The History Of School Shootings

School Shootings in U.S. History
Why do people resort to gun violence? This question has taken off in recent years, especially following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in December, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary. It’s hard to say why exactly people resort to gun violence mainly because most shooters are usually killed by themselves or they are shot by police officers at the scene of the crime so we don’t have a chance to question them and figure out what they were actually thinking. Shooters that we are able to capture and question are usually so mentally gone that it’s hard to figure out what exactly they were thinking. There are a plethora of likely causes for school shootings, some more plausible than others. People believe that anything from video games to mental disorders to bullying to attention, and many others, could be the main reason for why people decide to shoot up schools. You can’t point to one thing and decide that is why the shooter attacked, it will usually be several factors that affect the shooter that they end up breaking down and think gun violence is perfectly fine.
School shootings have been a part of America’s history since 1700’s when four Lenape Indians went into a school in Greencastle, Pa., and killed the teacher and up to as many as 10 children (Epstein, 2012). Since that day school shootings have become almost a regular occurrence. This school year alone, we have already reached eleven shootings (Hefling, 2014). Perhaps, an even more stunning number, since the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, just fourteen months ago, America has had an appalling 44 school shootings, totaling a horrific 28 deaths, in just fourteen months (Dimon, 2014). Since that day in December, about 1,500 state gun...

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...y. Publicly hurting others shows everyone just how much they were hurting themselves. Basically all of our mass media platforms of our society, such as television, video games, music, internet, movies, could potentially wear down the humanity, or in a way, the innocence, of the teens. This allows them to find violence as a potentially acceptable, or at least desensitize, to some extent, them to the actual magnitude of murder and violence. They see it as an easy way of gaining attention. People always want to point fingers when these tragedies happen, they want to find a scapegoat, and they try to pin the events on someone else. Teenagers all want attention and when they feel neglected or mad at the world for not having attention, they see violence as a great way of getting what they have always felt they deserved, no matter whose toes they have to step on to get it.