creative writing about a school shooting

Support fearless, independent journalism

The election is finally here and the stakes are higher than ever. At Vox, we strive to bring clarity in uncertain times and help you understand what really matters. We know the impact of this election will be huge, and we believe you deserve to understand how the outcome will affect your life.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

The kids are writing school shooting fiction

Wattpad is a popular writing platform for teen self-expression. Now it’s full of stories about the terror of school shootings.

by Aja Romano

creative writing about a school shooting

[Editor’s note, May 25, 2022: This story was originally published in 2018, and the statistics included may not be the most recent available.]

The first part of “The School Shooting” is called “First hour of my last day.”

“I already knew the day would be hell,” the anonymous first-person narrator tells us. The day proceeds like a regular one until an intercom announcement sends the school into lockdown: There’s a shooter in the building. The narrator comforts his sobbing girlfriend, telling her everything will be okay as they hide in their classroom. As the faceless shooter approaches, the narrator attacks him, taking down the shooter and saving lives, but taking a stray bullet in the process:

But as he hit the ground His gun hit the ground Im scared the bullet rushes out

Though this story is short — just a scant four pages — it’s representative of what you find when you delve into the hundreds of school shooting stories being written on Wattpad , perhaps the most quietly influential website you’ve never heard of.

On the behemoth self-publishing platform, the most popular stories — typically romance and fanfiction — boast YouTube-level traffic, amassing hundreds of millions of views, or “reads.” Despite a huge audience reach and enjoying the patronage of Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, Wattpad habitually flies under the mainstream radar; its most notable achievements to date are launching the One Direction fanfic turned best-seller After and galvanizing the Filipino film industry with a string of movie adaptations of Wattpad stories.

Wattpad’s relative obscurity probably has something to do with its main demographic of teens and preteens. But lately, the kids on Wattpad are contributing, in their own way, to a very mainstream national conversation — by churning out stories about school shootings.

The “hot” category of school shooting fiction on Wattpad is a mixed bag. Scroll past a host of stories related to Columbine and its shooters and you find a Voltron fanfic, a Criminal Minds fanfic, and a fic about a school shooting involving the bands Leathermouth and My Chemical Romance. There are romances built around the drama of a school shooting, as well as more traditional horror stories. And then there are other stories. One claims to be an account of a real school shooting threat ; many more present terrifying fictional accounts of what a potential school shooting might be like.

There, on a site usually dedicated to painting innocent fantasies about being Harry Styles’s girlfriend, teens and preteens are living through a culture so dominated by guns that fears of their schools going on lockdown and fantasies of martyring themselves to save their friends have seeped into the stories they tell.

School shooting fiction is full of harrowing details, escape routes, and fear

The school shooting stories on Wattpad involve characters of all ages. They’re bright and bubbly sixth-graders on their first day of school. They’re seniors in high school prepping for homecoming, college, or prom.

The incidents nearly always start in one of two ways — with the popping sound of gunshots and screams coming from a hallway, or with intercom announcements putting the school on lockdown or into a Code Red: “This is not a drill.” The students nearly always wind up fending for themselves, either because the teachers are absent or because they are quickly dispatched with bullets. Inevitably, students wind up alone, unarmed and unaided.

These stories meticulously catalog potential hiding places. Bathroom stalls are the most popular by far, but there are also crannies in classrooms, storage closets, people-size lockers, kitchens. Then there are the surreptitious escape routes: second-floor windows and little-used cafeteria exits. Fear of being caught out in the open looms large: In one story , three sixth-graders get trapped in an empty classroom with no way out and no protective cover that’s able to hide all three of them. The story ends there, on an incomplete cliffhanger.

The identities of the shooters rarely matter in school shooting fiction; when the shooters are given attention, they tend to comment on the anxieties of school life and the pressure to perform. In one story, a school shooter’s attempt to explain how hard the pressure of his life has been is so compelling that after he dies, the narrator picks up the gun and continues the shooting spree himself.

In another story , a new girl turns out to be an obvious misfit who can’t make friends and takes her revenge on her classmates. Usually, however, the shooters are faceless, rarely given characterizations or even names — they’re classic horror villains, described as crazy, insane, mental, psychos, maniacs, or simply weirdos. As one story notes , “No one knew who it was. Frankly, no one cared.”

The exception to this rule is that of the Columbine fanfic. This is the most popular variant of school shooting fiction on Wattpad, to the extent that it almost functions as a separate genre. Modern teens continue to be fixated with Columbine, but most of the 800 stories associated with Columbine on Wattpad are more properly a form of what-if fanfiction that attempts to love, redeem, or empathize with the Columbine shooters. That sets Columbine fic well apart from most other Wattpad fiction, which is concerned with processing theoretical shootings that haven’t happened yet.

In most of these other fics, the emphasis is almost always on the victims and the survivors — and the horror scenarios they do and don’t survive. The main characters frequently get shot; their friends and siblings frequently end up dead or seriously injured. In one story , the captain of the cheerleading squad survives a school shooting by playing dead beneath the body of her best friend:

People screamed. I screamed. Bullets flew out of guns. Camila slumped on top of me, knocking me in to the ground. I was lying on the ground, Camila on top of me. There was a hole in her head. Her brains were on the wall behind us.

“Imagine,” reads the summary of one story. “Imagine a shooter coming to your school to kill as many people as he can before he turns the gun to himself. Imagine what horrors, what fear would arise among you. Even more frightful, imagine what it would be like for that person to be you.”

“Of course,” reads one story , told from the perspective of two sixth-grade girls. “This is how we die.”

These stories are part of a long teenage literary tradition — but the stakes are suddenly much higher

As stories of teenage angst tend to do, these stories rely on an awareness of the fragility of life. They draw on the heady emotion and melodrama of death, tragedy, and terror. In this sense, as child psychologist Ellen Braaten told me, they’re built on longstanding tropes.

Braaten, the associate director for the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, described the school shooting genre of fiction as being similar to the way a teen might glamorize going through the experience of having cancer, dying young, or living during war — in essence, “making something romantic out of something really scary and awful.”

“When you’re really feeling afraid, one way to gain control is to tell the ghost story yourself”

Braaten speculated that these stories are “about students putting themselves in a situation they feel like they’re in ... working through their inevitable worst fears.”

It’s no secret that teens are drawn to gritty, angsty stories fraught with life-or-death scenarios. Entire genres of young adult fiction cater to this tendency, from 13 Reasons Why to The Fault in Our Stars to Ellen Hopkins’s entire best-selling oeuvre , which covers a range of dire teen issues from drugs to suicide.

It’s not really even new that kids are writing this kind of story themselves; lots of kids with access to a pen and a notebook have scribbled angsty existential missives somewhere inside them. The advent of the internet has just made sharing those feelings with other teens easier than ever. On Wattpad, which gained its massive underground success primarily as a mobile reading and publishing app, teens and preteens publish and view each other’s fiction by the millions. On Wattpad, a search for “cancer” generates more than 100,000 results; one of the most popular cancer stories has nearly 30 million views.

What does seem new, though, is that teens are working through their fears and anxieties about life and death using school shootings as the setting. In essence, teens and preteens who have grown up with the real possibility that they could live through (or die in) a school shooting have incorporated this reality into the kind of cathartic angst fiction usually reserved for more typically deleterious fare — a cancer scare, a plane crash, drug use, or suicidal ideation.

“Art is a place where we displace our worst fears and wishes,” Braaten said. “Anytime you’re putting something like this out there, it’s because you want to be heard. I think this is a wonderful outlet for students and teens to sort of work through one of their worst fears.” And Wattpad, she noted, is a place where “they can do it anonymously and quickly.”

What’s perhaps even more telling than the amount of fiction where the school shooting is the focal point of the story is the amount of fiction where it isn’t . Disturbingly, school shootings often form the mundane backdrop of stories with completely different plots. In many stories, the event of a school going on lockdown is just a boring part of a student’s everyday life. In multiple stories, there ultimately is no shooting, and the threat dissipates into a boring, wasted couple of hours for the students.

In several stories, the lockdown is used as an excuse for a romantic meet-cute . One, a fanfic about YouTubers Jake Paul and Erica Costell, uses a school shooting as the backdrop for a budding romance. Written in the wake of the Parkland shooting, it has Jake noting, “Us cuddling during the Code Red was amazing but sad at the same time.”

In these stories, the need to romanticize tragedy becomes very literal, a way of fantasizing about the heightened emotional connection felt at such moments while simultaneously grappling with the potential for loss of life, for instantaneous separation from their beloved.

Criminal psychologist Arthur Lurigio described the catharsis of this kind of fiction as similar to that of a horror film. “It’s scary but it’s not scary — it’s not real. Where you’re a little bit scared, a little bit excited, but the outcome is not going to hurt you.” Lurigio pointed out that these genres of school shooting fic are all about control for the students. “When you’re really feeling afraid, one way to gain control is to tell the ghost story yourself.”

School shooting fiction allows students to control the uncontrollable

Controlling the narrative seems to be a main point of these stories. “This writing has a sense of empowerment, of being able to control what’s uncontrollable and baffling,” Lurigio said. “Think about the degree of vulnerability these kids are feeling in general, and it’s being expressed now in a way it’s never been expressed before.”

