In response to school shootings, the media tends to focus on controversial ideas of how to solve this problem.  Arming the teachers or having the legal age to own a gun raised to 21 are proposals that come with their own problematic issues.  

A teacher’s job is to educate people, not shoot them.  And more incidents are likely to occur before any change will be agreed on at the federal level.

What if we took a different approach to this problem? What if we took the shooter out of school shootings? What if the shooter never was a shooter?  

People don’t just wake up one day, and say, “Seems like a good day to shoot up my school.”  That kind of hate develops over time from how people treat you and how you treat yourself. What if we teach students to treat each other with empathy and kindness? And I don’t mean teachers telling you over and over again to “treat each other with empathy and kindness.”  I mean having an actual place to be taught how to detect signs of neglect and signs of abuse so students can report it.

But this kind of teaching should not be just for the students. Teachers and staff  need to be better educated on these situations as much as the students need to be. Faculty and staff need to understand bullying, and more than just the surface of it. Bullying comes in many forms, even in smallest ways.

For example, if a student is sitting alone in class or at lunch, we need to make a note of it. If we notice it keeps happening, we need to do something about it. Little things like that can build up over time.  I’m not saying that all school shootings happen because of bullying, but emotional stress and abuse can make other things worse.

In the TED Talk “I Was Almost a School Shooter,” the speaker Aaron Stark explained his difficulties at school:  “I was the perpetual new kid since I also had such an unstable household…it wasn’t helped by the fact that I smelled really bad because I didn’t really have any clean clothes…” These details seem minor but they almost led to him feeling desperate enough to commit a dreadful action.

By adding more awareness of our school community’s emotional welfare and adding some of these lessons to a curriculum, such as high school health, we can engrave it into students mind that the signs of neglect and abuse are small but they matter.  If we learn to treat our peers better, then none of us will have to face the deadly consequences.