How are teachers coping in an era of increasing school shootings? Crystal Ferreira lives in Colorado, where there have been 24 mass shootings — nine of which have occurred in Denver over the past six years.
Because Crystal now teaches high school students online through the educational platform Polyhistoria, she’s no longer burdened with how to balance her role of teaching with the responsibility of student security and threat management.
Below, Crystal eloquently shares her thoughts on how we endure and respond to the crisis, both in schools and as a culture.
I am a teacher. I live in Colorado. (I now teach high school classes online.)
When I think about what sort of actionable difference we, as a society, could make to put an end to mass shootings, I think of a story about a little boy named Ken. Ken grew up in a small town with a park that hosted a farmer’s market every Thursday. Each day after school, he would walk a few blocks, past the park, to his grandmother’s house.
It wasn’t until Ken was in high school after his grandmother had died, that he learned she had been inside the school building that once stood in that same park on a day when 3 explosions ripped through it. So was her future husband, and several of their siblings. Ken’s grandmother, Florence King Schoals, had never talked about it.
It’s that simple act of never talking about that horrible massacre that is the greatest lesson we can ever learn about how to combat the virus-like nature of mass killings and terrorist acts of violence.
As Ken explained it in an interview, “There are some things you just don’t talk about in public settings in polite conversation. It’s one thing to say ‘Yes, I was in the war. I saw people die,’ but you don’t go into detail.”
It is because of this culture of denying perpetrators’ notoriety that most of us, like Ken, never heard about the Bath school bombing that killed 38 children in 1927. A bombing that, today, remains America’s deadliest school massacre. It’s thanks to this culture of silence that a deadly school bombing was not to happen again.
So, why can’t we say the same thing for school shootings? Columbine. Virginia Tech. University of Texas. Sandy Hook. School shootings cannot be named alone. Each tragedy starting a new gun control debate, and a new probe into the shooter’s psyche and motivation. As of today, a Google search for the Seattle Pacific University shooter’s name brings up 1,310,000 hits.
Immediately after the shooting in Seattle, people leaped to explain what had caused the latest mass slaughter. Just as they did after the first mass shooting. And the second. And the third.
Too many readily available guns. Too much untreated mental illness. Too much warped masculinity. Too much shoot-’em-up video games and movies. Add (or repeat, with voice raised) your favorite here.
“Criminals are made, not born.”
After all of these mass shootings, what do we know about how to pinpoint a mass shooter in the making? What did we learn? Simply that a dearth of research means the science of rampage shootings doesn’t exist.
We did learn something very important, however, from the Bath school bombing. The bomber left behind a stenciled sign on his farm fence that read “Criminals are made, not born.” This is an important part of the puzzle. It’s an important message. It’s important to remember that even after he had blown himself up, this man had a message saying that he wanted the world to hear.
But here is the really important part… ready? Here it is: The town’s people read his message, then they buried that man in an unmarked grave and never spoke his name again for 90 years.
See, sensational crimes that don’t play into a larger societal narrative fade away. Researchers studying the phenomenon of mass shootings describe these events through the metaphor of viruses — someone sneezes, the germs spread, others get infected, and so on.
“Sex may sell, but it’s murder that makes millions.”
Mass shooters intensely study their forbearers. They reference each other in their online ramblings and attempt to surpass them in their rampages. Indeed, if something like the Bath School massacre happened today, it would probably resonate more deeply than it did in the 1920s. It would also be sensationalized to the point of out-competing all other news stories.
Don’t be too quick to blame the media though. While we are aghast at the frequency of school shootings and the lack of political will to do anything about it, the public continues to crave information about these killers. And news outlets provide it. There is a theory gaining mainstream acceptance that the way the media report on shootings may lead to more shootings.
True-crime stories trigger an interest in an audience that’s hard to let go of. Just look at how many movies and TV-shows on Netflix are murder and true-crime related. Sex may sell, but it’s murder that makes millions.
It’s not guns, alone, that kill people, it’s society’s obsession with life-annihilating violence that kills people. It’s not the message of the killer that is important, it’s how we choose to respond to that message that will resonate into the future.
Has your community been affected by violence (or the fear of it) on school grounds? Please reach out here to share your experience.
