What are 'triggering behaviors'?
Triggering behaviors are those events that most commonly precede severe acts of violence at school. If you have a stabbing in your cafeteria, or a shooting on your playground, it's most likely going to stem from human behaviors that lead an individual to use a weapon. For example, the most common is a fight. Most campus weapon assaults don't involve a gun, they don't involve multiple victims, and they're not going to be reported on national news. They're going to be something like a verbal altercation that turns into a physical confrontation, and then a student pulls an edged weapon and stabs or slashes, and wounds an individual. If you can reduce fights on campus, you dramatically reduce your risk of a weapons assault. If gang members on your campus or next to your campus are allowed to throw gang hand signs, that's a very powerful triggering behavior. It's a call to action for gang members. I use the example, if you're a man and you're walking down the street with your wife, and someone then comes up and slaps your wife. That's how a gang member views someone using a disrespectful term or a hand sign against their gang. Others are bullying and trespassing on campus. These are the events that precede the weapons violence. It is important to make sure that we're not only sending a message and putting things in place to keep guns and knives off our campus, but also to minimize or, if possible, eliminate the physical and human behaviors that might lead an individual to feel the need to use a weapon to harm another person.