Lurigio told me the school shooting fiction could be seen as a basic form of therapy for students. “In working with patients, we have them diary, writing about their lives and thoughts and scenarios, and using that as a tool in therapy. This may be a way to process school shootings and give kids a false sense of control. They’re the ones who are the masters of what happens and doesn’t happen.”

We can see that need for control in a very direct sense. One story is a first-person account of the 2012 shooting at Perry Hall High School in Baltimore, by a user purporting to be a student who was then in attendance. (The user did not respond to my requests for verification or comment.) “‘Please let everybody be okay’ was the only thought going through my mind,” she wrote. “I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that something like this could happen at my school; the school that I had always felt so safe in.”

The difference in tone and focus between this student’s mostly matter-of-fact description of living through the event and the highly fantastical, dramatized versions many of the teen writers are imagining is striking. “I thought about every ‘What If’ question possible,” she writes about her reaction after the event. Eventually, she says, “I stopped asking myself these questions,” because she realized there was no point to asking them after the fact.

In a sense, then, the emergent school shooting genre seems to have come about because students are running through all of these potential “what if” scenarios well before they play out in reality. It’s not only about control; it’s also arguably a means of preparedness.

Looking at these stories from this angle, it’s hard not to find them devastating. One story, “School Shooting,” is written by a user with the word “unicorn” in their handle, from the point of view of a sixth-grader; the author told me that they wrote the story following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as a way of paying homage to the bravery of the Parkland students.

It’s practically a litany of survival scenarios playing out in high-drama action-adventure form. It shows kids working together as an ensemble to thwart, undermine, and escape the shooter. After their teacher is dispatched, they grab weapons and turn them on their attackers. They run for exits only to find them locked, so they turn to windows instead. On the playground, the narrator spots “a little kid crying”:

She had a bullet shot in her leg. “Cmon ride on my back.” I said “I can’t. It hurts.” she said I decided to carry her. Good thing she was light.

Wattpad skews young. The company claims 90 percent of its users are millennials and Gen Z; a majority are girls and women between the ages of 13 and 24 . It’s reasonable to assume that the ages of these characters reflect the ages of their writers. And so we have 11- and 12-year-olds writing about disaster preparedness, noting fire exits, psyching themselves up to leap out of windows, and looking out for kids younger than them — all while envisioning themselves as essentially abandoned by an older generation. Remember, there are hardly ever adults in these stories, not in the moments when it counts.

“It’s as if the statement is: Adult world, you have not taken care of us, you continue to not take care of us,” Lurigio told me. “The kids are the ones who are leading, not adults, and that’s a role change.”

Lurigio explained that it’s important to consider that these stories are expressions of real trauma — not lurid, far-fetched fantasies. “[School shootings] have lasting impact, not only on the victims but on kids who see it on the media over and over again. After 9/11, we had what we described as concentric circles of trauma. They have vicarious victimization. I think seeing this on the news over and over again absolutely is a micro-trauma to the kids who are not part of it.

“So this is akin to 1950s campfire storytelling,” he said. “But this is much more serious, with life-altering consequences.”

One fic, “The Gunman,” chronicles the day of a school shooting by jumping through the points of view of multiple characters. “I would never get married, have kids,” one thinks when encountering the shooter. “I’d never buy my own house, get my own car, or even learn to drive! The husky I dreamed of getting one day would never happen.”

But not all the stories are hopeless. Many of them are about students finding their own power and changing things for the better. Jade, a.k.a. xxjademariexx, is a freshman at a New Jersey high school. Her story, “After the Shooting,” depicts a group of high school students who mount a successful gun control protest in their state after a terrifying attack on their school. “I wrote about this because gun violence is a major thing in this country that no one wants to talk and hear about,” she told me. “It also needs to be talked about more than it is.”

Jade said that few within her community support gun control. “They’re all super conservative and think more guns is the solution for a safer country. I see it in a different light that may have been portrayed by my story.”

For Jade, the important aspect of her story isn’t the school shooting — it’s the aftermath. “There’s always that fear that a shooting will happen,” she said. Writing the story allowed her to express not only that fear but also a political stance she can’t always communicate in real life.

“I want to change everything,” she writes as her story ends. “I want everyone to be safe and not fearful. I want to stop school shootings like Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas and all the ones in between and before. I want to stop police from killing people by the color of their skin. I want to stop the suicide rate from going up by guns. I know this country will never be perfect, but I really do want to make America great again. We will be the generation to make America great again.”

Criminal Justice
Gun Violence
Internet Culture

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

College Essays Should Be Personal. For School-Shooting Survivors, the Question Is How Personal.

A generation of American students has become tragically familiar with mass shootings. Many of them describe the life-changing experiences in their college applications.

By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Patricia Mazzei

To make their college admissions essays stand out, high school students have always written about their biggest personal hardships. For those who have survived mass shootings, ducking under desks and witnessing unspeakable horror, the big question is whether to recount the bloodshed to get into college.

With school shootings now a part of the fabric of America, college admissions officers regularly find the tragedies they watched unfold on television being grappled with in the pages of the applications before them.

Students recall their terror. They describe their transformation from quiet pupil to outspoken activist. For those who are willing to relive those awful days — and not all survivors are — the tragedies are life-changing.

We Want to Hear From Students Affected by Mass Shootings

“I kind of struggled with that a little bit, because I never really knew what colleges would look for,” said Taylor Ferrante-Markham, who graduated this spring from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. But then she learned admissions officers liked to see evidence of personal growth.

“Of course, it was the first thing that popped into my head,” she said of the February 2018 massacre at her school, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. She applied only to St. John’s University in New York — her dream college, she said — and edited her essay until she felt it was good enough to win her acceptance.

It did. Ms. Ferrante-Markham, 18, said she plans to study journalism and criminology.

Writing about that day has become a little easier over time, she said. Her essay recounts her feeling of apathy before the shooting and how the massacre angered her and made her look outside her own circumstances.

“I now care about much more than just my little world around me,” she wrote.

I hated waking up for school and going to any class that challenged me. My only concerns were my friends and our afterschool plans, boys, and how far away the next holiday break was. I did not care about what was happening in my community, my state, or even my country. All I wanted to do was finish my spreads for yearbook and go home or out. That is pretty much how my life went throughout the majority of high school. I was never expecting anything to change, that was, until February 14, 2018. … I did my research, which showed nothing has been changed to protect students. So I decided to walk in the March For Our Lives in Parkland with my friends, for our safety, to make change. I now care about much more than just my little world around me. I am ready to move forward onto my next chapter, furthering my education, bringing my new desire for change wherever I go throughout college, into my future career, and for the rest of my life.

The majority of college-bound students from Stoneman Douglas who were juniors at the time of the mass shooting wrote about it in their college admission essays, according to Sarah Lerner, an English and journalism teacher at the school who taught many of those students in their senior year.

“Some of the kids didn’t want to write about the event because it was too much already, but others did, because it truly shaped them and they wanted to talk about it,” said Ms. Lerner, who compiled stories from shooting survivors into a book called “Parkland Speaks.” “I was very honest with them. I said, ‘If you want to do it, do it. If you don’t, don’t. Nobody is going to accept you because you write about it or not.’”

One Stoneman Douglas student who wrote about surviving the massacre was accepted to Harvard in the spring, only to have his acceptance rescinded this week because of racist screeds he wrote months before the shooting.

Another, Spencer Blum, who moved into his freshman dorm at the University of South Florida on Tuesday, wrote about his fear on the day the shooting unfolded, when he initially struggled to get hold of his sister, a freshman at the school who was not hurt.

Mr. Blum, now 18, said in his essay that Feb. 14, 2018, was “the day I would become an activist.”

As we kept walking down this narrowing path behind the school, things started to become suspicious. For starters, we were still going; it seemed a bit over the top for a drill. Then, a cop car pulled up behind us on the field and came out in a full bulletproof suit and with an extremely long rifle. As some students began crying and screaming “THIS IS REAL!” the thought that this was just a drill began to fade. … Every morning I wake up and think “what if it was me?” Then, I think about how it could have been me. … That’s why I lobbied in Tallahassee. That’s why I marched for my life. So I can wake up, hug my mom, dad, brother, and sister, an not worry about how it could have been me.

At Great Mills High School in southern Maryland, Alana White said she heard gunshots on the day in March 2018 when a 17-year-old student at the school fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and injured another student before killing himself.

Those memories came back months later as she wrote her college essay, focusing on the events that had shaped her view of her hometown. She wrote about suddenly not feeling safe in the tree-lined rural community where she had grown up, and about attending protests and rallies and working on a memorial mural.

“Whenever something bad happens in my life I tend to keep it in and not talk about it,” said Ms. White, who is heading to Brown University next fall. “I’m not the type of person who shares my problems with the world. Writing it down helped me come to terms with what I was actually feeling.”

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking for the whole day. I suddenly didn’t feel safe in the one place where I had spent so much time, where I had met some of my best mentors, where I had spent so long working towards my passions. Where a bright girl’s life had ended. My doubts resurfaced. But my community helped pull me up. Through our protests and rallies for unity, I realized I loved my school more than I ever thought I could, and that there was nowhere I would have rather become the person I am.

Imprints of school shootings are visible in other writings by student survivors, even after they arrive on college campuses.

At Northern Kentucky University, Mo Cox, 19, decided to write an essay for her freshman creative writing class about the day in January 2018 when a teenage gunman killed two classmates at Marshall County High School in rural western Kentucky .

