By investing in prevention, fostering resilience, and prioritizing the mental health of our students, You can create schools that are not only secure, but also nurturing and supportive learning environments. The guide presents resources, tools, recommended practices, and checklists, and evidence-based practices for incorporating gun violence-related strategies into the school crisis prevention and response plans of associations, Pre-K–12 schools, and institutions of higher education. In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence.
Fostering Student & Educator Mental Health
Students, staff, and parents all have an important role in promoting school safety. A more robust system for collecting and analyzing data on school violence is needed to identify trends, assess the effectiveness of interventions, and inform policy decisions. The tragedy in Tumbler Ridge serves as a stark reminder that school NEA Gun Violence Prevention Guide safety is not a one-time fix, but an ongoing process of assessment, adaptation, and investment. Traditional school safety protocols, such as lockdown drills, are increasingly recognized as insufficient on their own.
- All incidents of gun violence in schools, regardless of their intent or victim count, compromise the safety of students and staff.
- In its report, the Secret Service found most of the school attackers they studied had been bullied.
- We need to create powerful, informed networks in our communities that know how to keep our children safe.
- In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence.
- Instead, we have a gun homicide rate 26 times that of other high-income countries.1Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund.
- By focusing on root causes such as poverty, lack of education, and unemployment, this approach aims to create safer environments through prevention efforts that go beyond immediate crisis response.
Many other factors have been proven to cause toxic stress, including poverty, racism, bullying, community violence, and generational (historical) trauma (Cronholm & et al., 2015); (Garner & Yogman, 2021). Researchers have found that trauma can change the brain and the body’s makeup, which can lead to diseases like obesity, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and mental health disorders (Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, 2014). While not all ACEs lead to childhood trauma, people who suffer from one or more such adversities may experience a negative impact on their overall well-being, education, and career. In the shooting incidents where the Everytown Support Fund was able to identify the racial makeup of the student body, 2 out of 3 incidents occurred in majority-minority schools (Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, 2022). The U.S. Secret Service study of targeted school violence from 2008 to 2017 found that 100 percent of the perpetrators showed behaviors of concern and 77 percent of the time at least one person, most often a peer, knew about their plan.
How do gun safety prevention strategies address mental health concerns in schools?
A lot of the conversation around making schools safer has centered on hardening schools by adding police officers and metal detectors. School safety researchers also support universal background checks and banning assault-style weapons. When asked which specific measures would be “most effective” at preventing school shootings, 57% of teachers favored universal background checks, and the same number, 57%, also favored banning the sale of semiautomatic weapons such as the one used in the Parkland attack. For years, school safety experts, and even the U.S.
Safe and equitable schools
Several states have had recent success passing strong policy—for example, Nevada added half of its gun law score and New Mexico added close to 50% of its score in the past several years. But no state is an island (except Hawaii), and any state may be vulnerable if its neighbors fail to protect public safety. Our gun law rankings are a roadmap for how to build the ideal state system. While each of the top 16 states in the gun law rankings has all five of these policies in place, only one of the bottom 18 states has even one of these critical protections. Some seek to increase police accountability and protect civil rights, while another set targets bad actors in the gun industry.
Contrary to images of the Wild West popularized in movies, cities on the frontier often required visitors to disarm and check their guns with the local sheriff or at a stable on the outskirts before entering the town. Many Americans owned only hunting rifles or pistols instead of proper military guns, and though the fines were high for doing so (equivalent to thousands of dollars today), they were levied inconsistently and the public largely ignored the law. A 1792 federal law required that every man eligible for militia service own a gun and ammunition suitable for military service, report for frequent inspection of their guns, and register his gun ownership on public records.
