School rampage shootings and street shootings by youth differ in dramatic ways<\/strong>: They are done by different types of youth for different reasons, and often have very different risk factors.<\/p>\n “It is amazing how different school shooters are from street shooters,” said Brad Bushman, the lead author of the report and a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University.<\/p>\n “But the basic approach to preventing them is very similar. It starts with making the prevention of youth violence a national priority<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n Bushman co-authored the new report with 11 other violence experts from universities across the country. They all co-wrote a report for the National Science Foundation on what is known and not known about youth violence.<\/p>\n This new report, which summarizes and updates the NSF document, appears online in the journal American Psychologist<\/em>.<\/p>\n Bushman said that the type of youth who become school shooters are nearly opposite of those who commit street shootings.<\/p>\n Nearly all school shooters are white, rural or suburban, and middle class. Street shooters are often black, poor, and live in the inner-city<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Street shooters often have lengthy arrest records and use handguns that they obtained illegally. School shooters usually have multiple weapons, including semi-automatic or automatic rifles<\/strong>, which were purchased legally and often obtained from family members.<\/p>\n “Street shooters don’t want anyone to know what they did — they want to hide<\/strong>,” Bushman said. “Mass shooters want everyone to know.”<\/p>\n And for mass shooters, their violence is often designed to be the end of the line for them: They often kill themselves, whereas street shooters rarely commit suicide<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Given all the differences between street shooters and school shooters, it might appear that the causes are completely different. But that’s not true, Bushman said.<\/p>\n “The causes of gun violence in youth are complex. There are usually multiple factors acting together no matter what kind of shooting is involved,” Bushman said.<\/p>\n Some factors — like social rejection from peers — seem to be more related to school shooters<\/strong>. Other factors, like poverty, appear to play a larger role in street shootings.<\/p>\n But many factors, like family influences, personality traits, exposure to media violence, and access to guns play a role in both types of youth gun violence<\/strong>, Bushman said.<\/p>\n Bushman has extensively studied the role that a steady diet of media violence has on aggression and violence in youth.<\/p>\n Particularly in school shootings, the role of violent video games is often debated, particularly because so many offenders were shown to be obsessed with “first-person shooter” games, where the player is the killer.<\/p>\n “We can never say that playing violent video games is the one cause of a youth going on a shooting rampage<\/strong>,” Bushman said.<\/p>\n “But there is a lot of evidence that exposure to media violence increases aggressive behavior. And evidence suggests such exposure may be a contributing factor to violent behavior, even if it isn’t the main factor. The main factor is probably easy access to guns.”<\/p>\n Because youth violence has so many causes, preventing it also requires a multifaceted approach. Many of the solutions are well-known, if not often implemented, such as strengthening families, minimizing violent media effects, reducing youth access to guns, and improving school climates.<\/p>\n But Bushman said tools that make it possible to search large quantities of online data have opened new doors for predicting youth violence.<\/p>\n “It is possible to sift through Facebook and Twitter posts to determine if individuals are showing signs of violent behavior<\/strong>,” he said.<\/p>\n “There are concerns about privacy. We have to make sure that when we do this kind of data mining that we only use data that is publicly available.”<\/p>\n Bushman said improving school climate may be one of the biggest steps we can take to prevent youth violence.<\/p>\n Often, taking a high-security approach is not the best option<\/strong>. Metal detectors and security guards can make students feel fearful and mistrustful.<\/p>\n “You want students to trust parents and teachers and feel like they can talk about possible threats they hear about without ruining someone’s life,” he said.<\/p>\n “Zero-tolerance policies for speech are not helpful<\/strong>. Many kids won’t report threats they hear if they know a fellow student could be expelled for what could be an idle or non-serious comment.”<\/p>\n Bushman said that both school rampage shootings and everyday street violence need more attention from lawmakers and the public than they currently receive.<\/p>\n “We can’t begin to solve the problem of youth gun violence if we don’t make the issue a major national priority<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Ohio State University\u00a0media release: The two types of youth gun violence couldn’t be more different, but the ways to prevent them remain largely the same, according to a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[355,338,346],"tags":[289,406,124,98,405,214],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18808"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18808"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18815,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18808\/revisions\/18815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"school_bully\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/school_bully.jpg\")
The two types of youth gun violence couldn’t be more different, but the ways to prevent them remain largely the same<\/strong>, according to a new report by some of America’s top violence researchers.<\/p>\n