One of the stupidest and most simply
wrong justifications for school uniforms is that, somehow, they will prevent situations like what happened at
Columbine High School.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
School uniforms are not going to keep people from being abused for years and years. Would the popular crowd suddenly stop abusing their chosen targets if those targets suddenly started dressing like them? No. Why? Because the abusers want something to abuse like politicians need an issue to rant on. If they can't abuse on the basis of clothing, they'll abuse on some other basis.
This is like saying "violent video games are statistically linked to school violence." Journalists and politicians say that something is "linked" when they want to imply a causal relationship when in fact none exists. For example, with the violent video game issue:
The people playing violent video games could simply be predisposed to violence already, for whatever reason, and are venting their frustrations through the game. This is something the "researchers" should rule out, no?
The people playing these games could simply be venting primitive aggression. That dosen't mean that they are violent people. This is something they should have ruled out, no?
They didn't rule out either of those, which makes their study completely worthless. That doesn't stop the politicians, though.
The same kind of "scientific studies" are done on issues such as requiring all public school students to wear school uniforms. Just because wearing uniforms is "linked" to something doesn't mean that the uniforms actually had anything to do with it.
It also ignores a greater problem. Why are kids shooting up their schools? The answer in the rash of American school shootings is fairly obvious: The shooters were systematically abused, rejected, and/or ostracised from their fellow public school students, who are supposed to be their "peers".
But that's too contraversial an issue, and it's stuff that Americans don't want to hear, so they just propose "feel good" things like school uniforms, metal detectors, etc., and turn schools into even worse Public School Prison Camps.