Researchers rarely reveal that a person of their long-held concepts has actually failed.
But that is precisely what Ron Avi Astor, one of the nation’s leading scholars of school violence and a teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles, said before fellow researchers at the annual conference in April of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
“We were incorrect,” Astor informed the audience.
For years, Astor believed that enhancing school climate and decreasing bullying would assist prevent school shootings. He encouraged nationwide policymakers and provided recommendations. Schools responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, therapy and other efforts to make schools much safer and more welcoming.
Those efforts have benefited students in many methods. Fewer students report bringing weapons or knives to school, and schools have typically become much safer.
However school shootings have not declined.
“I’ve had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.
That shift followed he stepped back and took a look at the proof. During his AERA discussion, Astor revealed a slide with two stark graphs. One traced a stable decrease in trainees bringing weapons to California schools over the quarter century given that the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The other graph revealed a sharp increase in school shootings across the nation.
Diverging patterns
Divergent patterns in student-reported weapon-related behavior and national school shooting events, 2001– 2024. Panel A reveals the percentage of California secondary school students (grades 7, 9, and 11) reporting 4 weapon-related behaviors in the California Healthy Kids Study throughout academic years 2001– 2024. All 4 indications declined significantly over the research study period. Panel B shows the annual count of school shooting occurrences taped in the K-12 School Shooting Database, which records any event in which a gun was brandished, fired, or a bullet struck school property in the United States. Key occasions and the COVID-19 interruption duration (shaded) are annotated.
Source: A slide from Ron Avi Astor’s presentation during an AERA session on April 11, 2026, “School Active Shooter Drills: Mitigating Dangers to Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health– A Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medication.”
The graphs catch an unpleasant realization. Astor says he and other researchers had misinterpreted what was driving many school shootings.
Astor kept in mind that lots of school shooters had been bullied, were bullies themselves or had experienced injury, and he thought that shootings would decline if educators decreased bullying and strengthened relationships amongst students in your area, one school structure at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor stated. “Let’s concentrate on avoidance.”
“What was missed, I believe, was that each shooter wished to make certain that this was nationwide,” Astor said. “Their top audience was the media. That’s truly clear to me now.”
Astor now thinks lots of wrongdoers are driven by a desire for prestige. Shooters research study previous massacres, learn from online communities and seek the publicity that follows a mass attack.
“Most of them are self-destructive, and they chose to be bloodthirsty so that they would be remembered,” Astor stated.
That brand-new point of view has led him to an extremely different suggestion. Instead of focusing on prevention inside schools, Astor believes reporters and social media companies must adopt standards that decrease attention on criminals, delay publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more coverage on victims.
“I’m not stating do not do social-emotional or anti-gun” efforts, Astor said. “Those things are very important. But if we wish to see a decrease in school shootings, we require to work with the media.”
Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions or spates of terrorism, where comprehensive publicity can inspire copycats. He acknowledges that it’s a long shot to convince social media business or the dark web to change, and he can not prove that changing will work to decrease school shootings. “However it’s worth a try,” he stated.
What makes Astor’s argument noteworthy isn’t simply his new hypothesis. It’s his determination to openly desert an old one after concluding that the evidence no longer supported it. It’s never ever simple to alter course but Astor’s openness could save lives.
Contact personnelauthor Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].
This story about preventing school shootings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers education. Register for Proof Pointsand other Hechinger newsletters.
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