Written by: Greg Ellifritz
I’ve spent the last two decades of my life intensively studying every school shooting I can find. I’ve read hundreds of thousands of pages of material describing every detail of every single school shooting in the last century. I’ve written more than 50 articles on the topic myself. I’ve trained countless police officers, armed citizens, teachers, and school staff, providing them with the tactics and skills they need to prevail if their schools come under attack.
While doing some reflecting last night, I realized that I have been doing everything wrong.
I was looking at the notes I took after completing Tim Ferriss’ new book Tribe of Mentors. The book consists of short interviews with the absolute giants in every industry and details what advice they would give to people wanting to live a successful and happy life. The theme of both that book and the one that preceded it (Tools of Titans”) is that to be successful, the best path to follow is to model the successful habits of others.
In studying schools shootings, we are studying failures, not modeling success. Do you see the difference? While there are certainly lessons to be learned in failure, that is not the path we want to take. Instead, we need to look at successful school shooting interventions and model those tactics. We need to find schools where violence of any type is exceptionally rare. We then should be modeling those conditions to create a similar atmosphere in other schools.
For every actual school shooting, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of events that are thwarted when parents, teachers, and other students recognize a problem and work to solve it. No one is studying these successful school shooting interventions. No one is attempting to model the actions and processes of the schools that successfully prevented an attack from happening.
That is a huge and virtually unrecognized failure on the part of those of us who are attempting to address the issue of school shootings.
It is only by modeling success that we will find the true solutions for the school shooting problem. But successful interventions aren’t sexy. The news media doesn’t care unless the story has a large body count. How do we get people focused on studying these “boring” successful interventions when the “exciting” failures are filling up our news feeds?
I don’t have an answer.
Some of the above links (from Amazon.com) are affiliate links. If you purchase these items, I get a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.
