Breaking the system to prevent school shootings

Mass deletions of government websites include the public resources to prevent school shootings.

The National Counterterrorism Center, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security just released an updated booklet about the warning signs of mass violence at schools.

This document is a modified version of the US Violent Extremist Mobilization Indicators 2021 Edition. The PDF document (which should be an app for easy reference) is a resource to “inform law enforcement, terrorism prevention practitioners, other first responders, community leaders, as well as the general public about both threats of violence and contextual behaviors that suggest an individual is mobilizing to violence”.

The education version of this PDF mirrors the original 2021 document with three sections about behaviors, risk factors, and sector-specific resources. The first two sections are full of tips that aren’t really applicable to schools like monitoring suspicious foreign travel, unscheduled one-way travel, or receiving unexplained financial resources from violent extremist groups.

Since this is an “Education Sector” guide, the useful info is most likely to be in Section Three where the booklet is full of links to other government websites for more resources.

For info about preventing youth violence on campus, there is a Department of Education Guide:

But that link has been deleted:

If you want info from the US Secret Service, there is a link to an analysis of averted school shooting plots:

But that page has been deleted:

There’s also a link to a CDC guide about community violence prevention:

But that website is gone:

If you want to checkout the DHS CISA guide for how to create a bystander reporting system:

But that page is gone too:

For info on school safety and reporting resources from the official US Government information hub on SchoolSafety.gov:

That page is also gone:

Preventing violence before it escalates into a shooting is one of most effective ways to make a campus safer. The Department of Education wrote a guide about it:

But that page is gone:

Since most school shooting threats are made online, there is a DHS CISA guide for how to respond to online threats:

But alas, that page is gone too:

At the end of the booklet, under the official agency shields there’s a QR code to get your very own copy.

Like everything else in this document, the QR code does not give you a link to this booklet. It takes you to the Director of National Intelligence “How we work” landing page.

If you click the link to submit a tip to the FBI, you will get a reminder that they only investigate federal crimes and tips about terrorism. A school shooting in the United States has never been classified as an act of terrorism or a federal crime by the US Government so it’s unclear if your report will be investigated.

You also get a warning that if you make tips “with no investigative value” your tips won’t be considered.

The categories of tips don’t include school shooting or threats of mass violence:

If you click on Violent Crime, you get a warning to call 9-1-1 instead.

If a school gets a threat about a school shooting, I’m not really sure what the point of this guide or the link to the FBI reporting system is. None of these reporting categories are applicable and the links to prevention resources are broken.

Consequences and Solutions

Schools are already left on an island to deal with most threats of violence. Deleting links to the few resources that previously existed just makes this problem worse. Unlike the generic nonsense about identifying foreign terrorists in this new PDF guide, there are some practical steps and common sense info that schools can use without help from the government.

Most school shooters are current or former students who act alone, are actively suicidal, and plan to die during their attack. These attacks are usually a violent public suicide without an escape plan that comes at the end of prolonged trauma and crisis. (note: this new FBI guide doesn’t list suicide or crisis as risk factors but does highlight the widely discredited connection between violence and video games)

Based on my research with Dr. Dan Hamline (still unpublished because the peer-review process for an academic journal article takes years), more than 80% of averted school shootings between 2019-2023 were stopped because of tips from other students or parents. Empowering the community to speak-up and take action is the most effective way to prevent violence at schools.

There are three steps we can take to stop many school shootings:

1. Public education and standardized reporting system similar to “see something, say something” so that anyone who spots “red flags” can easily report them to police (read more: What can the average person do to prevent the next school shooting?)

2. Crisis intervention programs in every community to help someone who shows risk factors before they decide violence is their only option.

3. Federal ‘red flag’ law that enables authorities in every state to remove access to firearms from someone who is identified as a threat to themselves or others.

I wish I could put a link here to the nation-wide reporting system, but it doesn’t exist. Here is my explanation of how we can create a version of the National Poison Control Center for investigating, preventing, and collecting real-time data on school shooting plots.

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David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.