Sadly, six-year-old shooters are not an anomaly

Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, Va., is now on the long list of schools in the country in which a shooting has taken place. This time, however, the shooter was a six-year-old who took a legally purchased 9mm handgun to school to intentionally shoot his teacher.

The shooting took place in early January, and by the end of the month, classes resumed with two security officers assigned to the building as well as the installation of two metal detectors. The teacher survived the incident after a two-week hospital stay. She intends to sue the school district.

School officials were tipped off that the child may present a danger including by the child’s teacher, but those warnings were ignored. Since then, the school superintendent has been fired and the principal and assistant principal also left their jobs. They have been replaced by a new administration.

While every school shooting is a tragedy, this one was a little different with such a young child as the perpetrator. It begs the question, how did a child so young get so angry and decide a gun was his only option?

Sadly, this case is not the only one involving a young child. According to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been 18 school shootings committed by children under the age of nine since 1970. Twenty-three years ago in Michigan, a young girl of six was shot by her classmate. Two other shootings since that time by six-year-olds took place in Texas in 2011 and Mississippi in 2021.

Damion Grasso, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist and an associate professor in University of Connecticut’s department of psychiatry. Grasso said anger by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It can alert us to when things are wrong in our environment and need attention. However, in the absence of “emotion regulation strategies,” anger poses a risk.

Grasso, who holds a secondary appointment in the department of pediatrics at UConn Health, said young children may have inappropriate responses to environmental stressors or perceived threats because their emotional development has been disrupted by their exposure to adversity and violence.

“The question is not so much how did a child so young get so angry to decide that a gun was his only method of conflict resolution,” he said. “Rather, the question should be, how did a child who naturally experiences anger have ready access to a firearm, learn how to operate a firearm, and learn that firing a weapon at the target of his anger is an appropriate response?”

Grasso’s point is that it is about the access. A 2021 study published in the JAMA Network Open showed that in 280 households reviewed, 70 percent of parents reported that their adolescent could not independently access a loaded household firearm. However, more than one third were contradicted by their child’s report that they could access a firearm within five minutes.

But what happens now to the six-year-old shooter? Virginia law prohibits charging a minor as an adult. So likely the boy in this case will be shuttled through juvenile court. The minimum age for juvenile prison, however, is 11. What about mental health support?

Grasso noted that improving mental health training for teachers and school staff is a critical step for maintaining a healthy school environment. Having on-site mental health professionals is also a key factor. As he put it, this helps in identifying and responding to mental health “red flags,” connecting children to needed services, and providing ready access to support and counseling.

“It is difficult to say whether more mental health training or a larger mental health infrastructure would have deterred this young child from using a firearm in school,” he explained. “Perhaps it would have helped to identify and respond to problematic behavior that may have suggested risk for violence.”

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, research shows that children’s brains continue to mature and develop into their mid-twenties. But the sections of the brain responsible for decision making and the subsequent consequences of their actions is not fully developed until early adulthood. In other words, young children have difficulty assessing risk.

Grasso agreed in terms of moral development in children. He said it is incomplete as are other aspects of development. Emotional socialization, or developing empathy through healthy parent-child interactions, can help to advance moral development. The flipside of that, however, is adverse childhood experiences. When a child lives with family conflict or violence, that can undermine moral development.

Children in such an unhealthy social atmosphere may exhibit violent behavior without understanding the consequences of their actions. Nonetheless, Grasso emphasized that, while caregivers are ultimately responsible for ensuring the safety and wellbeing of their children, he knows nothing about the six-year-old’s family or specifically what may have led this child to shoot his teacher.

“The bottom line is that a young child exhibiting violent behavior is far from operating at their full potential,” he said. “There is much growth to be had with the right resources and support.”