School Shooting Research Papers

Over the past decade America has witnessed multiple school shootings, including recent mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut and Roeburg, Oregon. Growing up in the town right next to Newtown I was witness to the horrors and affect the shooting had on the community. Realizing how this shooting impacted not only Newtown, but also all towns in Southwestern Connecticut and around the world, opened my eyes to the crisis of school shootings. There have been stricter gun laws put in place, but as seen by the shooting in Oregon this fall, the system is still flawed. A suggestion of a solution to this crisis is to have background checks on not only the person buying the gun, but also people living where the gun is going to be stored. These checks need
This can be leveled out into two main ideas of mental illness involving substance abuse, and untreated mentally ill. It is shown through observation of gun related crimes that there is a very low correlation between the diagnosed mentally ill and violence. The problem is “a large body of studies found that co-occurring psychiatric disorders and substance abuse are associated with violence” (Rosenberg 2). Repeating that it is not the mentally ill we are attacking, but the belief is that you have to be mentally unstable to commit a crime with this level of violence. Not every mentally ill person is likely to commit such a crime. “Study findings suggest that subgroups of persons with severe or untreated mental illness might be at increased risk for violence during periods surrounding psychotic episodes or psychiatric hospitalizations” (Metzl 1). After further investigation into the subject one may find that it is the unrecognized, untreated mentally ill that have caused crimes such as the tragedies in Tucson, Arizona; Aurora, Colorado; and Newtown, Connecticut. In these three shootings there was evidence that “mental illness was potentially present in these individuals [the shooters]” (Metzl, MacLeish 1). These findings caused uproar in the government, and the focus is now on “mentally ill individuals, early detection of mental illness during school years, and the interactions of such individuals with physicians and the mental health system as a way to solve gun violence” (Metzl, MacLeish 1). The crisis is how to stop gun violence, and many signs for solutions are leading people to mental health systems. Mental illness needs to begin to be detected before the violence