School Shootings in American Culture: On Power, Propaganda, and Panic in Targeted Mass Attacks

by Lisa Ross

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798855804539
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	11/01/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	674 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Cultural Psychology of School Shootings

Part One: Flaws in America's Strategy to Combat School Shootings

1. One Unintended Consequences of Legislation to Prevent School Violence

2. The SRO Role

3. Still Being Outwitted by the Charles Whitmans

Part Two: Society's Psychological Processes for Social Threat Control

4. Moral Panic, Rules about Deviance, and Aesthetic Design

5. Contagion, Epidemic Psychology, and the Propagation of Subversive Ideas

6. Joker, Cinematic Fantasy, and the Sympathetic Mass Shooter

7. Conflict between Active Shooter Policy and Police Culture at Uvalde

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"School shootings is a topic of great interest and concern to American society, to parents, and to policymakers. School Shootings in American Culture is a highly readable, carefully documented study of the subject matter, full of original insights. I found it difficult to put down." — Brad J. Bushman, The Ohio State University

From the Publisher