Exploring the Social Impacts of School Shooting Threats

In the wake of highly publicized mass school shootings, national debate continues to focus on the devastating loss of young lives, the merits of gun control, or the dynamics that influence school shooters. Yet one outcome of mass school violence least addressed but most prevalent, is the shift in students’ social experiences of schooling as a result of its possibility. While few U.S. youth will actually encounter a mass shooting during their K-12 experience, most are drilled on how to respond to active shooters, and many encounter the threat of one. What impacts are these phenomena having on young people’s social lives and relationships?

School shooting threats are increasingly familiar in schools nationwide, and so are educators’ preparations for them. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 2021-2022 school year, over 45 percent of US public schools reported at least one threat of an attack at school, and 95 percent had drilled youth on lockdowns. Of course, young people’s awareness of the potential of a school shooting does not just come from schools. It is shaped by the culture that surrounds them, reinforced through social media, political discourse, and popular culture. Though mass shootings in schools are statistically rare, our cultural representations of, and securitized response to their possibility have dramatically reshaped the experience of U.S. education and intensified inequalities among students. 

In this next book project, I ask: how are school shooting threats – their actuality, their potentiality, and their presence in U.S. culture– impacting the social worlds of K-12 school communities? How do young people make sense of these threats, prepare for, and respond to them? In what ways are these threats and their outcomes racialized, sexualized, classed, and gendered? What implications do they have on the perpetuation of educational inequities and how are young people resisting these outcomes?

photo: moren hsu for Unsplash