Oakland school shooting: Is there a lesson to be learned from the tragedy?

Jesse Klein, assistant professor of criminal justice at Adelphi University and author of  “The Bully Society: school shootings and the crisis of bullying in America’s schools,” says of 191 school shootings from 1979-2011, 30 percent that were related to expulsion or suspension were directed at administrators, and 50 percent involved challenges to masculinity.

“Students picked up guns to protest being disrespected,” she says, noting it is quite common, as in the Oakland case, to have more than one reason.

Dr. Chuck Williams, director of the Center for the Prevention of School-Aged Violence at Drexel University, says the growing number of such incidents points to the dramatic need for counseling programs.

“Not in the history of this country have we had as many of these incidents as in the past several years,” he says. If the school had had a counselor to advise Goh, it might have made all the difference, says Williams, because the counselor would have picked up all the signs of Goh’s reasons for anger and depression.

“The counselor needs to make sure someone who is let go like Goh has a transition plan. They need to ask about future plans and goals and if the person is OK with his termination,” says Williams. “We are finding out too many times after it’s too late that they are not OK and are coming back to kill to make a point.”

Spurred by the growing numbers of such incidents, police at Otterbein College in Ohio have begun taking a proactive approach. It includes threat assessment teams that meet every other week to discuss any issues with students such as anger management and mental health issues that hopefully will be able to detect a potential danger before it becomes an issue.

The approach includes training courses several times each year for students, faculty, and administrators in how to deal with a shooting attack, demonstrating the options of running, hiding, barricading – and attacking the shooter if no other option exists.

In the Oikos University killings, the victims were lined up and shot execution-style, meaning the attack-the-shooter option would perhaps have been the most effective, says Larry Banaszak, the Otterbein chief of police.

"No matter if it's high schools or colleges and universities, we need to have training to be able to respond to these incidents as they happen,” says Mr. Banaszak, via email.

“Prevention is good and fine but these incidents have happened in the past, are happening in the present and will continue to happen in the future,” he says. “We can't keep putting our heads in the sand and pretending like it can't happen here. The shooter lined people up along the wall. There needs to be training for people to react as soon as the threat is recognized."

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