Yesterday, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and saw a picture of this week’s newspaper dated for October 25, 2016, on the shooting at Union Middle School in Sandy, Utah. The article reported that a fourteen year old student shot another sixteen year old student right there in the parking lot- point blank. The shooter was arrested and the sixteen year old victim was rushed to the Emergency Room in critical condition where he was treated with extensive surgery. My heart sank. To think- this happened in Sandy Utah, not the streets of Compton.
In fact, From 2013-October of 2015 alone, there was 199 school shootings in America- an average of nearly one a week(Everytown Research). I sat there in awe thinking-with all of these school shootings happening lately, there has to be some sort of prevalent cause! I got to thinking about all different changes in schools recently that would bring about such behavior. Out of curiosity I looked up the school’s website and found. There to be the standard dress codes for public schools, but no school uniform enforcement. I then continued to look up the dress code policies for other schools. Who have recently been attacked with school shootings by students. And saw that most of them in fact do not enforce uniforms or any strict dress codes.
Some scholars, such as Shirley Farrell argue that bullying and violence, like the gun shooting that occurred yesterday. Would have occurred regardless of what the students were wearing. She points out that there is no way of officially proving that the lack of uniforms was the cause for such behavior. And that it is merely coincidental evidence.
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Other experts, like Friederike Sommer, Pablo Pizzurno, Belinda Luscombe, Randy Rockney, Julian Tanner, and Julian Tanner would agree with my theory and support the fact that lacking school uniforms is a prevalent cause of the influx of student violence in schools. They say that enforcing school uniforms and strict dress codes helps provide the school and students with the structure they need to stay focused on getting an education rather than getting wrapped up in any violent or unrelated and inappropriate activities. Not only do their studies prove that school uniforms and strict dress codes reduce violence like school shootings, but also other inappropriate actions like bullying, theft, harassment, as well as helping enforce safety, limiting distractions and improving overall academic success.
While Farrell makes a valid argument, that there is no way of proving that the lack of school uniform was the only cause of such violence, I say that there is enough cross examined evidence to support it was a factor large enough to take into consideration. There are far too many studies to show that schools that enforce strict dress codes and uniforms have substantially lower violence rates, bullying, and far more academic success and school unity for it to merely be a coincidence. Even if, for instance, they lower the violence rate by only ten percent, wouldn’t it be worth it? I would certainly say so. If making uniforms mandatory in all public schools is all it takes to lower the chances of shootings like the one I saw yesterday on the news from happening and putting helpless sixteen year old boys on surgery tables- I would certainly say so.
School shootings don’t just start out as school shootings. There are many complicated reasons as to why students would want or have an incentive to shoot up a school. One of them being bullying. Friederike Sommer, an author of the International Journal of Developmental Science, reported that in 88.1% of cases the future perpetrator of school shootings experienced social conflict within the school environment-primarily bullying from other students. When a student is bullied, they feel threatened and angry towards that person and also the school itself, causing them to take matters into their own hands and act out irrationally by violent actions, like shootings.
