It’s a common refrain in the wake of school violence: Why would anyone do something like this? But a substantial and growing body of research continues to find strong correlations between school shooters and bullying.
Most attackers who target K-12 schools were bullied — sometimes persistently, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center that analyzed 41 incidents of school violence at K-12 schools between 2008 and 2017.
While that analysis only looked at behavioral histories for 35 of the 41 attackers, 80% of those 35 were bullied by classmates, and 57% faced bullying that lasted for weeks, months or years.
There’s also a 49% higher chance that adolescents will carry guns if they were bullied on school property within the previous year compared to peers who weren’t bullied, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Cureus.
Anecdotal evidence of bullying is emerging from last week’s tragic shooting at Perry High School in Iowa — in which a 6th-grader was killed and four other students and three staff members were wounded. In an interview with The Associated Press, two classmates said the 17-year-old shooter who died on the scene from a self-inflicted gunshot wound was “bullied relentlessly since elementary school.”
