Ron Avi Astor, a leading scholar of school violence at UCLA, announced at the American Educational Research Association conference in April that he has fundamentally reconsidered his longstanding approach to preventing school shootings. For decades, Astor promoted the theory that improving school climate, reducing bullying, and strengthening student relationships would help prevent such incidents. Schools invested substantially in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, and counseling based on these recommendations.
However, Astor’s examination of available data revealed a troubling disconnect. While his recommended interventions have produced measurable benefits—fewer students report bringing weapons to school, and overall safety has improved—school shootings themselves have continued to rise. Astor presented two graphs during his AERA presentation illustrating this paradox: one showing a steady decline in weapons in California schools over a quarter century, the other demonstrating a sharp increase in school shooting incidents nationwide.
Astor now contends that researchers, including himself, misidentified the primary drivers of many school shootings. Rather than being primarily motivated by experiences of bullying or trauma, he believes many perpetrators seek notoriety and media attention. Shooters often study previous massacres, participate in online communities discussing such attacks, and aim to achieve national recognition through their actions. According to Astor, most perpetrators are suicidal individuals who turn homicidal specifically to ensure they will be remembered.
This revised understanding has led Astor to recommend a substantially different prevention strategy. Instead of focusing exclusively on internal school improvements, he now advocates for media outlets and social media companies to adopt guidelines limiting coverage of perpetrators, delaying publication of manifestos and videos, and emphasizing victim narratives. Astor compares school shootings to suicide contagions and terrorism waves, where extensive publicity can inspire copycat incidents. While acknowledging the difficulty of persuading media organizations and online platforms to change their practices, Astor maintains the approach warrants serious consideration.
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