Talk:Lists of school-related attacks

Original Intent of page
I thought this page was intended to list what could at least be losely defined as school massacres. Listing incidents where one person attacked just one person, or just themselves seems pretty meaningless and will inspire people to add every event of local significance to the list, which is already becoming less and less meaningfull. I think people who come to this list are looking, for whatever reason,to see a group of "I Don't like Mondays" and Dunblane and V Tech situations and compare them. The idea that people come in and kill a group of people in schools etc. as a trend around the world is familiar and of interest. Individual attacks in a school are not really any different to attacks in, say, a workplace or a place of worship or indeed any other attack and, to my mind don't warrent a place in an encyclopedia. IceDragon64 (talk) 23:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
 * I wanna suggest a change in the other direction, let's not include every violent death which occurred at school, without any concern for the circumstances. So no war-related incidents, like the Vietnamese one, or the one with the Lenape warriors, or the Beslan incident. I thought the original intent of this page was to give a list of all Columbine-like incidents, starting with the 1966 Texas shooting. So, also the Orangeburg, Kent State and Jackson State massacres, should not be included, IMHO.
 * Agree with narrowing the focus. Delete single incidents or suicides. Delete war-related incidents, including political protests. That just confuses the issue of focusing on mass murders at schools.Parkwells (talk) 11:41, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Poisonings
Asking for a recommendation here: I noticed poisonings are not in any of the lists; should poisonings be included or a separate list?

In the US there have been several non-fatal poisonings in the past decade with a student or group of students putting a toxic substance such as rat poison or nail polish into a teacher's coffee, water, soda, or food. While there are media and police records of these events, they are often not included in the U.S. school violence reports. Sometimes these incidents are labeled "pranks".

On a different scale, there have been recent reports the Taliban is alleged to have sprayed students at a girls school in Afghanistan with a toxin. The poison made them dizzy, but did not result in death or long term injury (so far known). Like the current lists, this involves the school body being attacked, but unlike the incidents on the current lists, the intent seems to be to create fear rather than to kill.

All thoughts appreciated. Thelema418 (talk) 06:03, 21 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Taliban is part of political warfare; I do not think their attacks should be included here. I recommend against including poisonings; the list definition is already too broad and, as noted, these events are not easily found in reports. I think the issues are too ambiguous.Parkwells (talk) 21:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Recommend new, more narrow definition of criteria for list
I recommend that we make this list less broad: exclude events of war or political harassment, as well as accidental shootings, and single suicides and murder-suicides resulting from rejected suitors/spouses. I would also recommend against including events that involved one perpetrator and one victim. It gives them too much importance to list all such events here. Wasn't the original concern showing that schools had become sites for mass murders? That is altogether different from gang rivalries or altercations between two people.Parkwells (talk) 21:58, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I basically agree. My concern is that I have seen in some of the related sub-articles is that every single crime happening on school-grounds is being included.  Is there an article about attacks that have happened in a particular city or in a certain fast-food restaurant chain or whatever?...I don't think so.  And does every fist-fight, knife-confiscation. "injury caused by another person" have to be included in the sub-articles?  I think the subject-matter would be better served if the focus of all these related articles would be narrowed to incidents/crimes that get wide-spread coverage in national or international or even state-wide/regional media, not a crime report that lists every single incident that happens to occur on a school campus.  Shearonink (talk) 23:45, 12 October 2015 (UTC)