Dr. Stuart Henry, director of the School of Public Affairs and co-author of “Responding to School Violence: Confronting the Columbine Effect,” spoke with The Daily Aztec about mass shootings and shootings on college campuses.

The Daily Aztec: Are there truly more mass shootings? Or is the media reporting it more?

The numbers I’ve seen are around 27 a year, 20-30 a year.

So part of the problem is if you get one incident and it’s got multiple homicides, that increases the death rate. … Now if we talk broadly about school violence — we see a lot more incidents on schools than we see in colleges — but it’s still really low and it’s peaked in around the late ‘90s, and it’s been going down and down since then, even though we get these incidents that seem to occur on a regular basis.

They’re not frequent. They only account for a half a percent of the juveniles who are killed by guns in the United States.

It’s because it’s symbolically so disturbing that here you are in a setting of a school or a college that when you get someone coming in … shooting, or appears to be, that makes major headlines. Of course it does.

DA: Why do shooters pick college campuses to act on?

That is one of the key issues, and it’s to do with a vulnerable, gathered population that’s symbolically significant to the community and society.

Unlike a sporting event or a rock concert … where there’s a restricted venue and you have to go through a security check, you can walk on a college campus just about from anywhere.

And most of the time because it’s so large you don’t know who the people are that are in the class with you. … So if you put together highly vulnerable population with a motivated offender, in this case a shooter, with the lack of guardians — that is, people who could intervene or know how to control a problem because it’s so large and so dispersed — it’s not like a small neighborhood community where you’ve got everyone watching everyone.

So you put those three together and you’ve got … the potential for a violent incident to occur without any way to restrict it.

DA: Is there any feasible way to reduce that potential? Is a radical measure like a constant police presence on campus necessary?

The problem is, especially in school settings, where you’ve even introduced these (radical measures), what they do is to impact negatively the whole education experience for students who go to that school for the fear that something is going to happen some day … you may be able to reduce the number of deaths if you’ve got a rapid force that could move in quickly and do something about an active shooter.

One of the best things that happens — and it’s not necessarily true on all campuses, but they have it at San Diego State — is they have A.L.I.C.E. training, which is a police training activity where they show what happens in the event of an active shooter on campus and who gets targeted and how you’re supposed to respond and so on.

It tries to counter the idea that you should be passive in the classroom and just sit there and do what the shooter says, whereas the opposite should be true and you should be doing all kinds of movement and leaving the building. … To prevent it is a wider question.

And here’s the problem, as we see it, anyway, that is what you’re doing in these kinds of societies … is a multi-causal problem.

It’s not just one thing that causes this.

But what is a recurring feature is empowering … people to have the ability to dominate others.

You can do it in multiple ways. You can do it through guns, allowing people to have guns.

You’re doing it through corporations, giving them the power.

In most of the cases where you give people the power over others, they’re not going to use it negatively. … But just like corporations, some of them will abuse the power you’ve given them.

So will individuals. … So you’re trusting by giving them power over everyone else, which a gun is or a weapon or bomb-making equipment is — by giving them that power you are trusting that they’re not going to use it negatively.

That’s a hell of a trust. … But what there are are a number of factors that come to, and one of the factors is often a mental health issue, it’s gun availability, it’s a lack of monitoring of the person by family that allows someone to build guns, bombs in their room or garage … so there’s a lack of supervision.

There’s a codependent facilitator, often but not always the mother, who protect their child and their reputation from exposing they have a problem in the family. … It’s not (just) one of these things.

It’s a combination. It’s a lack of intervention, monitoring, supervision.

In a society like ours, it’s giving the individual the freedom to be outside the community inside the community.

They can be left alone and private so they’re not sharing, people don’t know what their issues are and they’re bottled up in themselves with a facilitator — parent, confidant — who allows that to continue.

DA: What’s a step that can be taken to help break that pattern toward violence?

Some of these are macro-level things.

How do you change a society’s culture that allows individual freedom? Because the freedom is that which we enjoy to do all the other things.

But some of the things you can do, like Australia is pretty famous for doing this, they’ve introduced strict regulations on monitoring who’s allowed to buy guns, what kind of training they have.

It’s not only the U.S., by the way, that allows everyone to have guns.

Switzerland allows everyone to have guns, but that’s how their army is put together — they train everyone how to use them. So in Australia they introduced this system of not only restricting guns, but they had a mandatory buyback of guns.

They took guns out of circulation and they basically train. You have to go through a training program and get a certificate in gun use.

Now it doesn’t eliminate everything, but … it’s made a huge difference, not just in the number of incidents — they claim they haven’t had a school violence incident since they introduced he legislation.

But it’s reduced the number of suicides, other homicides, just by taking the guns out.

It’s not the only answer and it’s not saying we’re banning guns.

It’s saying if you’re going to have this power over others, we’re going to regulate the ways in which you exercise it and who gets it.

DA: What can SDSU and its students to do be prepared for a shooting on campus?

(Shooters) do sometimes share with friends what they’re about to do and what they’re thinking. Now, unfortunately, everyone’s got bravado and everyone’s claiming this, that and the other.

And in some school settings the other student will egg them on and say, “Oh, are you really going to do that?” But they don’t really believe they’re going to do it.

Or if they do it, it’s like, “This is absolutely crazy. Can you believe that?” … But one of the things that the school research has shown is that if you encourage fellow students to report stuff that looks problematic — it sounds like snitching, but in fact what you’re doing is being protective of potential incidents like (shootings) occurring.

They’ve found that people say what they’re going to do to their close friends. They will have blogs.

And sort of going backwards after the fact and finding this isn’t helpful.

You need to find it as it builds to this pattern that we described before.