Recognizing Warning Signs: Preventing School Shootings

By James Densley, Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson, Hamline University

Most school shootings don’t just happen out of the blue. There are usually warning signs.

A year before a 14-year-old boy was arrested for opening fire in his Winder, Georgia, math class on September 4, 2024, killing two teachers and two students, authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting.

When they questioned the boy, who was 13 at the time, he denied making the threats. The father told police there were shotguns in the house, but the boy did not have “unsupervised access” to the weapons.

The FBI said in a statement on the day of the shooting that there was “no probable cause for an arrest” and that local law enforcement had “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.”

Teachers at the school had been given special identification cards with panic buttons a week before the shooting. Although authorities credit the ID cards with keeping the shooting from being worse than it was, the action came too late to stop the killings.

In many ways, the story echoes dozens of similar stories that we sociologists and psychologists have collected over the years in our effort to study the lives of mass shooters. It is emblematic of what we believe is one of the greatest challenges schools face in preventing school shootings: recognizing and acting on the warning signs that school shooters almost always give, well before they open fire.

In our database of U.S. mass shootings since 1966—defined as incidents in which four or more victims were killed with weapons in a public location and not related to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs—there have now been 15 shootings at K-12 schools. The first was in Stockton, California, in 1989.

Seven of those school shootings have occurred in the past decade, including the second and third deadliest ever: Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 (21 dead) and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 (17 dead). The deadliest school shooting in history occurred in December 2012, when 20 children and six adult staff members were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In total, 138 people were killed and at least 177 injured in the attacks.

What We Know About School Mass Shootings

When the Columbine High School massacre occurred in 1999, it was seen as a watershed moment in the United States. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting at a school in the country’s history.

Twenty-five years later, it ranks fourth.

Despite the billions of dollars invested in school safety since Columbine, school shootings have become more frequent and deadly. In addition to the mass shootings that make headlines, a gun goes off in an American school nearly every day.

Our research and dozens of interviews with perpetrators, survivors, and first responders of school shootings suggest that part of the problem lies with law enforcement and school officials. Influenced by myths and misinformation about Columbine, they still don’t know enough about the trends in mass school shootings to recognize the warning signs.

Most school shootings were carried out by a single gunman. Only two shootings – Columbine and the 1998 shooting at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas – were carried out by two gunmen.

The choice of “shooters” to describe the perpetrators is accurate—all but one of the school mass shootings in our database were carried out by men or boys. The average age of those involved in the attacks was 18—the youngest was 11 and the oldest 32. As minors, a majority of school shooters used weapons borrowed or stolen from parents, guardians, and other significant adults in their lives.

After every school shooting, people say, “We never thought something like this could happen in our community.” However, mass school shootings are most common in small suburban or rural communities like Winder, Georgia. There, the suspect is a 14-year-old student at the school. That’s not surprising. Most school shooters have some connection to the school they target. In our database, we found that 15 of the 17 school shooters were current or former students.

For most perpetrators, the mass shooting is intended as a final act. The majority of school mass shooters die in the attack. Of the 17 school mass shooters in our database, eight were arrested. The rest died at the scene, almost all by suicide. The lone exception was the shooter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, who was shot and killed by police.

Preventing the Next School Shooting

Inspired by previous school shootings, some perpetrators seek fame and notoriety. Most school mass shooters, however, are driven by desperation and generalized anger; more than 80% of school mass shooters showed signs of a crisis before the shooting, including depression, mood swings, agitation, isolation, difficulty with daily tasks, and other noticeable behavioral changes.

Most importantly, over 90% leaked their plans to others in advance, and prevented their attacks by leaving messages, posts, or videos warning of their intentions. School shooters communicate their intention to cause harm in advance as a last, desperate cry for help.

The key to stopping these tragedies is to be alert to these warning signs and respond to them immediately. Even if investigators don’t have enough evidence to make an arrest, they can continue to monitor students and help connect them to school or community services or interventions, including peer mentoring or mental health services. Simply criminalizing or punishing threats increases the risk of violence by exacerbating complaints about the school.

At the same time, parents can be reminded to keep guns safe. Virtually all shootings by children and teens can be prevented by storing firearms safely and by being accountable to adult gun owners. When a gun is stored separately from its ammunition, locked and unloaded, it is much more difficult for someone to quickly use it in a violent attack.

Portions of this article originally appeared in previous articles by the authors, first published on February 8, 2019 and May 25, 2022.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a non-profit, independent news organization that brings you facts and reliable analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: James Densley, Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson, Hamline University

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James Densley receives funding from the Joyce Foundation and the National Institute of Justice.

Jillian Peterson receives funding from the Joyce Foundation and the National Institute of Justice.

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