychological test is also required in order to understand the root of the crimes and procuring
better precautions on that. The report of Beland and Kim shows that most of the shooting were
occurred by the current students of the academic institutions. Therefore, it is obvious that there
are some possibilities to look out the root cause of the school shooting from a psychological
perspective. In fact, most of the reason till today found that psychological disorder is one of the
major cause behind such incident and the lack of treatment made it impossible to eradicate the
problem out of its root.
However, the policies are already implemented within the US society and the thorough
background check is seemed not enough for the educational institute to deal with the school
shooting. For an instance, the background checking system is not universally adopted in all the
states of United States. The report of Rostron advocated that there are severe gaps in the
government policy making and the height of pressure from gun manufacturing giants it becomes
impossible for the government to take adequate measures in order to bring justice and curbing
down the nefarious acts of school shooting. One the other hand, Schildkraut and Hernandez
mentioned that the psychological tests are also seemed ineffective because those are already
prevalent in educational institutions. The psychological tests are sometimes failed to find
anything related to revenge and ferocity. The process is not so sure enough to take down the