Behavioral Threat Assessment Management Intervention Resources
Gun violence is the number one killer of children in America. The result is this guide—a collection of hundreds of calls to action for educators; for school district, college, and university boards and administrators; for politicians; and for students, parents, and families. No matter how many school shootings we have seen happen, they are just as unacceptable today as they were in 1999.
About the National Education Association and the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund
Giffords seeks to arm activists, legislators, and the general public with the facts about our country’s gun violence epidemic and the most effective ways to address it. Many PTAs and other school-based groups are working to identify the problems and causes of school violence and possible solutions for violence prevention. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, the crime rate can decrease by as much as 30 percent when a violence prevention initiative is a community-wide effort.
What Educators Can Do
The strong heritage of gun ownership in the U.S. – and the Constitutional right to bear arms https://everytownresearch.org/report/school-gun-violence-prevention-response-guide-part-one-gun-violence-prevention/ – is an obstacle that British gun control activists like North didn’t have to wrestle with in the aftermath of the Dunblane shooting. It’s an argument that’s similar to those made by the gun lobby in the United States…. By comparison, according to the CDC, the number of murders involving firearms in the United States in 2020 was 19,384. Over the past several years, England, Scotland and Wales combined have seen around thirty gun deaths a year. He’s one of the founding members of the group Gun Control Network, which advocated for new laws in the aftermath of the Dunblane shooting.
Public awareness campaigns like the Be SMART program, developed by Everytown, educate the school community on secure gun storage. Secure storage laws require people to store firearms responsibly to prevent unsupervised access to firearms. These laws, increasingly being adopted by states, empower family members and law enforcement to petition a judge to temporarily block a person from having guns if they pose a danger to themselves or others.
When a weapon comes to school, self-harm may be the plan, and a school-climate approach addresses that threat as well. That’s conservatively more than half a million students, just in that one state. And research shows that school climate measures really work. This is true not just in the United States, says Astor, but in “Kosovo, Canada, Chile, Israel, the kids who bring weapons to school are reporting tons of victimization.” Well, for one thing, the very kids who bring weapons to school are more likely to report being bullied or threatened themselves.
- What sets this call to action apart from other policy proposals is not gun control, however, but the research-based approach to violence prevention and response.
- The Stress in America survey provides ample evidence of the collective trauma our country faces, including from mass shootings.6American Psychological Association.
- Training mental health professionals to recognize warning signs and intervene appropriately is essential.
- In the 326 incidents that occurred on university or college campuses during that time period, 120 people were killed and another 251 were wounded (Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, 2024-b).