I’m getting tired of hearing conflicting information from a variety of people who claim to know what actually happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, despite the fact that the results of the investigation have not yet been released.

I’m concerned that many of these individuals are relying on their educated guesses or rumor as the basis for making costly school security upgrades. This applies to campus employees tasked with security, as well as consultants and vendors giving advice to their school clients.

This lack of information also opens the door for unscrupulous individuals and organizations to step in and claim to have insider information… information that, not surprisingly, supports their political agenda or bottom line.

Worse yet, all of this speculation could come to be accepted as the truth when it might not be factually correct. Remember Columbine? Initially, everyone thought the killers were motivated to do their dastardly deeds because they were bullied. Only later when the facts were revealed by investigators did we learn that bullying was not the attackers’ motivation at all. Unfortunately, the myth that Columbine was the result of bullying is still out there.

The fact of the matter is we don’t really know what happened at Sandy Hook, and investigators aren’t giving us the information we all need to make informed decisions. I hope the investigation ends soon so that those of us in the campus protection field can rely on real information rather than speculation and rumor.

In the mean time, there are time-tested best practices that can be applied right away. Click here for some of them.

 

 

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