How can we draw on past challenges to help solve the problem of school shootings? Let’s start with a comparative analysis between airplane hijackings and school shootings.

School shootings (or any mass shootings) are a complicated problem, and like most complicated problems, there’s not a silver-bullet solution, but precedent — similar historical situations with known resolutions — can be helpful to understanding a solution.

Here are a few key parallels between school shootings & airplane hijackings.

Both a hijacker and a school shooter need to have access to a weapon, and they need to take that weapon to a place where weapons aren’t allowed. Neither school shootings or hijackings were common for much of modern U.S. history. There’s recent evidence that the “modern era” of school shootings began with the 1999 Columbine massacre. Similarly, airplane hijackings were virtually unheard of until 1968, when the infamous El Al hijacking launched a multi-decade wave of hijackings

The insanity of the era of hijackings that began in 1968 was how long it lasted, and how many planes were hijacked. Until 2001, there were at least 10 airplanes hijacked every single year. And at one point over 130 American flights were hijacked in a single 5-year period!

Since 2001, the level has dropped off to pre-1968 levels, despite record numbers of airplanes in the air. So, how did we solve the hijacking problem, and how could it help us figure out how to prevent school shootings?

Like any complicated problem, solving hijackings required a multi-prong solution, but I believe that ultimately the number of hijackings dropped dramatically after 9/11 because

It became harder to bring weapons on board airplanes and into cockpits; Passengers realized that hijackers might not be looking for a free ride to Cuba, but instead may just crash the airplane; and Planes had become hardened targets, which meant would-be hijackers were not going to be able to accomplish their goals

In order to harden schools, some people believe that teachers should receive training and carry guns, the equivalent to air-marshals in every classroom. But teachers overwhelmingly oppose carrying guns, and I don’t think we should force anyone to carry a gun if they don’t want to.

What we can do is make schools a more difficult target for a school shooter. This doesn’t mean making schools into fortresses, but there are some effective and non-intrusive security measures that can be taken:

Secure, monitored entrties but multiple, unsecured exits

Discrete, non-instrusive ballistic protection

School-wide electronic notification

All of these steps have parallels in hijackings: better security prior to boarding the aircraft, reinforced doors to keep a hijacker out of the cockpit, and more sophisticated monitoring and alerting.

At the end of the day, the goal should be to make it so difficult for a would-be school shooter to commit a shooting, that he or she is discouraged from carrying it out in the first place. We proved we could do this with hajackings (without infringing on constitutional rights), and we can do it with shootings as well.

Any solution that is truly effective is going to require a combination of top-down and bottoms-up. Trying to do it just with common-sense regulatory reform or only by making schools impenetrable are both solutions that only go halfway. School shootings, like airplane hijackings, should be relegated to the dustbin of history… let’s just not wait three decades to do it.