“It was supposed to be 1,000 words, but I went over,” Ms. Cox said. “I kept writing. I just had to get all this out.”

She said she wanted to help other people understand the initial waves of shock and heartbreak, but also the lesser-discussed echoes of trauma: How she failed Algebra III, for the first time. The frustration of getting nowhere with calls for tougher gun laws. How people just stopped talking about what had happened.

Patricia Greer, the principal of Marshall County High, said that when they were applying to colleges, many of her students chose to tell admissions officers about their community’s success, not just its tragedy.

“We don’t want to be defined by the shooting, and our students don’t either, so a lot of times that’s not what they choose to share,” Ms. Greer said. “They’re proud of their school, they’re proud of the community for their resilience, but that’s not something they want to be defined by.”

Rachel Blundell, the principal of Santa Fe High School in Texas, said this year’s graduating class worked hard to reclaim their senior year after a 17-year-old shot and killed 10 students at the school in May 2018 .

In her letters recommending seniors for college admission and scholarships this year, the first since the shooting, Ms. Blundell has made sure to mention their resilience. She said she has written about how student council members looked out for younger students. How the football team returned to the practice field just a few months after two players were killed. How students packed this year’s prom.

Jim Jump, a former president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the author of a weekly column on the ethics of admission, said he hopes admissions officers will not become numb to students’ pain.

“As more kids, unfortunately, encounter that kind of experience,” he said of school shootings, “I worry that college people will lose sight of the individual that’s behind that essay.”

Jack Healy contributed reporting.

Patricia Mazzei is the Miami bureau chief, covering Florida and Puerto Rico. Before joining The Times, she was the political writer for The Miami Herald. She was born and raised in Venezuela, and is bilingual in Spanish. More about Patricia Mazzei

49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best school shooting topic ideas & essay examples, 📌 good essay topics on school shooting, 🔎 simple & easy school shooting essay titles.

Theoretical Background of School Shooting Symbolic interactionism theory helps to single out the core elements of violent behaviour and explain the social causes of a school shooting.
Rachel’s Challenges and Its Benefits to the Youth. Columbine School Shooting If told in the right context, tone and by a person who really understands the predicament, Rachel’s challenges are bound to have a profound effect on students and inspire them to spread the dream that […]
School Shooting and Firearms in the United States In the context of the events that happened in the past two or three decades, it is possible to state with certainty that school shootings appear to be one of the most prevalent and worrying […]
School Crisis Management: Bomb Threat and Shooting As for the shooting incident, the initial step was to calm down the students to avoid the panic, and after that, inform the rest of the school about the red code situation and initiate the […]
School Shootings: Adolescent Masculinities and Guns Amok The media and other social surrounding environment have contributed a lot to the growth and development of this kind of behavior among the school adolescents.
Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting School administrators responded to the shooting incident by calling for a change in gun laws and by requesting for the development and implementation of various pieces of legislation aimed at protecting the safety of children […]
Crisis Intervention in the Wake of the Pennsylvania Amish School Shootings The identification of the victims and communication to their families proved challenging due to the nature of the Amish culture. There is also need to contribute more on the research that exists on the recovery […]
Where Rampages Begin: The Issue with the School Shootings Well, a profiling carried out in the United States of America showed that, there are no certain groups or individuals, who are more likely to commit these school-shooting incidences.
How the Labeling Theory Can Explain the Behavior in Time the School Shooting
Columbine High School Massacre and Topic School Shooting
The Cleveland Elementary School Shooting
Teacher and Peer Responses to Warning Behavior in 11 School Shooting Cases in Germany
School Shootings Impact on Students
Linking of School Shootings and The Concept of a Vulnerable Population
School Shooting in Heath High School
The Need for School Shooting Prevention Policies in the United States
The Worst High School Shooting
School Shootings Effects on Student’s Mental Health
The Biggest High School Shooting Incident in American History
Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting: President Obama’s Speech
Impact of the Media and Video Game Violence on School Shootings
How School Shooting Affected a Nation, From Gun Control to Pop Culture
The Guy Behind the Gun: Elementary School Shooting Case
The Problem and Consequences of School Shootings
The Social Roots of School Shootings
Causes Behind School Shooting
The Parents’ Role in School Shootings
The Root Causes of Mass School Shooting in the United States
School Shooting and Its Post-traumatic Stress
The Problem of School Shooting and Its Effects in the World
School Shooting Gun Crazy Animals
How Gun Control Impacts on School Shootings
Stoneman Douglas High School Shooting Case Study
School Shooting: Causes and Solution
Causes and Consequences of School Shootings
The Safety of School Shootings in Public Schools
Decrease of School Violence in School Shootings
The Factors That Lead to the School Shooting Tragedies
A Method of Preventing School Shootings
Discovering the Columbine High School Shooting and Its Influence
The High School Massacre and the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting
Psychological Effects of School Shootings
Impacts on the Mental Health of Surviving a School Shooting
How School Shooting Impact Survivors in the Long Term
Lasting Effects of Exposure to School Shooting
Another School Shooting: How Parents Can Help Kids Cope
Red Lake High School Shooting
Impact of Arming Teachers on School Shooting
Mental Illness Research Topics
Discrimination Essay Titles
Family Problems Questions
Criminal Behavior Essay Topics
Juvenile Delinquency Essay Titles
Social Norms Essay Ideas
Suicide Topics
Media Violence Titles
Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, September 27). 49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/school-shooting-essay-topics/

"49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 27 Sept. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/school-shooting-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 27 September.

IvyPanda . 2023. "49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/school-shooting-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/school-shooting-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 27, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/school-shooting-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda uses cookies and similar technologies to enhance your experience, enabling functionalities such as:

Basic site functions
Ensuring secure, safe transactions
Secure account login
Remembering account, browser, and regional preferences
Remembering privacy and security settings
Analyzing site traffic and usage
Personalized search, content, and recommendations
Displaying relevant, targeted ads on and off IvyPanda

Please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy for detailed information.

Certain technologies we use are essential for critical functions such as security and site integrity, account authentication, security and privacy preferences, internal site usage and maintenance data, and ensuring the site operates correctly for browsing and transactions.

Cookies and similar technologies are used to enhance your experience by:

Remembering general and regional preferences
Personalizing content, search, recommendations, and offers

Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .

Writing the Aftermath of a School Shooting

By Christopher McKittrick
. December 3 , 2014

By Christopher McKittrick.

Jeff Robison and Casey Twenter

Casey Twenter and Jeff Robison have been writing partners for over a dozen years, and several years ago it appeared that the music-based drama Rudderless would be their first produced screenplay when the script began to attract interest from actors, musicians, and investors. But getting the project on a stable path to completion proved elusive. It was not until they sent the script to actor William H. Macy that Rudderless began to find its footing. Though primarily known for his roles in films like Fargo and Magnolia , Macy has written for film and television before, including the 1995 film Above Suspicion , the 2008 film The Deal and a 2012 episode of the television series he stars in, Shameless . Macy decided to make the project his directorial debut and encouraged Twenter and Robison to keep rewriting the script. It was during this period that Twenter came up with a mid-story twist that fundamentally changed the tone of the entire screenplay.

During the long process it took for Rudderless to finally go into production, the duo wrote and directed a low-budget thriller titled The Jogger , and took it several festivals. The Jogger was awarded Best Heartland Narrative Feature at the 2013 Kansas City Film Festival and Best Narrative Feature at the 2013 L.A. Indie Film Fest. As Twenter and Robison worked on The Jogger , the stars finally aligned on Rudderless and the film went into production. Rudderless debuted at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and had a limited theatrical release in October 2014.

Rudderless stars Billy Crudup as Sam, a father whose life is still in shambles after his son Josh was killed in a school shooting two years previous. Sam discovers a box of demo tapes recorded by Josh and decides to show the world the talent that his son had. However, Rudderless is not simply a feel-good celebration of a father’s love of his deceased son as more information about Josh’s final hours becomes apparent later in the film. Creative Screenwriting spoke to Twenter and Robison together about their approach to collaborating on screenplays, the many rewrites of the Rudderless script, and how to use music as a character.

Anton Yelchin as Quentin and Billy Crudup as Sam

How did the two of you begin collaborating on screenplays?

CASEY TWENTER: Like all great creative relationships, ours started with fantasy football. We were in a league together and we were having a conversation about film. Jeff was talking about how he always wanted to go to film school, which was a passion from when he was a kid doing Super 8 movies. He said that he had finally written a screenplay, and he suggested that if I were interested in film that I should try it too. It was like going out and playing golf for the first time, we were hooked. At least I know I was, though I think Jeff was already addicted.

JEFF ROBISON: I had been writing my whole life, but had never written a screenplay formally. I went out and bought Final Draft software after I got married and wrote one. Casey read it, and probably because we’re both competitive thought he could do a lot better. He leaned on me for a little, but he wrote a script that was actually really funny and we decided to write one together.

How would you describe your writing process?

