Panic is natural.
Thus, the inevitable frenzied calls for teachers to carry firearms and school bags to be clear plastic and every school to be locked up and ready for lockdown, with metal detectors and surveillance cameras and police officers standing guard outside the classrooms.
Panic is natural, yes - but most panic-induced actions do nothing to reduce violence, say experts in school safety.
If they have learned anything since 15 died at Columbine High School two years ago, it's this: Schools need to take a collective deep breath, then concentrate on fixing the kind of deep-seated problems that can't be detected by even state-of-the-art security systems.
Among those problems: bullying, the isolation some students feel, the impersonal nature of many large schools, students' pervasive mistrust of faculty.
"When shootings happen, schools want to act quickly and they want what they do to be seen," said Joanne McDaniel, acting director of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence in North Carolina. "If a school puts in a metal detector or a camera system or something else visual, it's so much easier to tell that story than to say, 'We're going to be teaching character development,' or 'We're starting an anti-bullying program.' There's a pattern of reaction rather than real response right after a shooting occurs."
In 1999, the days after Columbine brought a spate of copycat threats, too - as well as a flood of untested, potentially harmful quick fixes, from the banning of black trench coats to "profiling" methods purporting to identify students with violent tendencies. Tough security measures, crackdowns, singling out of certain students - all these approaches may hurt more than they help, according to those who study school violence.
