School Shootings in American Culture
Product details
- ISBN 9798855804515
- Weight: 431g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 2025
- Publisher: State University of New York Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Explores the psychosocial causes of school shootings as a cultural trend and society's strategies to maintain order in their aftermath.
The tragedies at Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, have shown that our national strategy to end school shootings is failing. School Shootings in American Culture uniquely applies systems-thinking to school shootings as a cultural trend. Author Lisa Ross exposes not only the design flaws in our most celebrated prevention methods—active shooter response training, threat assessment teams, and target hardening but also the implicit and at times unwarranted assumptions on which they are based. America's makeshift approach to combating school shootings since Columbine is examined, with emphasis on the school resource officer's role. Then through the interdisciplinary themes of power, propaganda, and panic, Ross explores society's psychological processes for controlling social threats. What emerges is a near irreconcilable conflict between post-Columbine active shooter policy and traditional police culture, which is made plain by government investigations into law enforcement's response at Uvalde. Policymakers, school administrators, and researchers and students in the fields of social science will find this book sweeping, compelling, and relevant.
Lisa Ross is an independent scholar who holds a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Memphis, where she served on the graduate faculty for six years, and a master's degree in advertising from the University of Florida. With a quarter century of experience in organizational development, her research interests include the root cause of cultural phenomena and the psychosocial impact of violence in schools.