ROBISON: We live only six or seven miles away from each other, but we’ve only been in the same room to write maybe a handful of times. We talk on the phone and we e-mail, and whoever comes up with the idea that we both like will start the project. We’ll send each other five or six pages to see what the other thinks, and we’ll give notes, tweak it, and send it back. It’s really kind of amazing, especially since we’re both so stubborn, that we’ve been writing together for close to thirteen years and there were only a few times that we’ve gotten really heated about a disagreement. There’s a reason I’m writing with him, and it’s because I think he’s good and he has ideas that I respect. So if I’m really adamant about something and he feels differently, I’m going to fight for it for a little bit and then calm down and listen to what he has to say. Like all relationships in general, you really have to pick your battles. If it’s something that I don’t just feel burning inside of me that I need to fight for, then I’m willing to cede a little bit because I know there’s going to be a time when I’m really going to want to fight for something. That goes both ways.

TWENTER: Film is the single most collaborative artistic process there is. Even on a film as small as ours, there are a hundred people who are all going in the same direction. The people who are in charge of locations, or makeup, or wardrobe are putting their best efforts forward and they’re completely relying on everybody else to do their jobs so there is this finished product that is amazing. I feel like that’s how Jeff and I collaborate because we do a lot of passing off, and if we didn’t trust each other implicitly the way everybody on a film crew does we wouldn’t trust each other to rewrite our stuff. It’s very common for Jeff to completely cut or rewrite a scene that I wrote, and vice versa. If we’re trimming down a story, there may be a scene that I feel is really important and Jeff feels like we’re rehashing something on a beat that we already hit really hard. You have to have that trust to allow somebody to take your words and completely change or delete them.

Selena Gomez as Kate and Billy Crudup

You’ve indicated that it took about five years to make this film. Could you take me through the timeline of how the script developed?

TWENTER: It was probably a little bit more than five years. Jeff and I had done the dance of writing our scripts together and sending them off with query letters to try to get an agent or a producer to read them. We decided that we were going to make a film on a lower budget. We were inspired by Once . I had read that it was made for $200,000 and that the actors in the film were actually musicians. Since we couldn’t get the attention of directors, actors, agents, or managers, we thought we could get through to musicians. We let the ideas percolate for about three to four months and we had different ideas for settings, like a guy who lived on a boat in a landlocked state, and we were both new fathers so we were inspired by this really dark idea of what if your child was cut down before the world got to see his or her talent. It took about six months to write the first draft, and in the original draft Josh was just killed in a school shooting.

We got it to a point where we felt we could start looking for musicians and directors. At one time we were going to make the movie with Keith Carradine in the lead and Ben Kweller was going to be Quentin. We just couldn’t get all of the pieces in place, but we were unwilling to give up. The next move was that we reached out to William H. Macy about two years in and sent him the script because we read an article where he said he wanted to direct. We were emboldened because the feedback we were getting on the script was really strong. We got it to Macy, and he reached out to us saying he wanted to make it on April 1st. Jeff thought it was an April Fool’s joke that I was playing on him, and it took a week until we realized that it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. However, Macy said that he felt like there needed to be more to this story and the stakes needed to be risen a bit. We worked on it for about two or three months with him and then came up with the idea that Josh was the shooter. It turned it from a nice, earnest film with a happy ending to something that we all really wanted to explore and dig deep in.

We took another six months to write that and it took another two years while getting different people attached like Laurence Fishburne and Felicity Huffman, but we still couldn’t get the money. Meanwhile, Macy was making Shameless and at the end of each Shameless season he would be very tired from the grind of that. One time he actually did back out for about three months because he was just so spent from Shameless . Then in June 2012 we thought we had the money together, but very quickly it all fell apart right before Bill went into another season of Shameless . We thought Rudderless was dead and Bill had decided that we should just put it aside. We made a movie called The Jogger and shot it in October. In early January when we were editing The Jogger , Bill gave the script to Keith Kjarval, who ultimately ended up producing it. We didn’t believe Keith when he said he could get the money together because we had heard it before, but we had applied for the tax incentives in Oklahoma to shoot and we had this window of needing to be shooting by May of that year, and it was January. We told Keith that if he wanted to run with it he could because we had to go to festivals with The Jogger . One month later he had the money together, a month after that we were location scouting, and we were rolling cameras in early May. It went from being dead in January to shooting in May.

ROBISON: There were so many ups and downs and heartache. We had a guy tell us around 2009 or 2010, “You know what? This is going to be the year of Rudderless !” and we were like, “Yes! It is!” And then he never called us back. That stuff happens all the time, so you get excited and you wait a month and then you don’t hear anything.

You mention that you didn’t come up with the idea of Josh being the shooter until after William H. Macy was involved. How did that story element fundamentally change the script?

ROBISON: Bill very much took on a mentor role with us. The vast majority of what we wrote still made it in there, but he kept pushing us to go further. We had this upbeat story – and I think it can still be perceived as upbeat at the end – but Casey called me one morning and said, “I got this crazy idea and you’re going to hate it, but what if we switch it and make Josh the shooter?” I almost had a fit. You become attached to these characters and I said, “No, this kid wouldn’t do that and that’s not the movie we’re making.” We called Bill and the first thing I said was that I hated this horrible idea because it changes the tone. But after Casey told him the idea Bill was silent for about five seconds – which felt like an eternity – and he said, “You know, Jeff, perhaps these emotions you are feeling are a good thing.” Then I sat there for five seconds and said, “Well, he is William H. Macy. He’s probably right.” It took me a while to fully come around to this drastic change, but I started thinking that you always tend to root for the protagonist if the screenwriter is doing his job right. But what if we find out that the protagonist is responsible for bringing into the world a child who did a horrible thing. Am I still going to support this guy? The first thought you think of is that maybe he was a bad parent. Being that I am a teacher and a coach, I know a lot of problems stem from the home. But that’s not always the case because the parents are doing everything they can. I was really intrigued by the idea of whether I could still root for this guy and I finally felt comfortable with the way I was writing and the way I resolved it.

TWENTER: Once we made that change we had things that we needed to do. We knew that we didn’t want to manipulate the audience. Bill is an expert in how you lay out the facts and leave the crumbs of the story to let the audience find their way. With Jeff and I being new fathers, we wanted to have a theme of unconditional love. We’ve written a lot of things and all of them end up having a theme of some sort, but once we made that change it really allowed the theme to affect the way the scenes came out. It made all the characters stronger. For example, the Kate character was always there but giving her a moment of her saying “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel” because Josh was the shooter heightens it and makes everything stronger, especially when the scene plays through.

Director William H. Macy on set

Naturally, you mentioned having to rewrite the script. What is your rewriting process?

TWENTER: Typically it’s a lot of conversations to figure out what we feel is wrong. One of us typically ends up with a better perspective, like sometimes we’ll know that there’s something wrong in the first act and one of us tends to have a three-dimensional view of what the solution is. Whoever has that grasp will take the first stab at it, just like how we write the first draft of a script. From there it goes back to trading back and forth. On the first draft of Rudderless , before Bill was involved, Josh had a brother and Sam and the brother started the band. When Jeff read it he said, “I get what you’re doing here, but it can’t be a brother,” and he gave all these reasons that I didn’t see until he started working with the script.

ROBISON: It’s very organic with us. Casey and I are always spit-balling ideas, and that’s how Rudderless happened. You get like a hundred ideas, and of those five of them you can work with. We collaborate by letting the other guy fill the gaps.

For example, we were so frustrated and disappointed with the way Rudderless was going and it was becoming a $3-$5 million dollar movie. I just said, “Let’s just go in the backyard and film something. I just need to make a movie.” I just had to get this out of my system. Casey then suggested we try to do something in the $300-500,000 range. You know, you go into the video store and the walls are just lined with horror and thriller movies, and we knew we could do that because we had written some monster movies. Casey likes to jog and he came home one night and called me out of breath, saying, “Jeff, I have the greatest idea for a script! A guy goes for a jog and a car passes that he recognizes. He keeps jogging, but then the car comes back and a guy gets out and starts chasing him into the woods.” That was it. And I sat there for however long it was and I went, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” He said, “But there’s more, I just can’t figure it out. But wouldn’t that be great?”

Then we went to a film festival and we were meeting some people and talking about Rudderless . We were asked what else we were working on, and although we have about thirty ideas for scripts Casey launches into the idea about the guy jogging. And the first guy we told it to looks at us and says, “I love it! That’s a great idea!” So I perk up and say, “Yeah, isn’t it?” and we start making up the story as we’re talking to this guy, and that’s our process. Our rewriting process is just like our beginning process – we talk, we share notes, we share ideas, and all of sudden something will click.

Even though Rudderless is closely tied to its soundtrack, you did not have specific music before you wrote the script. How did you work around that while writing?

TWENTER: One thing that’s fun with writing is throwing yourself challenges. When we first came up with the idea of Josh being killed, we thought the best thing about it is that we would never see the son – we’d only meet him through his music. There was no face to him; his songs were the only way to carry that character through. From the first draft all the way to the last draft the way we handled the music was almost like you’d use a notecard for a scene to describe what that scene meant to that character. We had a detailed description for each song – like we wanted the first song to be about how alone and lost Josh is, which would also resonate for Sam. We had no idea how the song would sound. If it ended up being country music, it could be a country song. If it were rock music, it could be a rock song. The context transcended genre. We didn’t want the songs to be overly angst-full or Josh to be a kid who was wrapped in darkness, we always imagined him of having more of a sickness. It was very much like writing a character, except the songs were the character.

It’s different than writing a biopic of a musician and having a catalog of songs to cherry-pick from.

