Why Stricter Gun Control Laws Will Not Stop School Shootings

Let me say upfront, that I do indeed support much stricter gun control laws. That I believe that the federal government should write and enforce these laws so that there are no longer 50 states with 50 different sets of laws and 50 disconnected lists of who should or should not have guns. And by all means, automatic weapons should not be sold at all. Having said that, allow me to explain why stricter gun control laws will not impact these awful school shootings, and provide a road map for what will.

Psychological research has demonstrated that married couples fight most about financial matters, but in fact, finances are just a foil for deeper seated problems. The same phenomenon is at play regarding school shootings. Each shooting hits us hard, but we have to remember that they are very few in number, and that gun control is not the issue. It's just the foil for real problems that lead young men to commit these horrible acts.

I have worked as a Developmental Psychologist for 30 years, and one area I've focused on, is Developmental Psychopathology – or the development of mental illness in children and adolescents. Within that area, I've done extensive research on the development of children who eventually resort to violence. The problem is not gun control. The roots of the problem lay within families, communities, and schools. I'd like to review some of the things that I've been lucky enough to learn along the way. My hope is that the issues I discuss will bring people around to a better understanding of adolescent violence.

In 2007, I was asked to create a report for leaders in Rochester, New York, on the origins of violent youth. At that time, I wrote:

According to the Department of Justice, in 1970, 168,504 youth (all children up to 24 years in age) were arrested for violent crimes. By 2000, that number had jumped a full 40% to 276,920 youth arrested for committing a violent crime.1 Data now available from the FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report for the first half of 2006, shows an increase in violent crimes of 2.3% -- the largest such increase since 1991. In a 2007 interview on this topic, former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales cited statistics that suggested that the country’s increasing level of violent crime was being fueled largely by increases in violence by youth. The federal government has pledged over $80 million dollars this year to address youth and gang violence.

Did the trend for increasing violent crimes by youth continue? Not according the the 2015 FBI Uniform Crime Report. In fact, in comparison to the 2006 rates, crimes committed by persons under the age of 18 had decreased by 54%. So the country needs to know that all crimes, including violent crimes committed by youth, have dramatically decreased across the last decade. This should give all of us great pause as we investigate the root causes of youth violence. Because even though the rates are down, the causes remain the same.

Research in child development, psychology, and education have created a substantial literature on the development of aggressive and violent behavior. Across a multiplicity of studies, several findings emerge as hallmark in the development of violent youth. Risk for the development of violence in youth, begins in infancy with the formation of key relationships with caregivers and others. “Attachment,” has to do not with the intensity of these affectional bonds, but with their quality. Many studies on violent young people indicate that those bonds with primary caregivers were insecure or disorganized, rather than secure.

Having an insecure or disorganized attachment is thought to impact brain development negatively, resulting in problems with impulsiveness and self-regulation of emotions. They are also associated with an increased risk of mental illness, as well as underachieving in school – among many undesirable outcomes. Insecure infants experience rejecting, punitive, neglectful, and/or potentially abusive relationships with primary caregivers. Also, it is these primary infant relationships that serve as general relationship models – guiding both the developing brain and the developing child -- in future relationships, thus perpetuating the insecurity or disorganization and its associated risks. Science has confirmed that those earliest social relationships have long-term and profound effects throughout life.

I was lucky enough to do my Post-Doctoral work with Danny Shaw, on his exceptional longitudinal study of children at risk for the development of problem behaviors, called the “Pitt Mother & Child Project,” which also involved Joan Vondra. Longitudinal studies are the best of the rest when it comes to understanding child development, because they recruit children during infancy and then follow these kids and their families for years. Some studies of this kind have followed their initial target children for over 30 years, performing yearly assessments. When I joined Dr. Shaw's study, it was in it's 11th year. Dr. Shaw and I wanted to examine if surveys of various kinds, completed by mothers when their target child was 2 years old, could predict the quality of teacher-child relationships in first grade – a pretty big jump! But being able to form positive relationships with teachers early on, was viewed as a strong predictor of academic achievement, and positive engagement in school. We narrowed the surveys down to a small group that included maternal depression, parenting daily hassles, maternal social support, challenging and disruptive child behaviors, and maternal perception of the difficulty of infant temperament. Infant temperament is regarded as the initial expression of personality. Some babies are easy to care for, some are a bit slow to warm up, and others are difficult – perhaps having colic or other issues that make parenting of these infants less satisfying and more challenging.

