Anti-bullying and social-emotional learning have not reduced school violence. Minimizing public attention on shooters can.
(Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
Scientists rarely announce that one of their long-standing ideas has failed.
But that’s exactly what Ron Avi Astor, one of the leading researchers on school violence and a professor at UCLA, told fellow researchers at the April annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
“We were wrong,” Astor told the audience.
For decades, Astor believed that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. He advised national politicians and issued recommendations. Schools have responded by investing heavily in social-emotional learning, restorative justice, trauma-informed care, counseling and other efforts to make schools safer and more welcoming.
These initiatives benefit students in many ways. Fewer students reported bringing guns or knives to school, and schools generally became safer.
But school shootings haven’t gone down.
“I had a complete change” in my thinking, Astor told me in an interview after the conference.
This change came after he stepped back and looked at the evidence. During his AERA presentation, Astor showed a slide with two vivid graphics. One traces a steady decline in students carrying guns in California schools in the quarter century since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. The other graph shows a sharp rise in school shootings across the country.
Different trends
Source: Slide from Ron Avi Astor’s presentation during the AERA session on April 11, 2026, “School Active Shooter Drills: Reducing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health Risks – A Report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.”
The charts capture a painful realization. Astor says he and other researchers haven’t figured out what causes many school shootings.
Astor noted that many school shooters have been bullied, have been bullies themselves, or have experienced trauma, and believes that shootings will decrease if educators reduce bullying and strengthen bonds between students at the local level, one school building at a time. “We were adamant,” Astor said. “Let’s focus on prevention.”
“What was missed I think was that every shooter wanted to make sure it was national,” Astor said. “Their number one audience was the media. That’s really clear to me now.”
Astor now believes that many perpetrators are driven by a desire for fame. Shooters study previous massacres, learn from online communities and seek publicity after a mass attack.
“Most of them are suicidal and have decided to be a killer to be remembered,” Astor said.
This new way of thinking has led him to a very different recommendation. Instead of focusing on prevention in schools, Astor believes that journalists and social media companies should adopt guidelines that reduce the focus on perpetrators, delay the publication of manifestos and videos, and focus more attention on victims.
“I’m not saying don’t do social-emotional or anti-gun efforts,” Astor said. “These things are important. But if we want to see a reduction in school shootings, we have to work with the media.”
Astor compares school shootings to suicide epidemics or waves of terrorism, where widespread publicity can inspire copycats. He admits it’s a long shot to convince social media companies or the dark web to change, and he can’t prove the change will help reduce school shootings. “But it’s worth a shot,” he said.
What makes Astor’s argument remarkable is not simply his novel hypothesis. It is his willingness to publicly abandon an old one after concluding that the evidence no longer supports it. It’s never easy to change course, but Astor’s candor can save lives.
This story about preventing school shootings is produced by The Hechinger Reportan independent, nonprofit news organization that covers education. Sign up for Evidence points and others Hechinger Bulletins.