ROBISON: Nobody likes to be told no, but Casey is willing to go through all that if he feels passionate about something. When we came up with the idea to make this movie ourselves, Casey starts going to fan pages and somehow gets ahold of Gene Simmons from KISS. The band in the movie was going to be a cover band that did a few originals, and we wanted to use some music that people would recognize. We wanted to use one of the more obscure early songs, and Gene said, “You might have some trouble with the studio, but as far as I’m concerned you have my blessing.” That just blew me away, and that’s exactly how Casey got Ben Kweller. Casey reached out and told him we were making a movie, and then all of sudden you’re hanging out with Ben Kweller. It’s fascinating how it works. You don’t know if you don’t try.

Did you do any research on school shootings?

TWENTER: We did quite a lot. We even read articles on Jeffrey Dahmer’s father, who said he always knew that his son had this horrible dark side. I think one that really resonated with me was the Virginia Tech shooter. Similarly, if Josh doesn’t see his parents often and only talks with them on the phone, even if they’re in the same city, they’d have no idea that he’s off his meds, or hearing voices in his head, or having deep depression, or whatever it is. We also did research on how alienated parents feel. After the Columbine shooting there was a tree planted and a memorial put down that had the shooters’ names on it. That memorial was torn out of the ground, as was the tree, so they redid it without the shooters’ names on it. Ideas like that influenced the script.

What scripts influenced you, either on Rudderless or your work in general?

ROBISON: I watch as many movies as I can with two kids and a job. My first memory is from when I was three or four and watching the 1933 version of King Kong and just bawling at the end. Probably a lot of guys my age would say the same thing, but I was five years old when Star Wars came out and that changed everything for me. I knew immediately that I wanted to do that someday, though I didn’t know if I wanted to be Han Solo or George Lucas. Some of my influences are Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, but the filmmaker at the top of the list for me without question is Steven Spielberg. As for writing, Lawrence Kasdan is a genius – Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time. I also get inspired by smaller films as well, like the writing style of Dan Fogelman. I read some of these scripts and they’re such good storytellers, and then I read a Charlie Kaufman script and I don’t think I could even write that well! So you aspire to do certain things and get inspired by other people.

TWENTER: I get inspired by scripts and story that play a lot of notes. While working on Rudderless , I drew inspiration from films that aren’t one note. For example, I don’t like movies that deal with death where everything has to be dour or a comedy where nothing can be dramatic. When I look at films I like ones that cross genres. The ones that inspired me when working on Rudderless are ones that have a few different things going on. When you get at the end of Rocky , you realize it’s a love story. Cool Hand Luke is a funny movie, but it’s not a comedy. Those are the kind of films that I surround myself with when I’m writing.

ROBISON: The human element has to be there. Yes, Rudderless is a drama, but there was one day after filming and I was walking with Bill and he starts chuckling. I asked him what was so funny and he said, “This is the damndest thing ever. I don’t know if we’re making a comedy or a drama.” It was after we shot the scene where Billy Crudup comes out of the bar drunk and rides his bicycle into the van. It’s this kind of slapsticky moment, but that’s real life. Obviously there is very sensitive subject matter, but life goes and you can still laugh when there is drama and turmoil in your life. I love seeing humanity in films, and I have a lot of respect for those who can do that effectively.

Christopher McKittrick

Christopher McKittrick has interviewed many top screenwriters for Creative Screenwriting Magzine. His publications include entries on Billy Wilder and Jim Henson in 100 Entertainers Who Changed America (Greenwood). In addition to Creative Screenwriting Magazine, McKittrick writes about film for <a href="http://www.ThoughtCo.com.">ThoughtCo.com</a>

Subscribe for Updates

Improve your craft.

Processing school shootings through young adult literature

ASU’s James Blasingame believes books can safely forearm and forewarn students on violence

Editor's note: This is part of a series investigating gun violence from many angles .

Arizona State University English Professor James Blasingame strongly believes that books are a “roadmap to life” for young adults that can be used to explore the causes and impact of teen violence and school shootings.

That’s why he’s devoting time to developing a curriculum for young adult readers so that educators and students can have a dialogue on issues such as gun control, bullying, mental health and school climate.

Blasingame, who is also the executive director of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English, recently spoke to ASU about his research and work on real-life trauma and keeping schools safer.

James Blasingame

Question: What led you down this curriculum path on school shootings?

Answer: It began with a book launch for ASU alumni Tom Leveen’s new book “Mercy Rule,” the story of events leading up to a fictional high school shooting . Reading “Mercy Rule” inspired me (A) to go to ASU’s active-shooter training, and (B) to start researching possible ways to avert these tragedies. I looked at federal studies of 37 active-shooter events in schools published years ago to help communities across the country to formulate policies and strategies aimed at preventing school-based attacks. I also compared the facts to Leveen’s book and found 57 plot details that accurately reflected the causes, warning signs and "PAIN," pre-attack indicators, reported by the FBI, Secret Service and Department of Education.

Further investigation revealed a study conducted by Jill Ellen Hathaway, a graduate student at Iowa State University, “Using Young Adult Literature to Explore the Causes and Impact of Teen Violence.” Hathaway found that the critically acclaimed young adult novels accurately depicted “causes, effects, and warning signs of (school) violence,” and that high school readers had no problem identifying these key elements as they read. Hathaway suggested teachers use modern young adult literature “to open a much-needed dialogue with their students about social issues that are relevant to teens today” in addition to traditional studies of the literary canon.

Q: What’s a good age for students to start having a dialogue on this issue?

A: Discussions about serious issues like school shootings should come when young people reach the appropriate emotional/psychological maturity level to engage with the topic. I estimate that to be around the time they enter high school. I was recently invited to speak with a group of high school students whose leader said they were troubled by this issue and wanted to talk about it. In general, I believe we owe it to kids before they actually experience these issues to “provide them with weapons,” as Sherman Alexie says, to arm them against dangers that might otherwise ambush them. As authors Chris Crutcher (“Whale Talk”, “Period 8”) and Katherine Paterson (“Bridge to Terabithia”, “Jacob Have I Loved") have explained often, we want young people to experience life’s problems first in their reading so they have a chance to process it from the safe distance of literature: Forewarned is forearmed.

Q: You are currently conducting a study with 18 authors of young adult books about school shootings with the goal of finding out some takeaways from the readers. Any interesting insights?

A: After analyzing about 100 emails sent to authors by readers and forwarded to me with identification removed, I can share a few significant facts and recurring themes [on a variety of books]:

In one case in which a middle school shooting was averted because students alerted the faculty/administration, school officials concluded that reading “Give a Boy a Gun” played a big role in students understanding the importance of warning school officials immediately. One of the most shocking facts in the federal studies was that students usually knew something was going to happen but failed to say anything to adults.
Verbal and physical bullying in schools is rampant, and the kids see it even though adults might not. Federal studies showed that attackers had been bullied for years and slowly built up to their violent reaction.
Young readers often said, “Everyone should read this book.”
Many young readers report being bullied themselves, and explain how the book made them realize they are not alone and it’s OK to ask for help.
Life is precious and irreplaceable.
Students in other countries are shocked at how accessible guns seem to be.
Students often said that although gun control may be a relevant issue, school situations should never deteriorate to that level. Bullying, mental health, dysfunctional families should be addressed before things get so bad.
Kids often ask the author what they, the young readers, could do to help prevent these tragedies.
All teachers should have to read this book as part of their training.

Q: You’ve also been going over findings from the FBI, Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education regarding commonalities among school shootings. What did you find that’s worth sharing?

A: One frustrating, heartbreaking finding of these studies was that in the majority of cases, shootings could have been prevented if young people had just shared what they knew. In nearly all cases, the shooter shared his intentions with friends and others. Nineteen percent of the time, this happened just hours before the attack, but the majority of the time, other students knew something might happen for days or even weeks before the event took place. Four percent of kids tried to dissuade the attacker. In some cases, kids told adults and attacks were averted, but in most cases no one told.

The reasons for this silence often involved kids not understanding the severity of the situation, how urgent it was to act, or not recognizing the warning signs that an attack was imminent. The most disheartening reason for silence, which happened all too frequently, was that kids’ prior experience with reporting problems was negative. In one incident, a student told an adult about a threat and was told it was best “to mind his own business.” The next day a shooting occurred at that school.

To remedy this, the Secret Service’s study recommended a course of action: “This study also highlights the importance of a school climate where adults encourage students to come forward with information about threats and other concerning behavior, without fearing punishment, ridicule or not being taken seriously. All communities should develop school policies and practices to ensure students come forward when they have information about a threat or possible attack.”

Q: What are some other preventative measures that can help empower students?

A: On July 12, the Secret Service released a booklet detailing ways to prevent school shootings: “ Enhancing School Safety Using a Threat Assessment Model: An Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence ."

In addition, school districts and state governments around the country have been enacting programs to empower students with tools for prevention. Here in Arizona, the Senate and House approved HB 2489, similar to a program created in Colorado right after the Columbine school shooting. The “Safe to Tell” program, the brainchild of Phoenix 14-year-old Ridley Wilson, allocates funds for a hotline for anonymous phone calls about potential school violence.

