School Shootings: Issue Attention Cycle & Law of Unintended Consequences

The next school shooting happens because people only care about the issue for a few days. New policies created during a short period of panic might be making the problem worse.

The Issue Attention Cycle is fascinating. For most of the year, my website (K-12 School Shooting Database) gets a few thousand visitors. When a planned attack like Apalachee High in Georgia happens, there are +100,000 from all over the world. Within days, it returns to normal.

Back in 1972, Anthony Downs first wrote about the Issue Attention Cycle in the National Affairs journal:

American public attention rarely remains sharply focused upon any one domestic issue for very long—even if it involves a continuing problem of crucial importance to society. These problems suddenly leap into prominence, remain there for a short time, and then—though still largely unresolved—gradually fade from the center of public attention.

Even with articles from NYT, Economist, CBS News, Newsweek, BBC, Reuters, AP, and USA Today that have links to my website, the vast majority of traffic comes from search engines. When a school shooting happens, curious people look for information and find my site. Very little of my website traffic comes from social media (mainly because these apps suppress posts with external links to keep users scrolling on their service). These curious people look at the site, send me emails with question and ideas about how to stop school shootings, and then move on to another topic.

Issue Attention Cycle

For detailed, analytical information about school shootings to be available when the general public’s attention is captured and people want to see it, I need to do work every day during the period when nobody cares about the topic. Most of my time and effort happens during the issue inattention part of the cycle before the public sees the problem or after enthusiasm to solve it fades.

When there is a critical mass of support to pass legislation during the rapid discovery/enthusiasm phase, there isn’t time to carefully analyze the new laws, policies, and purchases. Leaders make quick decisions based on public demand without exploring all of the possible the consequences.

This is a serious problem because the negative impacts from the unintended consequences of legislation that capitalized on the Issue Attention Cycle includes:

• 6-year-old students are handcuffed and arrested at Florida schools because state legislation passed weeks after Parkland requires police involvement in all school shooting threats, even obvious jokes and hoaxes.

• School districts with budget deficits in Texas are required by an unfunded mandate to have armed officers on every school campus after Uvalde.

• After the Nashville school shooting, teachers in Tennessee are told not to evacuate their classrooms during fire alarms despite nationwide fire codes that were developed after school fires that killed hundreds of students.

These unintended consequences can make schools less safe, hinder the ability of schools to provide their core function (educating students), and irrecoverably harm children’s futures through entry into the juvenile justice system. But why do we have so much trouble foreseeing these negative outcomes?

Law of Unintended Consequences

Sometimes unintended consequences are catastrophic, sometimes beneficial. Occasionally their impacts are imperceptible, at other times colossal. Large events frequently have a number of unintended consequences, but even small events can trigger them. There are numerous instances of purposeful deeds completely backfiring, causing the exact opposite of what was intended.

In Best Laid Plans: The Tyranny of Unintended Consequences and How to Avoid Them, William A. Sherden writes:

Suspending problematic children from school worsens their behavior, as they are more likely to engage in criminal behavior when outside school.