{"id":64763,"date":"2014-10-26T09:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-10-26T14:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=64763"},"modified":"2014-12-21T13:59:28","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T18:59:28","slug":"school-shootings-whats-different-about-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/10\/26\/school-shootings-whats-different-about-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"School Shootings: What’s Different About Europe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u2019s killing was the 39th school shooting in the U.S. this year.\u00a0 Most of those got little press coverage. Unless someone is actually killed, a shooting might not even get coverage in the local news.<\/p>\n

Yesterday’s did.<\/p>\n

Why would an apparently happy kid shoot several classmates? That seems to be the question that\u2019s getting the attention of the press and perhaps the public. \u201cStruggling to Find Motive,\u201d said one typical headline. That\u2019s the way we think about school shootings these days.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unlikely that any of the motives that turn up will be all that strange. Fryberg may have been upset by a racial comment someone had made the day before or by a break-up with a girl. He may have had other conflicts with other kids. Nothing unusual there.<\/p>\n

But \u201cwhy\u201d is not the question that first occurs to me. What I always ask is how a 14-year old kid can get his hands on a .40 Beretta handgun (or whatever the weaponry in the shooting of the week is).\u00a0 For Fryberg it\u00a0 was easy. The pistol belonged to his father. Nothing strange there either.\u00a0 Thirty million homes in the US, maybe forty million, are stocked with guns.<\/p>\n

Do European countries have school shootings like this? Surely kids in Europe get upset about break-ups; surely they must have conflicts with their classmates; and surely, some of them may become irrationally upset by these setbacks.\u00a0 So surely there must have been school shootings in Europe too.<\/p>\n

I went to Wikipedia and looked for school shootings since 1980 (here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>).\u00a0 I eliminated shootings by adults (e.g., Lanza in Sandy Hook, Brevik in Norway). I also deleted in-school suicides even though these were done with guns and were terrifying to the other students. I\u2019m sure my numbers are not perfectly accurate, and the population estimate in the graph below\u00a0 is based on current numbers; I didn\u2019t bother to find an average over the last 35 years. Still the differences are so large that I\u2019m sure they are not due to technical problems in the data.<\/p>\n

\"1<\/a>
\nDoes the U.S. have a much greater proportion of kids who are mentally unstable? Do our schools have more bullying? Are European kids more capable in dealing with conflicts? Are they more stable after break-ups? Do they spend less time with violent video games? Do their schools have more programs to identify and counsel the potentially violent?\u00a0 I\u2019m not familiar with the data on these, but I would guess that the answer is no and that our kids are no more screwed up than kids in Europe. Or if there are differences, they are not large enough to explain the difference in the body count.<\/p>\n

No, the important difference seems to be the guns.\u00a0 But guns have become the elephant in the room that nobody talks about.\u00a0 Even asking about access to guns seems unAmerican these days.\u00a0 Thanks to the successful efforts of the NRA and their representatives in government, guns have become a taken-for-granted part of the landscape. Asking how a 14-year old got a handgun is like asking how he got a bicycle to ride to school.<\/p>\n

When the elephant\u2019s presence is too massive not be noticed \u2013 for example, when the elephant kills several people \u2013\u00a0 the elephant\u2019s spokesmen rush in to tell us that \u201cNo, this is not the time to talk about the elephant.\u201d\u00a0 And so we talk about video games and psychological screening and parents and everything else, until the next multiple killing. But of course that too is not the time to talk about elephants.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u2019s killing was the 39th school shooting in the U.S. this year.\u00a0 Most of those got little press coverage. Unless someone is actually killed, a shooting might not even get coverage in the local news. Yesterday’s did. Why would an apparently happy kid shoot several classmates? That seems to be the question that\u2019s getting the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":64764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[260,3920,85,250,133],"class_list":["post-64763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-international-comparisons","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-guns","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/10\/26.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64763"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65484,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64763\/revisions\/65484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}