Page 20 - Campus Security & Life Safety, September/October 2022

Active Shooter
and relationship to the school (e.g., student, teacher, parent, non-stu- dent attending game) are included for each victim and shooter.
Broad Focus Beyond ‘Mass Shootings’ and ‘Active Shooters’
On the news each week, we tragically hear about how many “mass shootings” happened this year. While these headlines are common- place, there is surprisingly little consensus on what a mass shooting is, or how many there have been. There is not a commonly agreed- upon definition or criminal charge specific to a school shooting, mass shooting, or active shooter.
The Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Department of Jus- tice, media outlets, and academics all have their own definitions of a mass shooting based on four or more fatalities. It’s usually not a mass shooting if it’s gang-related, drug-related, part of another crime (like five people shot during a bank robbery), a serial killer, domestic vio- lence, or inside a private residence. The government doesn’t count 25 people shot at a block party in Chicago as a “mass shooting” if police suspect the shooter, or victims, were gang members. Similarly, 25 people wounded wouldn’t be a “mass shooting” if none of them died—even though that would be a major crime scene and emergency response operation. Labeling the attack as gang violence versus a mass shooting doesn’t change the outcome for bystanders caught in the crossfire.
Deciding that something is a “mass shooting” based on four fatali- ties is utterly arbitrary. Mass public violence is about the intent to kill as many people as possible, just like terrorism is the intent to send a message through violence. If a bomb in a marketplace kills two peo- ple instead of 200, is it not terrorism because there weren’t enough victims? The number 4 doesn’t magically render a shooting impor- tant. We should focus on the circumstances and intent of each situa- tion, rather than the number of victims. Saying “This is the nth mass
shooting this year” is an empty statement lacking substance or rigor. Such meaningless proclamations dilute our attempts to understand a complex problem with dozens of variables, including the type of weapon, how proficient a shooter was with the weapon, emergency response time, distance to hospitals, and dozens of other factors that impact whether a person lives or dies.
An “active shooter” is even more complicated. Homeland Security defines an active shooter as someone “actively killing in a populated area without a pattern or method to select victims”. Based on this definition, the Uvalde school shooter would not be an “active shoot- er” because students within his fourth-grade classroom were pur- posely targeted. The FBI’s definition differs slightly by adding that an active shooter must be an ongoing incident. Based on the public time- line of the Uvalde shooting, about 30 minutes passed between the last shot at children inside the classroom and police entering. Because the shooting was not continuous, it wouldn’t meet the FBI’s definition. Despite not meeting the DHS or FBI definition, nobody would ques- tion that Uvalde is exactly the type of attack we consider to be an “active shooter.”
Definitions of a school shooting are even more complicated. In their annual report on targeted school violence, the Secret Service only considers an attack to be a school shooting if the perpetrator is a current or recently former student. Based on this definition, the Secret Service would exclude Uvalde, Sandy Hook, or dozens of other indiscriminate attacks on schools committed by nonstudents.
Attacks That Would Be Missed Without Inclusive Definition
On the afternoon of April 22, 2022, a group of teens crossed a glass sky-bridge connecting buildings at the Edmund Burke School, an elite prep school in Washington, D.C. Students walked across this bridge hundreds of times daily. Suddenly, the glass exploded around
20 campuslifesecurity.com | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022