Although the shooter in Florida had been reported to various agencies, no single agency was pulling all the information together or even information sharing across agencies. “Safe to Tell” ensures that “otherwise disparate tips are gathered under a single umbrella, giving the agency collecting the data the chance to see patterns before they explode into something else," according to the Arizona Capitol Times. Before this bill, individual schools might have hotlines, and various law enforcement and child protection groups might have call-in lines, but there was no central clearinghouse. Now students can call in and the situation will be assessed by professionals in relevant fields and shared with all stakeholders. The Colorado program has resulted in over 9,000 reports from students.

Q: You’ve implied in the past that literature has many uses as education and that books can be “used as a roadmap for life.” What do you mean by this?

A: Coretta Scott King Award winner Christopher Myers once reported in The New York Times that kids the world over most often use books as maps, as directions to help them navigate the obstacles and joys available to their lives. Good books help kids find their way. Literacy scholars have been insisting for 100 years that some of high school students’ reading curriculum should include modern literature in which they can see themselves and the issues they and their friends face on a daily basis. Recently, this has been especially evident in efforts to improve equity in children’s and young adult literature available to young readers in the movement known as We Need Diverse Books .

Q: If you could pick one simple lesson about school violence that young readers might take to heart from Tom Leveen’s "Mercy Rule," what would it be?

A: Actually, I wrote a whole chapter about using Leveen’s book in the classroom for “Teaching Beyond Fear: Arming Teachers with Words, Stories, and Power." Personally, I blame the tragedy in this book on the shooter, the bullies and a particular football coach. My favorite moment in the book is when one boy witnesses a star football player embarrassing an overweight classmate in the locker room. The young man, who is just as big as the football player, faces off with him and berates him for misusing all the power of his social rank to hurt people rather than help them. As Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben told him in "Spider-Man," “With great power, comes great responsibility.” Rather than teaching his players the most valuable life lesson of how to be the best people they can be, this coach does everything he can to feed their egos and train them to believe they are above accountability as long as they win — which they don’t actually do very often.

I think the lesson is that we ARE our brother’s and sister’s keepers. We need to watch out for each other’s well-being. Oh, and fire coaches who put winning above character-building.

Top photo courtesy of Google Images

More Arts, humanities and education

View of debris and damage caused by a hurricane.

ASU workshop trains educators, professionals from marginalized communities in disaster science

As devastating as hurricanes can be to anyone caught in their paths, they strike marginalized communities even harder.To address this issue, a fund named for a former Arizona State University…

Retired admiral who spent decades in public service pursuing a degree in social work at ASU

Editor’s note: This story is part of coverage of ASU’s annual Salute to Service.Cari Thomas wore the uniform of the U.S. Coast Guard for 36 years, protecting and saving lives, serving on ships and…

A young girl dances in traditional Indigenous clothing at an ASU Pow Wow

Finding strength in tradition

Growing up in urban environments presents unique struggles for American Indian families. In these crowded and hectic spaces, cultural traditions can feel distant, and long-held community ties may be…

Presentations made painless

Get Premium

107 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

School shootings have unfortunately become all too common in today's society. With each tragic event, the debate over gun control, mental health, and school safety reignites. As students, educators, and parents grapple with the aftermath of these senseless acts of violence, it is important to continue having open and honest discussions about how to prevent future tragedies.

To help facilitate these discussions, we have compiled a list of 107 school shooting essay topic ideas and examples. These topics cover a range of issues related to school shootings, including the causes, consequences, and potential solutions. Whether you are a student looking to write a research paper or an educator seeking to spark dialogue in your classroom, these topics can serve as a valuable resource.

The history of school shootings in the United States

The psychological profile of school shooters

The impact of media coverage on school shootings

Gun control laws and their effectiveness in preventing school shootings

The role of mental health in school shootings

The impact of bullying on school shootings

School safety measures and their effectiveness

The connection between school shootings and domestic violence

The role of social media in school shootings

The impact of school shootings on survivors and their families

The influence of violent video games on school shootings

School shooter warning signs and how they can be identified

The connection between school shootings and white supremacy

The impact of school shootings on student mental health

The role of law enforcement in preventing school shootings

School shooting prevention programs and their effectiveness

The impact of school shootings on communities

The connection between school shootings and toxic masculinity

The role of school policies in preventing school shootings

The impact of school shootings on teacher morale

The connection between school shootings and school discipline policies

School shooter demographics and commonalities

The impact of school shootings on student academic performance

The role of parents in preventing school shootings

School shooting drills and their effectiveness

The connection between school shootings and mental health stigma

The impact of school shootings on school funding

The role of student activism in preventing school shootings

School shooter motives and their underlying causes

The impact of school shootings on school culture

The connection between school shootings and gun culture

School shooter profiles and common traits

The impact of school shootings on school attendance

The role of technology in preventing school shootings

School shooter access to firearms and how it can be restricted

The connection between school shootings and extremist ideologies

The impact of school shootings on student mental health services

The role of mental health screenings in preventing school shootings

School shooter training for educators and staff

The impact of school shootings on student sense of safety

The connection between school shootings and school resource officers

School shooting response protocols and their effectiveness

The impact of school shootings on student performance in standardized tests

The role of gun violence prevention programs in preventing school shootings

School shooter preparation and planning

The connection between school shootings and access to mental health services

The impact of school shootings on student behavior

The role of community partnerships in preventing school shootings

School shooter motivations and influences

The impact of school shootings on school climate

The connection between school shootings and social isolation

School shooter communication and warning signs

The impact of school shootings on student mental health resources

The role of school shooter drills in preventing school shootings

School shooter access to firearms and how it can be limited

The connection between school shootings and school discipline practices

The impact of school shootings on student perceptions of safety

The role of school shooter prevention programs in schools

School shooter motives and underlying causes

The impact of school shootings on student mental health support

The connection between school shootings and mental health resources

School shooter prevention strategies and their effectiveness

The impact of school shootings on student social relationships

The role of school shooter profiling in preventing school shootings

School shooter access to firearms and how it can be regulated

The connection between school shootings and school security measures

The impact of school shootings on student mental health awareness

The role of school shooter response training in preventing school shootings

School shooter risk assessment and intervention strategies

The impact of school shootings on student sense of belonging

The connection between school shootings and school culture

School shooter intervention and prevention programs

The impact of school shootings on student academic achievement

The role of school shooter threat assessments in preventing school shootings

School shooter access to firearms and how it can be monitored

The connection between school shootings and mental health education

The impact of school shootings on student mental health stigma

The role of school shooter prevention policies in schools

School shooter motives and influences

The connection between school shootings and media coverage

The connection between school shootings and gun control laws

These topics are just a starting point for exploring the complex issues surrounding school shootings. By engaging in thoughtful conversations and research on these topics, we can work towards creating safer schools and communities for all. It is important to remember that there are no easy answers when it comes to preventing school shootings, but by working together and staying informed, we can make progress towards a safer future.

Want to research companies faster?

Instantly access industry insights

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Leverage powerful AI research capabilities

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

What It Means to Be a Writing Teacher in the Age of School Shootings

The new vigilance

I’m teaching on a Monday morning when a young guy — distressed denim jacket, headphones — walks past our room. My students and I are seated around a long table, made of three tables pushed together. “Workshop-style,” we call it. It’s an introductory fiction writing course, held in an Art Education classroom — at the University of the Arts, it’s not uncommon for rooms to double as other things. This one has a sink and paper towel dispenser in one corner, and the walls are papered with second-graders’ self-portraits. The classroom is long and rectangular, tucked in the back corner of the tenth floor. On the wall facing the street stand four tall windows with heavy metallic blinds that rattle when it’s breezy. It’s a cold day, but the room is warm, so the windows are cracked. Even ten floors up, the sounds of downtown Philadelphia blow in from the street: impatient honking, throbbing bass, an ambulance’s long wail. The opposite wall faces the hallway. The top half is a window, through which anyone walking by is visible to us, and we to them.

When I arrive, my students are awake, engaged at ten in the morning. I love these students. I hear their chatter from down the hall. This morning, Jaymie is telling us she’s been experimenting with drawing freckles on her face — life hack , she says. Tyra is scraping the inside of a yogurt with a plastic spoon. I flick on the lights, leave the door propped open. Today we’re discussing Miyuki’s draft, which is quite good, and everyone is excited for her. They have taken careful, plentiful notes; their hands are in the air. The story features an unreliable narrator, and we talk about how details can reveal the character indirectly. The tabletop — Micki’s potato chips and feminist literature, Zoe’s giant water bottle — is cluttered in the way of a family’s shared dining room.

I nod, throwing out questions, listening hard to what they’re saying. I’m energized by their insights. To discuss fiction with students like these has been, for more than 20 years, one of the primary pleasures of my life. In my peripheral vision, I see movement, a person, in the hallway. Not unusual, a person in the hallway. Except that our classroom is in a back corner, and there’s very little traffic here. This person, a guy — kid? man? — is moving slowly. My eyes flick toward him: jacket, headphones, patchy beard. He pauses, chin down, and I feel something leap in my chest — a lousy description. We’ve talked in class about how to describe familiar feelings in original ways, but that’s what it is: a leap in the chest. I’m trying to focus on what Liz is saying, but my attention is diverted — I don’t believe my students notice him, or if they do, they’re not alarmed. Of course not. A teenager in a distressed jacket, scruff, headphones. A UArts student, almost certainly. Edgy-looking but probably, like so many UArts students, enormously sweet. He’s pausing because he’s late for class, adjusting his iPod or checking his phone. I watch out of the corner of my eye until he keeps going.

