In the wake of the shooting at SuccessTech Academy — two teachers and two students wounded, the 14-year-old shooter a suicide — Cleveland schools are considering putting a metal detector at every campus, even those with few violence problems. It won’t work, say the usual experts. The way to prevent shootings, they say, is to stop bullying and get students to speak up when they hear threats.
Every school should have a program to stop bullying and one to overcome the mind-set that reporting a threat is “snitching,” said Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Nobody likes a person who rats,” Levin said, but schools have to provide an environment where students who hear threats can turn to trusted teachers or counselors or even report the threats anonymously.
He said the “law and order” approach, installing metal detectors and cameras, is a politically expedient solution that doesn’t work.
Getting students to report threats of violence does work. Dillon Cossey, the 14-year-old Pennsylvania boy charged with planning a “Columbine-style massacre,” is lucky that he was turned in before he hurt anyone.
But I question the theory that bullying turns nice, normal kids into avenging killers. Bullying shouldn’t be tolerated, but not because the victims are likely to shoot up the school.
Cossey reportedly was pulled out of high school because he was teased for being overweight. After 18 months of homeschooling, he’d collected in his bedroom an assault rifle, three homemade grenades, “numerous knives and swords, about 30 air-powered guns, a bomb-making book, a hand-painted Nazi flag, a book about Adolf Hitler and a video about the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado,” writes Lou Sessinger, an Intelligencer columnist.
On Friday police arrested Michele Cossey and charged her with purchasing for her son the 9 mm rifle, a .22-caliber rifle, a .22-caliber handgun and black powder used to make grenades. The two .22s were found after the initial search of the house on Wednesday.
It was also reported that Frank Cossey was sentenced to house arrest for failing to acknowledge a 1981 manslaughter conviction when he tried to buy a .22-caliber rifle for his son in 2005.
Is the problem with the school? Or maybe the family is a little screwy?
Certainly, Asa Coon was more of a bully than a victim. He was in trouble for violence at home and at a previous school before he enrolled in SuccessTech, a relatively safe school, where he fought with other students and threatened them. (Some students say they reported the threats but were ignored.) He’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder while in a mental institution, but often failed to take his medications. He was a troubled kid from a troubled family.
I’m with you on this one, Joanne.
I think they are narcissists who percieve themselves to be victims of grave injustice whenever someone doesn’t give them their way.
Programs against bullying will do no more to prevent mass shootings than programs to irradicate real black helicopters will do to prevent paranoid schizophrenia.
“Snitching” programs lose credibility and support when the program expands to consider otherwise normal behaviors as pathological.
Both this article, and the article of several days ago about the troubled elementary teachers,Miss Bennett and Ashlee, concern discipline. It may be argued that the issue of discipline is or is not central to both situations, but discipline obviously is involved to some extent. So much educational conversation in the past year has been about the NCLB act. Are there any provisions, either current or proposed, in NCLB about discipline? I’m not sure there should be. I’m not sure anything written into law would do more good than harm. But the problem needs a lot of attention and discussion. The problems that plagued me as a beginning teacher over forty years ago apparently plague teachers today. I have no ultimate solutions to discipline in the classroom, but I have written rather extensively on my own views and analysis. I published a book, Tactics And Strategies Of Classroom Disciplne, in 1979. It didn’t sell very well, but it’s on my website, brianrude.com. I have no recipes for instant success, but I do think I have some important insights and analysis.
If the average rape were covered in explicite detail in page one headlines I doubt that the public would accept this as legitimate news, and yet school shootouts are repleat with instructions and with expressions of rage and horror and helplessness by those involved. Outrage is what these shooters want. Don’t give it to them. Figure a way to report the news without feeding the copycat monster.
His youtube page is still up.
There is a little girl in the “family” as well.
The father is a felon, the older brother is a felon.
Pray for that little girls safety.
Here’s the link:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Shadow19462
His lawyer to too busy golfing to notice.
I agree with Walter. I think the sensationalistic coverage the shootings get actually inspires other disturbed kids to act. I think we’d be better off with fewer news stories and no TV news coverage of school shootings. I think the videotapes that the Virgina Tech shooter made points out what fantasy and audience he had in mind. And the media delivered it.
I also think that many if not all of the disturbed kids could be identified in advance by teachers. But I acknowledge that many additional kids that teachers would point out wouldn’t become shooters if left alone. I’m not sure that the invasiveness of school initiated mental health screenings or restrictive settings for the odd-but-ultimately-harmless would be worth it to prevent what is arguably still a statistically tiny risk presented by the truly deranged and homicidal.
On a different note, haven’t there been far more incidents of deadly workplace violence? But we don’t hear too much about workplace anti-bullying programs. So why is the “bullying causes school violence” argument always thrown out after school shootings? Do people who don’t work with teenagers imagine that all of them are so innocent and good that they would only be driven to violence by some warped sense of self-defense?
Bullies and their victims are both likely to bring weapons to school. Stopping the bullying is important, but to do that takes resources that the schools never seem to have until after an incident occurs (and then it’s always available. Weird, huh?)
What the kids need most in life is a great big lesson in reality. Unfortunately, the school system is its own little world. Like prisoners who become institutionalized, too many students become institutionalized into thinking school is the entire universe. In my darkest adolescent days, I never though attacking the school would change the world. But then, I had clues that there was a real world out there. And that made all the difference.
“bullying” is a “root cause”
Root causes have one thing in common: They cannot be effectively addressed. You can have marches and programs and so forth. You may even pass a law which means little.
But root causes allow the activist to look and feel good without having to do anything.
Better preen about slavery and poverty as a reason for affirmative action than do the sweaty work of fixing the inner city and inner city families.
Better for a preacher to talk about root causes because the last thing a liberal cleric wants to hear is….
“Preacher, this is evil. Isn’t dealing with evil your department?”
Every body knows bullying and we are commended to see it whenever it’s convenient. Easier that way. Sort of blaming the victims.
Cossey’s 30 “air-powered guns” are Airsoft toys, significantly less dangerous than the Christmas Story “put your eye out” BB gun, and the bomb-making book is the Anarchist Cookbook, which has never resulted in injury to anyone but those foolish enough to follow its deliberately miswritten instructions. I haven’t seen any pictures of the “many knives and swords” but I would bet they are QVC dragon ninja blades, incapable of being sharpened to an edge that would cut cold butter.
Praise the Lord regarding your title. You are dead right on that one. These situations frustrate me so because everyone around the child spouts off regarding the problem yet because of confidentiality the school can’t give the real details.
I can only speak to my own situation with the hundred of children who have passed through my classroom…too often these types of kids that are “bullied” exhibit antisocial behaviors that keep them from making friends. Too often the “bullied” are bullies themselves.
Think to yourself how many times you have known/felt deep in your heart there was a real problem of some sort with a student, but the parent chooses to ignore your input and the behaviors keep continuing on and on and on…..
The fact that Dillon’s UTube site is up with a video he made praising the Columbine killers is really disturbing.