We formed two groups based on teacher's perceptions of the quality of relations in first grade. One group were very positive in their relations with teachers, and teachers viewed the other group as having negative and difficult relations in first grade. Our two groups differed significantly on all variables except for maternal social support. The group that teachers had negative relations with exhibited challenging behaviors at age 2, difficult temperaments, higher rates of maternal depression, and higher ratings of daily parenting hassles. We entered these variables into a predictive model to see if these ratings at age 2 could successfully predict our two groups of kids in first grade. The predicitons were very successful – 85% of children were correctly identified. The most important varialbe was maternal perception of daily parenting hassles. This construct is complex and likely includes things like maternal distress tolerance in parenting, the frequency of daily hassles, maternal sense of parentng efficacy, and maternal view of difficult child behaviors. Overall, the construct tells us that these moms were very overwhelmed with their toddlers, and felt inadequate in their parenting.

The first research project I worked on during my doctoral studies was called, “The Preschool Families Project,” and was funded by the National Institute for Mental Health. The goal of the study was to learn as much as possible about preschool-age boys with serious disruptive and aggressive behaviors. Previous work had demonstrated conclusively that it was indeed possible to identify and diagnose these young boys. Our goal was to take a deeper look, and in particular, to examine the potential role that father's played in the development of these serious problems. My extraordinary colleagues were Michelle DeKlyen, Matthew Speltz, and my advisor, Mark T. Greenberg. The study matched boys with problems to boys from the same neighborhood, who did not have problems. In comparing the two groups of fathers, we found that the fathers of boys with serious problems had higher life stress, psychological symptoms, higher rates of substance abuse, poorer parenting attitudes, less positive involvement, and harsher discipline practices. In creating our predictive model, it was the harsher discipline practices that contributed the most in the prediction. So this explains a small part about where violent youth come from. And it also tells us that we can and should create prevention and intervention programs starting in preschool. In a word, it tells us that school shooters do not just wake up one morning and become horribly violent. Development plays a central role - more central than gun control.

Socially, young people who exhibit violent behavior show a pattern of poor and conflictual social relations. Insecure and disorganized attachments combined with difficult temperaments produce kids that interact awkwardly, with conflict, or not at all with peers. Some violent kids are part of deviant peer groups that engage in delinquent behaviors, with group pressures promoting more delinquent behavior in group members. Other violent kids are more likely to be socially isolated and ridiculed/tormented by their peers. In both cases, the impact is manifold and resoundingly negative. These kids develop a hostile attributional bias in social interaction. They assume, even if there is no evidence of this, that the other party in the interaction has hostile intent toward them. They preemptively respond to this assumption, and not in the most optimal ways. They show evidence of having developed poor coping skills for conflict situations, so they often escalate the conflict with impulsive and hostile responses.

Aggressive youth are more likely to have been raised by a parent with mental illness. Parental Psychopathology creates inconsistency in parenting, especially if left untreated, which is unfortunately the case for the majority of mental illness in our country. We say that we want to raise healthy kids, both physically and mentally, but we underfund mental health and substance abuse services, and we allow the continuation of our society’s negative attitudes towards mental health treatment, psychiatry, and psychology. These negative attitudes create a stigma regarding behavioral health that discourages people from getting the help they need. And this stigma is especially pronounced in certain segments of society, including those from which violent kids are most likely to emerge.

Even when no mental illness or substance abuse is present, parents of violent kids are less likely to engage regularly in positive interactions and activities with their children. This lack of regular positive interaction can have multiple causes, including impossible work schedules or other demands, like having to care for an elderly relative, parental psychopathology, and marital discord. It could also be one long-term impact of insecure and disorganized attachments – in that parents that are not adequate to the parenting task when their children are infants, simply continue to parent poorly. Parents also might simply not understand the vital importance of positive interactions with their children for their child’s healthy development.

Parents of violent youth also show deficits in parental monitoring – meaning that they are less likely to know where the kids are, who their kids hang out with, and what activities they engage in. Again, the causes of this lack of close monitoring are many. Whatever the reason, poor parental monitoring leaves kids out supervising themselves, often in situations with adults and other kids, forced to make decisions which they are likely not equipped to make without good parental support. Lack of parental monitoring also has an emotional impact, in that parents who are poor monitors, convey by this lack of monitoring that their child is not good enough or important enough to keep track of. This can contribute to the development of low self-esteem in the early phases of its development, because it's early development is always partially defined by the caregiver’s attention and interest, which are equated with love by the child. Children whose parents fail to monitor their activities are more likely to feel unloved and unsupported by their parents, and are therefore more likely to turn to a gang or deviant peer group for a sense of belonging.

