School Shootings

Photo by Clint Patterson

School shootings are the social cancer of the new millennium, easy to diagnose, difficult to fully prevent and stubbornly defying the “silver bullet” of a single long-term cure. School shootings have become close to common place on the nightly news- different town, different school, different victims, same results, same shooter right off the established profile. So, who’s the shooter and what’s the profile? If you believe TV and movies, it’s this twisted super genius kid with a fully automatic super weapon he built in his basement. If you ask grandparents, they’ll say it’s that greaseball kid with the sullen expression, always rebelling against authority. If that was the case, James Dean, Fonzi and Elvis would all have been school shooters. If you ask the parents, they won’t know; 10% of them have forgotten they have a kid- he/she’s got lost between the gym, golf, face lifts, coke, weed and banging the pool boy. So, who’s the shooter? Easy question because you just walked past him, you do every day and never notice him- he’s always by himself, shy, no friends, poor social skills, the girls think he’s creepy and the jocks bully him. The shooter is a young white male from a working-class family, attending a public school, average intelligence, living at home, but probably in a strained relationship with parent(s) and his main social contact is the dark side of the internet, where he finds similar views. He has been identified in most cases as having existing serious mental health and emotional problems and has become adept at concealing his thoughts and problems and is capable of meticulously planning an attack. Nothing just happens, this type of killer went through several stages, delusion, fantasy and eventually a personality that pretty much fragmented before he killed (A) anger or brooding over a grievance, problem, hallucination, fear, (real or imagined), (B) either verbally, in writings or actions gave some indication of his problem, (C) his emotional and mental health began to deteriorate at a faster pace (“... he had worried that his thoughts might glow out of his ears so he put cotton balls in his ears, fearing that the cotton was too flammable, he tried steel wool....”) The Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris, (D) planned the act, obtained the equipment, justified his actions to himself, accepted that he would die and then calmly and methodically began shooting. At the time of the attack, he will be the calmest, most focused, and most determined person in the building, and nothing short of a police bullet or a self-inflicted gunshot is going to stop him. Gun control will have limited success because this problem begins and ends as a mental health issue and a determined attacker will find a way to defeat a mechanical or human obstacle and obtain or fashion a weapon (you can learn to make a suicide vest on the internet). The answer is in identification and treatment of potentially violent people. Risk indicators have shown that when angry, provoked, scared or frustrated, a person has three basic ways of expressing it, (1)  brooding about it in silence, (2) responding verbally,  (3) taking physical action. Never make the fatal mistake of underestimating someone’s ability to hate, or to carry a grudge.  As Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer, “… passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life…”.  Once past that initial step of putting thoughts into words, the next step of elevating to a physical attack may prove quicker. As the problem of school shootings has increased, funding for mental health has decreased. Mental Health treatment is not a glam issue, but it is the circuit breaker that falls between treatment and an act of violence. The government has money, plenty of it, it’s a question of how it’s spent. Currently, more school children are dying in classrooms than soldiers in combat in the Middle East. I’m not advocating cutting military spending, far from it, but there’s funding to address the mental health issue, too.

As important as the mental health approach is to the problem, decision makers need to talk to the frontline teachers. They’re the infantry in this fight, they know the dynamics of their school and they know these kids, they see them every day- talk to and trust the teachers. Forget the teachers’ unions, school administrators, school boards and anyone else who brings a political or a financial motivation to this fight. Understand you can’t count on all the parents, all the time, the vast majority of parents are doing a hell of a job raising their kids in a complex world, but you’ve got a few stone cold idiots who, when notified their kid is spending his class time drawing pictures of a guy with a jack o’ lantern for a head, chopping up cheerleaders with an axe, just nod their head and get back to surfing for porn. Meanwhile, junior is upstairs loading 556 ammo into 30 round magazines for the AR15 they bought him as a diversion for his emotional issues…