It’s not the black nail polish that’s the tip off, nor the trenchcoat.
Looking for a physical profile of a school shooter is futile, Dr. Amy L. Klinger told
a gathering of county public safety and school officials, Thursday.
The training session, "Crisis Management for School-based Incidents,"
couldn’t have been more timely in the wake of this week’s murders at a high
school in Chardon.
The timing was a coincidence. The session hosted by the Wood County Educational
Service Center has been in the works for months. Still the Chardon attack served
to sharpen participants’ focus, said Klinger, a school safety consultant.
"People are more interested in it right now," she said during the session’s
lunch break. "I just hope we can maintain this level of concern. … You
can imagine this happening in your school a lot more now than you could a year
ago. …. No districts can say it won’t happen here."
Though school shooters have little in common other than they are male teenagers, they
do exhibit behaviors before their attacks – threats on social media, planning
the attack, giving away personal items, enlisting accomplices – if only family,
friends, educators and police officers could work together.
"These kids are begging us to stop them," she said. "We’re just not
connecting the dots."
This can deter not only assaults, but also other forms of violence including teen
suicide. "A student who kills himself is just as tragic," Klinger
said.
Communities can act to prevent these targeted acts of violence.
The "tipping point," Klinger told the training session, is for every young
person to have a "trusted, responsible adult" in their lives.
Young people’s lives are shaped by the influences of friends, family and school. If a
teen has trouble in one of those areas, he must be able to gain even more
support from the others.
It’s no coincidence that these attacks happen in rural, middle-class communities,
Klinger said.
Those areas tend to have fewer social opportunities for children and lower tolerance
for differences. Boys, for example, who love musical theater might not be as
accepted, she said.
Klinger told of one attacker who was the only boy cut from the basketball team and
then when he joined the band, he couldn’t march because the band was short two
uniforms.
She said also in close-knit communities kids who are bullied have little chance to
get away from their tormentors. Many attackers, she said, believed they were
bullied or persecuted, though others may not have perceived that.
And when they decide to attack finding weapons is not difficult. Most attackers have
access to and had used weapons prior to the attack, Klinger noted. "There
are a lot of weapons out there and kids have access to them. What was shocking
to me was the number of parents buying weapons for their kids."
When it comes to using those weapons, attackers kill at a high rate.
Klinger said humans are predisposed not to kill each other. After the Battle of
Gettysburg, 12,000 rifles were collected from the field that had not been fired.
In World War II, the kill rate was only 15 percent. The military has made
concerted efforts to overcome this reticence by making targets more human like.
That approach has now been integrated in video first-person shooter games.
That gives potential attackers far more practice shooting at and killing people than
law enforcement officers have.
Two characteristics of attackers, Klinger said, are instability in their personal
lives and "immersion in violent media."
Having students go into lock-down mode, cowering under desks can make the attacker’s
task easier, she said.
Seung-Hui Cho who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 practiced at a shooting
range by putting targets on the floor.
A lock-down can also impede the gathering of information that police need about the
location and nature of the assault.
Shooters, she said, are on a power trip, but once that sense of control is disrupted
by someone challenging them, the attacks end.
That’s what happened, she said, in Chardon when a coach confronted the alleged
attacker T.J. Lane.
That kind of action is needed, she said, because attacks are usually over by the time
law enforcement arrives.
The attackers do not want to encounter police. Cho, she said, killed himself within
seconds of police entering the building where he was on his rampage.
The project is being funded by a $5.25 million federal grant awarded through the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.
The grant has also been used to buy safety related equipment for schools, said Kyle
Clark, WCESC project director. The Wood County Sheriff’s office has also
accessed all 44 buildings in the county for their vulnerability to a targeted
attack.