Billions are spent on "security theater" to prevent school shootings, instead of mental health resources.

Some high-risk students get shuffled between schools without shared history, increasing the risk for violence.

Radical kindness and social support interrupt vengeance and help restore safety.

In the "capitalist death circus," America fights the school shooting epidemic by wasting billions on the theater of war—marketing bulletproof backpacks, bunker-desks, and combat simulators to turn teachers into soldiers. For educators, surviving a shooting is a double trauma—a harrowing collision between their own survival instincts and responsibility to their students. To remain a protective figure, they often suppress their own terror and grief, leading to an emotional burnout that few other professions experience.

Teachers Are in a Permanent State of High Alert

Teachers are also secondary first responders, forced to absorb student terror without the specialized training or emotional distance of emergency professionals. This can create a painful paradox: The teacher is simultaneously a victim, protector, and witness. Resulting survivor’s guilt—an intense, often irrational sense of failure to protect every child—may make their path to recovery even more complex.

This secondary trauma is the deep physical and emotional distress caused by absorbing the pain of others. Even without witnessing a shooting, many teachers live in chronic stress, working within a system that treats schools as war zones through constant lockdown and active-shooter drills.

These “security” measures can inadvertently lock a teacher’s brain in a permanent state of high alert. By rehearsing for tragedy, the brain begins to treat violence as a certainty rather than a possibility, transforming a place of learning into a battlefield.

Human Connection Can Interrupt the Cycle of Vengeance

Instead of lockdown drills, we need social-emotional support systems in our schools. It teaches marginalized children how to verbally express anger rather than enacting it with violence. It also teaches children compassion in action, which is about actively reaching out to those who are isolated. Instead of just feeling compassion for a child who is bullied, students are taught to intervene with an act of kindness. By encouraging loving skills, this movement fosters a more peaceful, caring, nonviolent world.1

The power of social-emotional support is illustrated by my patient, NS, a married, 59-year-old female, and history teacher at a public high school in New Jersey for the past 25 years. She called me urgently, seeking guidance on how to manage her student, an isolated, paranoid, 16-year-old South American boy threatening to bring a gun and “shoot up” the school. He was an illegal citizen, spoke little English, and had no psychosocial support. Alone in the U.S. and living with a gang-affiliated brother, the boy arrived disheveled and underfed—a visible portrait of systemic neglect. Desperate, he came to school to be fed. The other teachers and students were afraid of him and shunned him. He would often feel overwhelmed, become agitated, and begin to talk to himself.

Neither the administrator, the school, nor the teachers were sure how to respond to this threat of violence. In NS’s class, he was behaving strangely, saying another student was threatening him, and he refused to go back to class. But NS could not identify the other student, whom he said was threatening him. So NS sent him to the guidance counselor for an assessment and to get the help this boy so desperately needed. But after this boy made threats of violence, NS’s school administrators contacted the previous high school he was transferred from to understand what was going on with him.

The previous school only then revealed that both brothers had threatened a school shooting, a situation so alarming that the school had previously called 911. The younger brother was involuntarily institutionalized for paranoid delusions, yet the previous school "ping-ponged" him to NS’s classroom without disclosing his violent history or mental health struggles.

NS’s school lacked a formal threat assessment plan—a multidisciplinary protocol designed to evaluate struggling students, determine risk levels, and implement safety-driven support plans. I advised NS to mobilize the administration and faculty, urging them to prioritize both safety awareness and direct psychiatric outreach to this isolated student. Desperate students are often marginalized because overwhelmed teachers lack the specialized training required to manage suicidal, homicidal, or mentally ill students.

Despite knowing of his threats, other teachers further isolated the boy, forcing him to sit alone in their classrooms. Though my patient reported the boy’s threats, a paralyzed administration and a lack of school mental health resources left the crisis unmanaged. I advised NS to ensure the administration had an emergency protocol ready: Upon the boy’s return, a staff member must immediately escort him to the nearest ER for a psychiatric evaluation for homicidal, suicidal, and paranoid ideation. If deemed a homicidal or suicidal threat to himself or others, the boy must be involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital for medication and care.

I encouraged NS to use her wisdom and reach out to this disenfranchised boy with kindness and support. She developed a caring relationship, which I supported. She often took him to the school’s food bank for nourishment. Under her care, he became less agitated. Reassured and finally "seen" by NS, the boy’s agitation subsided, and his behavior became significantly less erratic. Rather than ostracizing him, she moved the boy to the front of the room, surrounding him with mature, empathetic peers who would include rather than isolate him.

Simple acts of kindness can be enough to stop the feelings of vengeance that often drive acts of violence. By contrast, expelling or transferring troubled students who threaten violence only furthers their sense of worthlessness, hopelessness, and desire for retribution. These children feel discarded, convinced they have no allies and nothing to live for. Feeling destroyed by society, they in turn feel a desperate impulse to destroy it. This boy showed up the next school year, but eventually stopped coming to school and disappeared. NS’s follow-up attempts were unsuccessful.

Teachers endure secondary trauma as front-line responders to school violence, yet lack clinical support. When systems fail, troubled students are simply shuffled between schools, leaving their dangerous isolation unaddressed. However, as NS demonstrated, transitioning from drills to social-emotional support can stabilize disenfranchised children. Radical kindness, human connection, and the proactive recognition of warning signs interrupt the cycle of vengeance, restoring classrooms from battlefields to sanctuaries.

1. Cerfolio, N. (2023). Psychoanalytic and spiritual perspectives on terrorism: Desire for destruction. Routledge. 1-166.

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