Violent youth are more likely to live in neighborhoods and communities that are low on resources and high on need. These youth are concentrated in urban areas. Schools in the immediate area are more likely to be sub-standard. Crime rates in their neighborhoods tend to be higher – violence tends to breed more violence. There is a lack of community cohesiveness, which is evidenced by low levels of organized community activity and lack of cooperation with law enforcement during the investigations of violent crimes.

Unemployment levels are likely to be significantly higher, and opportunities are likely to be significantly lower. The neighborhood is also more likely to be in disrepair, containing more substandard housing, boarded up houses, and empty lots. Overall, conditions in the communities and neighborhoods of violent you are depressing and oppressive. Strategies to prevent violence in youth must focus not just on the youth, or the youth and their parents – but in fact, the entire neighborhood as well.

Community development agencies can play an important role by working to draw down funds for new housing development and existing housing rehabilitation. They can act as community organizers, bringing neighborhood residents together to discuss important issues like public safety and drug use. They can facilitate helpful contact between local law enforcement and residents. Finally, they can also institute programs, like after-school and summer enrichment programs that are preventative in nature. Because so many of the problems existing at the community level are so difficult to tackle, the important role of community development organizations cannot be understated. One of the greatest advantages community-based agencies have, is that they are trusted within the community they want to change, and thus have access and intimacy with residents that local governments often do not have.

Finally, I was fortunate enough to spend several years working with my colleague, Bohdan S. Lotyczewski, at the University of Rochester's Children's Institute. We were working on a very large study concerning the relationship between school climate variables and bullying. The study included almost 10,000 students, grades 5 though 12. Thirty percent of these students reported that they were involved in bullying – either as a bully, a victim, or most important for our purposes – a bully-victim. Bully-victims likely start as victims, but in reaction to their victimization, they begin to act as bullies. Stories about school shooters always show that they were both bullied and acted as bullies as well. School Climate is a global variable meant to represent how students feel overall regarding all aspects of the school environment. Several different sub-factors can be drawn out of this overall sense of school cohesiveness. We derived 4 different parts of overall school climate: safety and engagement, interpersonal relationship quality, institutional quality, and teaching and learning. It was out hypothesis that the three groups involved in bullying would be differentiable on some variables from students who were not involved, but they would also have unique profiles on these four variables. If we were correct, then targeted intervention programs could be developed specifically for each group.

Our hypothesis proved to be correct. Those involved in bullying had significantly more negative views of the quality of interpersonal relationships at their schools. They also held more negative perceptions regarding the quality of the institutional environment, which included things like availability of information on extracurricular activities, and school discipline policies.

We then examined whether or not the three bully-involved groups had unique profiles on these variables, and indeed, unique profiles emerged. Victims cared about their school and liked going to school and being involved in school activities, while bullies felt the opposite. However, and reasonably, victims did not feel safe at school, but bullies did. Victims had extremely positive views of the teaching and learning environment; bullies did not share these views, and regarded teaching and learning negatively. Victims felt that the adults at their school treated one another with mutual respect, while bullies perceived the opposite – a general lack of mutual respect on all levels. Bullies were the only group who consistently viewed the institutional environment negatively.

Bully-Victims could be distinguished from bullies and victims. They did not care about school and did not like going, and did not feel safe. They felt disrespected by teachers and reported that they did not get the extra help they needed. And to an even greater degree, they did not perceive a sense of mutual respect in their schools.

So, let's consider these views to paint a vague portrait of bully-victims and see if it matches the reports we read in the press about school shooters. They were not attached to school, and felt disrespected, which probably made them loners in their school environment. They were detached from the learning process, likely because teachers did not know how to respond to these complex kids, they did not receive the academic support that they needed to achieve. Lack of achievement likely led to negative self-esteem. Not being a member of an established peer group would possibly lead them to associate with others like themselves, and because of their lack of caring at school, and likely difficulty at home, they would be more prone to express their depression and lack of engagement by performing anti- social activities. For example, research has indicated that young men like these often begin their trajectory by harming younger children and animals.

What can be said in conclusion? School shooters are not born that way. They follow an established developmental pathway that unfortunately for some, leads to the type of violence that breeds fear in the hearts of all Americans. But stricter gun control will not solve this problem. Throughout this article, I have highlighted areas were interventions could lead to better outcomes. We have to take responsibility for the acts of these young men. Pretending that these acts are related to gun control is denial in its highest form. It shows that we do not really want to look at the true reasons that lead to these tragedies. And until we do, the shootings will not stop.