Inside the growing industry to defend schools from mass shootings

NPR

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At least two gunmen opened fire today at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

There were many injuries.

Columbine, April 20th, 1999.

15 people were killed that day, including the two gunmen.

Another 20 were shot but survived.

And another victim recently died from complications related to her injuries.

Columbine wasn't the first school shooting, but for many Americans, it marks a turning point, the beginning of a dark era, because now, of course, it's not the only school shooting we know by name.

Sandy Hook, Parkland, Virginia Tech, Uvalde.

I'm joined today by Meg Anderson, a criminal justice reporter at NPR.

Meg, you helped cover the Parkland tragedy.

I did, and others.

There have been more than 400 school shootings since Columbine.

And there's a familiar rhythm to it all.

We learn the victims' names, we try to find a motive.

Some people offer prayers, others push for gun control, and not a lot changes.

It's quiet for a while, and then it all starts again.

But from this seemingly endless cycle, a multi-billion dollar industry has emerged.

There's a long list of things schools can buy to try to deter a mass shooter from drones to body armor, and business is booming.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Waylon Wong, and today we're going to take a look inside the school shooting industry.

What's for sale, whether these products can actually prevent school shootings, and the psychology behind the growing industry.

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So, over the summer, I was at this conference put on by the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Those are the police officers stationed in schools.

At the conference, they had all kinds of training sessions for the officers, like how to work with kids who've experienced trauma.

But they also had this big expo hall

where there were tons of things for sale panic buttons facial recognition technology trauma kits metal detectors guns tasers the expo hall was like a mini version of the industry all in one room okay so your name is scott scott newman yes ma'am and you're the ceo yeah i'm founder and ceo for titan armored okay and tell me about what what are we looking at okay we're looking at

In layman's terms, this is a bulletproof mobile whiteboard.

So essentially, it was a big dry erase board.

Someone had even written welcome on it.

I think that was to show it could be used like a regular teaching tool.

Right, it's designed to be discreet so it won't scare children.

But the idea is that students, teachers, whoever could hide behind it if they needed to.

I just felt at that point there's got to be a way that we can protect students and teachers in the event there is something they need to be able to shelter in place until the first responders can get there.

There was even a bullet hole in the whiteboard on display which did not go through to the other side.

And actually this example was kind of low tech in comparison to other things I saw.

Yeah so we use drones to stop school shootings.

Justin Marston is CEO of Campus Guardian Angel and his company did a whole demo.

The idea is that these drones live inside a school and if there's a shooter remote pilots who work for the company deploy them from their headquarters to debilitate the shooter.

So we typically go first with a siren, which is kind of a distraction and then we will take shots with a Peppa gun and then we hit them with a drone at kind of 60 miles an hour.

This industry is growing quickly.

According to the market research firm Omdia, the school shooting industry is now worth as much as $4 billion.

They predict it will be worth nearly $6 billion by 2027.

That's a lot of money.

But the problem is that we really have no idea if most of these school safety products even work.

There isn't a comprehensive data set about which products are even being used in schools.

Some are bought by local school districts.

Others are bought by police departments.

They're then used by the more than 23,000 officers stationed in schools.

There isn't a lot of data on what technologies would actually work to stop a shooter.

And it's even harder to study shootings that were averted.

It's so hard to study because it's so hard to study something that didn't happen, right?

Which is literally what prevention is.

That's Jillian Peterson.

She's a professor at Hamlin University in Minnesota who studies school shooters.

She says you can look at the similarities of people who do carry out these acts to get an idea of how to prevent them.

Typically, she says shooters are former or current students who have access to guns.

Oftentimes they're too young to purchase guns, so they're taking unsecured guns from family and friends.

They are also usually in crisis.

So Jillian says strengthening mental health care in schools is important.

Other research backs that up too.

But according to a study by the Urban Institute, we spend about $12 billion a year on school security guards.

That's about a billion more than we spend on school counselors.

There are a few simple things gun violence experts say do make a difference that schools should invest in, like having an emergency plan and keeping school doors locked.

But adding lots of security bells and whistles to schools, also known as hardening the building, Jillian says that isn't proven to be effective.

It is security theater, right?

I feel like we tried hardening for 25 years post-Columbine.

Like we were all in on hardening.

It has gotten worse.

Like we just, I don't think we can harden our way out of it.

When it comes to protecting kids, obviously the stakes are incredibly high.

And fear plays a big part in the decision-making over what schools need.

For instance, what if the metal detector at the door does catch a gun in a backpack and averts a tragedy?

What if making your windows shatterproof is the thing that makes the shooter give up?

Or on the flip side, what if we don't buy these things and they could have made a difference?

Those what-ifs are powerful.

Kai Rajeri is a professor at Columbia University.

He studies population behavior and decision-making, and he says they represent a specific type of economic decision.

So when we talk about rationality, we kind of have to split it into these two ways.

What we have is we have maximizing outcomes and we have optimizing outcomes.

So when we optimize, we are making a decision within a budget.

Let's say you're renovating your kitchen.

You love cooking and you want a really nice stove.

But you also probably want to make sure you're getting good quality cabinets.

You can't have the rest of the kitchen fall apart because you spent all your money on the stove.

So you'll make the best decisions you can make within your monetary constraints.

That's optimizing.

But with maximizing, all bets are off.

You're not going to cut corners.

You're going to spend whatever it takes.

Something like airline safety would be a great example.

No one's going to admit to saying there's an upper level of investment we're willing to put into keeping planes safe or keeping cars safe and all this.

Anything where you're talking about the protection of human life, that's obviously going to have much larger flexibility and people aren't going to be nearly as price sensitive.

School security fits into that category.

At the conference I went to this summer, police officers stationed in schools told me as much.

They said that on the awful day a shooter does show up, they want whatever tools they can get, even if they're not proven to be effective.

Gun ownership is like that too.

Most people who buy guns say they're doing it for protection, when actually having a gun in the house increases the risk of being shot.

Even if research suggests there are more effective ways to stop a school shooting from happening, like strengthening mental health supports, Kai says people are acting rationally within the confines of the country we live in, where gun control isn't coming on a large scale anytime soon.

People aren't stupid.

Life is complicated, right?

There's threats and worries.

And you can show a parent every study that says these things will reduce, you know, threats to the school.

And the parents might say, yeah, that's great.

That's great.

Do that everywhere else.

But at this school, here's what I want.

Kai says it's not surprising that the response in the U.S.

to school shootings has been to try to buy our way to safety.

It is uniquely American that we will take any sort of issue and turn it into an economic opportunity.

In many cases, it's to our benefit.

But he also says sometimes it disincentivizes simply reducing the problem itself.

This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Robert Rodriguez.

It was fact-checked by Sarah Juarez.

Keikin Cannon is our editor and the indicator is a production of NPR.

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