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Introduction
According to the journal article that is being reviewed, approximately 40 students had their lives taken away and numerous students had gotten injured due to school shooting since 1993-2003. This article looked into the contributor of school shootings in between the year 1993-2001. Moreover, the study gave a look at some other factors of school shootings. The authors had made it clear that their aim is to determine the role of interpersonal rejection in school violence. The article also looked into whether bullying happens frequently in schools.
The authors hypothesized that social rejection, teasing, bullying and relationship rejection may be main contributing factors to school shootings. The article gives readers an insight of some possible factors that could result in a student to conduct a school shooting.
Methodology
The authors approached the question using a case study method. The case studies used in the article is in between January, 1995 to March, 2001. To be specific, they only count a shooting incident when the shootings are happening in school hours during the school day excluding extracurricular activity, tuition etc. Furthermore, the shooting must be convicted by students and cases with no casualties were excluded as the study is only interested on students’ aggression toward their peers.
Since school shootings does not happen very frequently nor is an incident that could be “experimented”, in some cases, the incident did not receive enough media attention, the authors collected the data by consulting three newspapers, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and three news magazines, Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report. The authors also retrieved some information online through reputable news organization.
For each cases of school shooting, the reason of the shooting and details of the perpetrator(s) and victim(s) was recorded. As a result, 15 cases was identified that fits the authors’ criteria.
The method used in this study might be one of the best way and is specified clearly as well. Replicating the study would be easy since all steps used were explained in detail. Though, all information gathered is from news company in the US where propaganda could happen as the US might want to keep certain information confidential to prevent controversy from starting outside of the US.
Results
The case studies gathered by the authors were summarized and compiled into a table with the name and age of the perpetrator, date of the shooting, and number of victims killed/wounded. The cause of each cases is then separated as Teasing, ostracism or other ongoing rejection, Acute rejection, Psychological problems, Fascinated with guns or explosives and Fascinated with death or violence to show if any of these factors are contributing in each cases.
The results gathered shows that most of these shooting cases includes interpersonal rejection. Out of 15 cases, 12 of these cases includes the perpetrator getting teased or bullied by being humiliated for their appearance/weight or picked on. Half of the cases involved the perpetrator being unsuccessful in relationship such as a break up or unrequited love.Three other common factors found other than those the author hypothesized includes psychological problems, an interest in guns and explosives, and a fascination with death. At least 10 of the 15 cases includes the perpetrator having psychological problems, 6 incidents included the perpetrator familiar or not fascinated by weapons and at least 4 perpetrators are fascinated with death or dark topics such as satanism, death-rock music etc.
Overall, the authors proved that their hypothesis, school shooting is caused by interpersonal rejection or being picked on by other students, is correct. The data shown is sufficient, but not convincing enough as there could be more reason why school shootings happen. The proofs given might be only be an anomalous result. Bullying, teasing or ostracism are common problems that students from any parts of the world even outside of the US might face. The evidence given failed to let readers comprehend that the main contributor of school shooting is teasing, rejection, and violence in school.
Conclusion
Most evidences given by the authors had successfully proven that their hypothesis, school shootings’ main contributor being teasing, rejection, and violence, is correct. Though, two of the incident found by the authors had proved them wrong which involves an honour student who never been bullied but conducted to shooting for no reason but thought the victims “deserved it” and another student with no history of rejection but only feeling depressed. The authors then noticed that only over two-thirds of the cases involves bullying, ostracism, and social rejection.
The authors then came to a conclusion that school shootings happens only when a student is facing rejection combined with the perpetrator having at least one of these risk factors — psychological problems, interest in guns or explosives, and fascination with death.
The author explained that the evidence is might not be as convincing as a controlled experiment as school shooting is not a common occurrence. In addition, they only had access to data given by news medias and other websites. They were also aware that by using the case study method, no solid proof can be provided.
My research paper is about factors on why school shootings happens often only in the US and this article basically gives the reason of why school shootings happen. Though, the article failed to prove completely why school shootings only happen more often in the US despite countless students around the world facing the same problems as students in the US. The learning outcome from the is that school shooting perpetrators could have multiple or one factor that cause them to conduct a shooting. Although the article gave clear points as well as solid evidences that rejection, teasing and ostracism being the main contributors of school shootings, it does not prove why school shootings only happens in the US but not outside of the US.
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