Following a mass shooting incident Monday that claimed the lives of three adults and three 9-year-olds, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) proposed “an automatic death penalty for school shooters,” in a tweet.
“Life in prison is not enough for the deranged monsters who go into our schools to kill innocent kids & educators,” he said.
Scott is known for the “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America” document that includes an unpopular proposal to sunset all federal legislation – including programs such as Social Security and Medicare. President Joe Biden referenced this plan during his State of the Union address last month.
The lawmaker is also linked to a massive Medicare fraud scandal, per Newsweek.
While some on social media appeared to support Scott’s proposal for an automatic death penalty, others criticized it. Critics cited evidence that the death penalty doesn’t actually deter crime.
“There is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment,” said the American Civil Liberties Union. “States that have death penalty laws do not have lower crime rates or murder rates than states without such laws.”
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 23 states in the U.S. no longer have the death penalty. Out of 27 states that do, four currently have governor-imposed holds on the practice.
At first, authorities thought 28-year-old Audrey Hale – the alleged shooter who opened fire at Covenant School Monday – was a teen. Data analysis from The Washington Post indicates that the median age of school shooters is 16 and children are responsible for more than half of the school shootings in the nation.
This is something that would not “be possible if those children didn’t have access to firearms,” the outlet added.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court prohibits execution for crimes committed at the age of fifteen or younger, some states do allow children under age 18 to be executed, the ACLU said. These include 19 states that have laws permitting the execution of persons who committed crimes at 16 or 17.
Over the past 50 years, 226 juvenile death sentences have been delivered, according to the ACLU. Per the organization’s most recent data, 22 of those juvenile offenders have been executed and 82 remain on death row.
“While adolescents can and should be held accountable for their actions, new scientific information demonstrates that they cannot fairly be held accountable to the same extent as adults,” said the ACLU. “Studies by the Harvard Medical School, the National Institute of Mental Health and the UCLA’s Department of Neuroscience finds that the frontal and pre-frontal lobes of the brain, which regulate impulse control and judgment, are not fully developed in adolescents. Development is not completed until somewhere between 18 and 22 years of age.”
Others who commented on Scott’s tweet noted that many school shooters die at the scene. For example, Hale was reportedly shot dead by police.
“Unlike most murderers and terrorists, mass shooters almost never escape the scene of their crimes,” said Adam Lankford, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama who studies mass shootings, as cited by Popular Science in 2013. Research published that year indicated that mass shooters died in 48% of attacks studied, including 38% by their own hand.
According to the National Institute of Justice, suicidality is “a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings,” especially for younger shooters. Students in K-12 who engaged in mass shootings were found to be suicidal in 92% of instances and college students who engaged in mass shooting were found to be suicidal in 100% of instances.
Research from the institute supports safe storage of guns as a way to prevent school shootings
“There are no federal laws requiring safe storage of guns, and no federal standards for firearm locks,” it said. “The data also support ‘red flag’ laws permitting law enforcement or family members to petition a state court to order temporary removal of a firearm from a person who presents a danger,” the NIJ added.
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