This is new, this vigilance. Or it’s vigilance of a different sort.

When I began teaching college, at the University of New Hampshire, I was 22 and getting my Master’s in writing. It was 1995. Email was relatively new. Flavored things — coffees, bagels — were trendy, popping up along the main street in Durham. Grunge was popular. Bill Clinton was President. The shooting at Columbine would occur three years later, in the spring.

Four months before, I had been a college student, a senior at Bowdoin. Now I was teaching college students. Each semester, as part of my graduate assistantship, I would teach one section of First Year Writing: English 401. I’d spent the entire summer preparing, reading the assigned anthology and tabbing pages, taking notes, drafting schedules — I had no idea, really, what I was doing. Assign a theme , my grandmother had suggested. She’d gone to school in a one-room schoolhouse in northern Maine.

My cousin Jimmy, in fourth grade, asked: What will you do if they ask you something and you don’t know the answer?

An innocent question, but it hit a nerve. I guess I’ll tell them I don’t know the answer , I said.

It was hard for me to believe I would be teaching actual students, which was surprising — or, perhaps, totally unsurprising — since I had been practicing to be a teacher all my life. As a child, I’d had an imaginary class. I stood at the chalkboard that hung in our living room, just to the right of the front door next to the record player, lecturing effusively to the empty room. In real life, I was very shy (I never spoke in class unless called on, not even in college) and beset with fears, both everyday and imagined — robbers, kidnappers, fires, nuclear war — around which I built elaborately detailed narratives in my head. In front of my imaginary class, though, I was confident, articulate and impassioned. I typed up alphabetical lists of my students. Ola Bass, Lester Cable, Cleo Cottsworth, Sidney Douse. I listed their daily activities, scheduled their parent-teacher conferences, assigned them instruments in the school band. Some of them I enrolled in an extracurricular called “Afterschool Adventure Course.” I instructed them to write essays, then wrote said essays, in different handwritings and at different ability levels, grading and commenting on them with a red felt-tip pen — Wonderful true-to-life account or, more often, Highly disappointing effort or Please see me . I was far more harsh than any teacher I’d encountered in real life; it was as if I was playing a part, similar to the brassy, fearless girls I wrote about in my short stories, embodying characters unlike myself.

Now, at 22, these students were real people. I recall staring at the roster of twenty-four names in disbelief. I bought a pale blue spiral binder — TEACHER’S PLAN BOOK — and penned their names neatly on the red lines. I debated what to wear on the first day. I would always dress up more than the other teachers — who, this being New Hampshire, wore mostly jeans and sweaters — but I felt the need to establish my authority. I was young, still shy. Each week was a series of hills and valleys. For the 24 hours that preceded every class — it met for an hour on M/W/F — I subjected myself to mounting, almost paralyzing nervousness. After class, a brief, exhausted reprieve. The next day, it started again.

In the classroom, I was somewhat able (at least, I think) to disguise my shyness. It helped that I came in with the day’s plan more or less memorized. I hadn’t learned yet that the best classes are often the ones that go off-script, allowing for interesting digressions, and wouldn’t have had the confidence yet to let that happen if I had. I knew I could write well and help my students write better. I was diligent and prepared. And I cared — I cared . Whatever I lacked in classroom presence, I believe I made up for in the intense attention I gave every student. I still have all my old teaching notebooks and am astonished by the pages upon pages I devoted to every one: notes on the students, their essays, our meetings about their essays. A wonder I was doing any writing of my own.

In 401, the emphasis was on writing from personal experience. Recreate a moment or experience from your life that was significant , went the instructions . Watch out: don’t just tack the meaning of the event onto the ending but try revising so that meaning is revealed. Naturally, such an assignment elicited deeply personal stories. Deaths of relatives. Near-fatal car accidents. Abortions. Addictions, friends with addictions. As I read those essays, then and for the next four years, I felt concern, and amazement, and also, I suspect, a touch of pride in their openness, even the gravity of their subjects, as if this somehow reflected well on me.

Looking back, there were things my students wrote about that — 22 years old, no prior teaching experience, relatively little life experience — I was not qualified to be dealing with. Often they were revealed explicitly: the students were telling me on purpose. This could be difficult, but was at least clear-cut. Other times, it was more complicated — the unreliable narrator, the accidental subtext, the truth that stormed suddenly, seemingly inadvertently, to the top. Like the essay about a father’s drinking that gradually revealed itself to be about the student’s drinking. By the end of the paper, my notes in the margins dwindled down to nothing. What a powerful piece , I wrote. I made a few suggestions but I had trouble treating this as just a writing assignment because I was — am — concerned .

“What a powerful piece ,” I wrote. “ I made a few suggestions but I had trouble treating this as just a writing assignment because I was — am — concerned .”

Or the essay about the eating disorder (there were many essays about eating disorders) that was alarming not only in its details but its note of forced resolution, of “meaning.” After our conference, in my notebook, I scribbled for two pages: The paper was difficult to discuss because I believe she is still quite ill. I asked her if she wanted a counseling number — she said no, she liked handling it on her own.

For all my worries, I only actually suggested counseling to students a handful of times. Maybe I was wary of overreacting, overstepping. Maybe therapy felt like a bigger deal to me then. Maybe it was my old shyness kicking in. When I did, I followed the advice we had been given: write down the phone number so they can turn to it later, prevent our conversation from evaporating as soon as they open my office door.

Those first years in New Hampshire were a crash course in teaching, but also in discovering that teaching is about much more than I understood when writing stern notes to my imaginary students: not just a responsibility to the material on the syllabus, but to everything else. Of course this is true for all teachers, but perhaps uniquely writing teachers, who read so much about their students’ lives.

In 2000, I moved back home to Philadelphia and began teaching at the University of the Arts and, in 2004, at the New School in New York. I was now teaching only fiction writing — which was, in some ways, simpler. We never assume fiction is autobiographical , I tell my students early in the semester, establishing the ground rules for our discussions. We refer to “the narrator,” not “you.” Fiction: let’s treat it as such.

But this doesn’t apply to me — how could it? Naturally, over the years, there have been stories that worried me. Or, if not the story itself, then the feeling of the story. The obsessive, digressive references to eating. The description of a murder that is, yes, somewhat cartoonish, but also overly elaborate, gruesome — gleeful. (Is this something? Is it nothing? Is it generational, the by-product of violent movies and video games?) Or the boyfriend character who hits the girlfriend character with no remorse, no seeming awareness that it is even wrong, and — here’s where it gets more complicated — not just awareness by the character but awareness by the story, by the student. (How to navigate these fine points? When to break the wall and step in?)

Rarely is it clear what to do. Fiction is subtle, half-invented, safe. A kind of pact. Usually, unless a story truly alarms me, I don’t address these things outright. I might make an observation in class about the profound sadness of the character, the moral ambiguity of what he does or doesn’t do. Submit a CARE report. Watch my student with a closer eye.

Usually, unless a story truly alarms me, I don’t address these things outright. I might make an observation in class about the profound sadness of the character, the moral ambiguity of what he does or doesn’t do.

Are there times I didn’t intervene, over the past 22 years, when perhaps I should have? Maybe. Probably. I still remember an essay for 401, one of my first semesters, in which a student described how her mother punished her if the bathroom towel was not centered precisely on the towel bar, equidistant from each end. Not the most concerning detail, on the face of it. But I still remember it, and I remember her, and the sense that it was just a sliver of the whole and troubling story. But I didn’t say anything. I probably praised the detail for being so specific.

10/4. UArts Alert: FBI Security Advisory. Violence threat against unspecified Philly area college on 10/5. Be alert for suspicious activity. UArts security increased.

The text message, directed to all faculty and staff, comes in late on a Sunday afternoon. It is October 2015. It’s been almost 20 years since I taught my first college writing class and I am now the director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts. The world is a different place. Filled with new fears, fraught in new ways. The week before, there was a shooting at a community college in Oregon; nine people are dead.

The Columbine shooting was in April 1999. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous or Facebook existed and one heard about news the instant after it occurred. I’d been holed up all day marking papers and hadn’t heard what happened until that evening, from one of the students in my class.

It was at school too (UArts, April 2007) that I heard about Virginia Tech. I was standing by the copy machine outside the door to the dean’s office, heard him suck in his breath. Later, I watched the news, feeling incredulous, nauseous. An interview with the shooter’s creative writing teacher ran on CNN.

Later, I watched the news, feeling incredulous, nauseous. An interview with the shooter’s creative writing teacher ran on CNN.

December 2012. CNN again: this time my husband and I are in a hospital waiting room. I’m having a fertility test; we’ve been trying to have a baby. I was told the test is painful, was instructed to take eight Motrin before coming. The news about the shooting at Sandy Hook is playing on the TV bolted to the ceiling. The waiting room is full but silent, all eyes pointed at the screen. We’re finally ushered into a room, where I’m injected with dye, my Fallopian tubes swimming with ink. The doctor says, If you ask me, they should stop putting these things on the news.

Sunday afternoon, seven minutes after the text, a more detailed email is sent to all faculty and students.

Subject: FBI Safety Alert.

The FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) have notified all universities and colleges in and around Philadelphia of a threat of violence against an unnamed university or college that was posted on social media. The post alleged that such a threat would take place Monday, October 5 at 1 p.m. Central/2 p.m. Eastern time.

