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Explores the psychosocial causes of school shootings as a cultural trend and society's strategies to maintain order in their aftermath.
The tragedies at Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, have shown that our national strategy to end school shootings is failing. School Shootings in American Culture uniquely applies systems-thinking to school shootings as a cultural trend. Author Lisa Ross exposes not only the design flaws in our most celebrated prevention methods—active shooter response training, threat assessment teams, and target hardening but also the implicit and at times unwarranted assumptions on which they are based. America's makeshift approach to combating school shootings since Columbine is examined, with emphasis on the school resource officer's role. Then through the interdisciplinary themes of power, propaganda, and panic, Ross explores society's psychological processes for controlling social threats. What emerges is a near irreconcilable conflict between post-Columbine active shooter policy and traditional police culture, which is made plain by government investigations into law enforcement's response at Uvalde. Policymakers, school administrators, and researchers and students in the fields of social science will find this book sweeping, compelling, and relevant.
"Overall, Ross provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the motivations behind school shootings and a critical examination of responses to them. It is also timely, as SROs are becoming increasingly common but have generated relatively little discussion. As Ross points out, no proposed solution is a panacea, but it would be naive and inefficient to take a purely reactive approach, and it is important to reconsider policies that might cause more harm than good." — Cato Institute
"School shootings is a topic of great interest and concern to American society, to parents, and to policymakers. School Shootings in American Culture is a highly readable, carefully documented study of the subject matter, full of original insights. I found it difficult to put down." — Brad J. Bushman, The Ohio State University