I teach at 10:00 on Monday morning. When I wake up, feeling tense, it’s still dark. I check email and find a note from Glorious, one of my students. The subject line is empty. It had been sent late the night before. It says only: I’m terrified to come to school tomorrow.

I understand , I dash back. If you feel uncomfortable, stay home.

Because who am I to reassure her? I’d like to stay home too. I’d like to not leave my house for a week. But I get ready for work and nurse my son, who just turned one. At 7 a.m., my mother arrives to babysit. She is worried. On her drive over, she heard a report about the threat on the news.

On the subway, another email appears. It reiterates what we know — the threat, the timing — with additional details about increased campus security, patrols by federal law enforcement, Philadelphia police. It is unknown whether the threat is a hoax, so increased safety measures are being taken , the email says. Students who believe it best not to go to class today will not be penalized.

Twenty-three minutes later, a clarification. Faculty and staff, in addition to students, should use their own best judgment re: their comfort level in coming to campus today.

I forward both emails to my husband. Jesus , I write.

Be careful , he writes back.

When I arrive at my building, there are extra security guards at the doorways, standing on the sidewalk instead of sitting in the lobby behind the desk. There’s a cop too, as well as the director of the music program. He is greeting students warmly, trying to inject the familiar into the unsettling and strange.

I arrive at my classroom early, a little before 10:00. Some students are absent. Understood. The ones who are there, I’m impressed by their courage, as impressed as I am sympathetic to the ones who were too nervous to come. Our class feels fairly normal, which doesn’t feel normal. At 11:20, class is done.

If I could, I would head home then, but it so happens that at 1:00, I’m scheduled to visit a Contemporary Novel course. My friend Rahul assigned my book; at the beginning of the semester, we’d planned I would come that day to discuss it. If you don’t want to stay, I totally get it , Rahul tells me kindly. But, I think, if these students have read my book and are showing up to discuss it between the fraught hours of one and four, I should too.

We meet on the sixth floor, in a large classroom near some acting studios. About half the class is absent. Understood. The other half is there, participating generously. We talk about structure and symbolism, about drawing on one’s own life in fiction. Then we hear a loud noise from the hallway — conversation stops. We glance around the room. A shout, we think. At UArts, a shout in the hallway is not so unusual — a vocal major warming up, theater major rehearsing. And that’s likely all it was. The moment passes. Nothing happens, not on our campus and not on any campus. We share a nervous laugh, move on.

This new vigilance is more layered. In 2018, I still worry about my students — what they may or may not be going through, may or may not be alluding to in their writing, accidentally or on purpose. I worry about things they confide to me in my office. They are depressed. Anxious. The whole world is anxious. Anxiety has become the norm. I submit CARE reports; I check in with them, check in again. I commute to school, alert for some unseen catastrophic event lurking around the corner. I realize my reaction is probably somewhat outsized, the by-product of my old fearfulness. I also know that ten years ago, even five, I wouldn’t have stopped to notice someone walking slowly by my classroom, but now I do.

They are depressed. Anxious. The whole world is anxious. Anxiety has become the norm.

11/1. UArts Alert: Threat against UArts staff discovered on social media. Security increased. Philadelphia PD investigating.

It is November 2015, another Sunday, when this text appears on my phone. The previous threat was five weeks ago. The Paris attack was two days ago. This time, my immediate response is fury — is this what it means to be a college professor now? Because I didn’t sign up for this. Neither did my students. Maybe I should hold class in my living room, like my professor in grad school. Or teach online. Write full-time. I weigh what’s most important to me. My family. My husband, my little boy.

My husband, too, is less diplomatic this time. Screw it, he says . Cancel class and stay home .

But I go, because that’s what we do. What we’re doing. By Monday morning, the police suspect this threat is related to a domestic dispute. There’s still extra security on campus. My students, all but one, are in class at 10:00. They seem to shrug this one off, an annoyance, roll a collective eye at the kind of losers who post threats online. Maybe they’re so accustomed to social media that they’re inured to it. Maybe this is just the world they know.

It’s no surprise to me that my son, now three, has his own imaginary class. His students are a motley crew of stuffed pigs and ducks, musical instruments, plastic tools, a wind-up snowman. I love to watch him teach his class, the simplicity of what it means to him. “O-kay,” he says, perched on a makeshift stool made of wooden blocks. He speaks with a funny emphasis that he must associate with adults sounding authoritative. “We’ll eat a snack,” he says, addressing his students, laying out his lesson plan. “We’ll dance. We’ll play with our friends. We’ll build. We’ll think about things.”

Another Monday morning. I’m on my way to school. Lately, my commute feels like one long held breath: the ten-minute ride on the commuter train, apprehensively scrolling through the latest headlines, hoping some new horror hasn’t transpired during the night. The transfer at 69th Street, the twenty-minute subway ride into Center City. The subway feels relatively safe in the morning, less so in the afternoon. A few weeks earlier, midday, I was walking down the stairs to the platform when two guys approached me and asked: Are you nervous? You look nervous . They spoke quietly, smiled slightly. I walked back upstairs (nervous, yes, now of course I’m fucking nervous) and waited until they were gone, until my panic had hardened into anger, not wanting to walk back down to the platform but wanting to just get home. Last week, on the train, there was an altercation in the next car over; we were held at the station until police arrived. A few months prior, the subway was stopped at 56th Street because a Penn undergraduate had jumped onto the tracks. I take a seat now, watching the stations blow past the window, punctuated by stretches of flickering dark. Across the aisle, a guy is playing a video game on his cell phone. It sounds like the spattering of gunfire. I open up Tyra’s story to read again before class. It’s speculative fiction, a love story set in the midst of an imagined global disaster. The government has collapsed. The ocean has risen three feet. When I get off the subway, I quickly walk the eight blocks to my building — coffee, bagel, good morning to the security guards — where I take the elevator to the eighth floor and am glad to reach my office, turn on my computer, shut the door, exhausted. The day has just begun.

Take a break from the news

We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven't read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox.

YOUR INBOX IS LIT

Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.

ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

8 Books About The Pain of Being Exiled From Your Home

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of ‘Call Me Zebra,’ recommends books about the banished and displaced

May 31 - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Read

Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetry Is a Heart-wrenching Account of Everyday Life in Gaza, and Here Is What He Wants You to Know

"Forest of Noise" captures the scope of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and shows a ceasefire is not enough

Nov 1 - Bareerah Ghani

Raising Sons In a Forest Full of Fascists

“Adela” from WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE by Julian Zabalbeascoa, recommended by Mary O'Donoghue

Oct 21 - Julian Zabalbeascoa

A Three-Bedroom Victorian to Kill For

“House Hunting,” a fiction debut by Mary Heitkamp

Sep 25 - Mary Heitkamp

DON’T MISS OUT

IMAGES

School Shooting: Causes and Solution Essay Example
≫ Issue of Gun Violence and School Shooting Free Essay Sample on
⇉The Columbine High School Shooting Essay Example
⇉The Path to Violence: Understanding the Problem of School Shootings
The Stoneman Douglas High School shooting
The School-Shooting Epidemic

VIDEO

| A visit to Murree
The South Gate Story: From Dream to Creative Writing School
A school shooting is about to happen #shorts #viral

COMMENTS

How Does a Novelist Write About a School Shooting?
Richard Russo reflects on readers’ reactions to “Empire Falls,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was published in 2001, when school shootings were not so common.
The kids are writing school shooting fiction - Vox
The kids are writing school shooting fiction. Wattpad is a popular writing platform for teen self-expression. Now it’s full of stories about the terror of school shootings.
College Essays Should Be Personal. For School-Shooting ...
June 19, 2019. To make their college admissions essays stand out, high school students have always written about their biggest personal hardships. For those who have survived mass shootings,...
49 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples - IvyPanda
Looking for a good essay, research or speech topic on School Shooting? Check our list of interesting School Shooting title ideas to write about!
FREE School Shooting Essay Examples & Ideas by EduBirdie
For a school shooting to be defined as such, it must be an act or attempt at first-degree murder involving two or more victims on a school’s campus. The horrible and tragic event is something we sadly experience in our life.
Writing the Aftermath of a School Shooting
Rudderless stars Billy Crudup as Sam, a father whose life is still in shambles after his son Josh was killed in a school shooting two years previous. Sam discovers a box of demo tapes recorded by Josh and decides to show the world the talent that his son had.
Processing school shootings through young adult literature
Hathaway found that the critically acclaimed young adult novels accurately depicted “causes, effects, and warning signs of (school) violence,” and that high school readers had no problem identifying these key elements as they read.
107 School Shooting Essay Topic Ideas & Examples
To help facilitate these discussions, we have compiled a list of 107 school shooting essay topic ideas and examples. These topics cover a range of issues related to school shootings, including the causes, consequences, and potential solutions.
What It Means to Be a Writing Teacher in the Age of School ...
It’s been almost 20 years since I taught my first college writing class and I am now the director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of the Arts. The world is a different place. Filled with new fears, fraught in new ways. The week before, there was a shooting at a community college in Oregon; nine people are dead.
Chapter 4. The Value of Violence in Student Writing
Two months before the April 20, 1999, shooting, Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold wrote a dark short story for his Creative Writing class with English teach-er Judy Kelly. The story described a black, trench-coat clad shooter with pistols in a backpack (Cullen; Hudson, Student; Langman, Lieberman).