Let’s start with a statistic: “Over the course of the last 25 years, sixteen teenage boys have committed a mass murder at an American elementary or high school.”* Additionally, many other teenage males were planning to kill but were discovered and prevented. So: Why so many (a) young (b) men desiring to (c) kill in (d) schools?
A. Focus on the young males commonality. It could be primarily biological: teenage males and teenage females differ in their biologically driven behaviors, so the same environment will stimulate different behaviors. Or it could be primarily environmental: We do well with teenage females but don’t do those things with teenage males, or we do bad things to teenage males that we don’t do to teenage females. Or some combination of all of the above. I don’t have an hypothesis here.
B. Focus on the specific place and targets: students and teachers in schools.** These killers are not targeting people at the mall or a music concert or others places where lots of potential targets are concentrated. So: What is special to the killers about schools?
Stats also show that motives for killing (outside of war) most often are money, hatred of specific individuals, or hatred based on religious or political ideology. Money is not the issue in the school shootings, so let’s focus on hatred.
Think of spousal killing and the statistic that most domestic murders are one spouse killing the other. The relationship is close — hours and hours, days and days together constantly — but it has becomes toxic: they come to dislike and then to despise and then to hate each other. Then one kills the other.
School is a toxic place for many students. Being there is slow poison over hours and days and weeks and months — and they come to hate the place and the individuals in it. As in the toxic marriage, they want to kill the other.
So Hypothesis 1: Unlike shopping malls and concert halls, schools are toxic places for these students, and the same dislike/despise/hate dynamic of toxic marriages is operative in them.
C. Yet there is an impersonal element in the school shootings, unlike the toxic marriages, so it’s more complicated. The murdered students and teachers very often have no personal connection to the shooter. The shooter’s not only targeting a particular teacher he despises or a few other students he hates. He also kills people whose names he does not know and has never met.
That suggest that the school is functioning as a symbolic place in the shooter’s mind. And this makes the school shooters similar to political and religious ideologues who kill. When the ideologues, say, blow up synagogues, churches, mosques, banks, or parliaments, their targets are to them generic tokens of hated abstractions, not particular individuals and places.
So Hypothesis 2: To school shooters, School stands in his mind as a hated symbol in the same way Jew stands in the mind of an anti-Semite or Banker stands in the mind of an anti-capitalist or Politician stands in the mind of an anarchist, and the destruction of the individuals involved is generic and impersonal.
D. I’m also struck by how many school shooters do not expect to survive, do not seem to care if they survive, or plan not to survive the event. So there’s a powerful self-destructive phenomenon at work too, something nihilistic. Yet rather than simply subsiding into insignificant lives or quietly committing suicide, they plan and execute a negative act they know will get much attention. They want to destroy themselves, and they want to cause as much destruction to others as they can when doing so.
So Hypothesis 3: The school shooters are near-but not-quite total nihilists who feel empty except for despair and hate and a need for their lives to have at least one act of significance to define it.
Notes:
* Source: Professor Bradley Thompson.
** A sub-question to investigate later: How many occurred at private schools and how many at government schools?
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To your second footnote, there is a data set here which you can download which includes a “school type” field that should answer your question.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/local/school-shootings-database/
Uh, oh, I feel a rant coming on…
Another commonality most mass shooters including kids who kill share is that they were on psychotropics (psychiatric drugs). Critical psychiatrist Peter Breggin, the man who virtually singlehandedly stopped the lobotomy movement including on children, explores this aspect in ‘Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime’ (St. Martin’s Press. 2008).
https://www.amazon.com/Medication-Madness-Psychiatric-Violence-Suicide/dp/031256550X
Of course, as millions of children are on them, it would be but one factor.
But it is the tip of the iceberg. In ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America’ (Crown Publishing. New York. 2010) Pulitzer Prize nominee medical journalist Robert Whitaker reports that in 1987 16,200 US children under age 18 were receiving SSI (Supplemental Security Income) payments due to disablement by a serious mental illness: or 5.5 percent of children on disability rolls. By the end of 2007 the number had climbed to 561,569 children – a THIRTY-FIVE-FOLD increase in two decades. “Mental illness” Whitaker writes, “is now the leading cause of disability in children, with the mentally ill group comprising 50 percent of the total number of children on the SSI rolls in 2007.” As he, Breggin, Burstow, Healy and others make clear it is the drugs themselves inducing the impairment. All are neurotoxic (nerve poisons) that “work” by partial deactivation of brain and neural function. “The impairment” Burstow writes, “IS the therapeutic effect.”
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing-ebook/dp/B0036S4EGE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
From implementation of the recommendations of the Carnagie sponsored 1910 Flexner Report to the US Durham-Humphrey Amendment of 1951 which made doctors gatekeepers of all habit-forming drugs, obliging the pharmaceutical industry to buy the medical profession which they wasted no time doing marking their birth as “Big Pharma,” on into our time the medical-pharmaceutical cartel rides the crest of an increasingly totalitarianized industry under an increasingly totalitarian state known to its state-educated citizenry as “freedom.” Like the Church in days of yore it owes its success, power and authority to State coercion: regulatory, funding, credentialing, police and carceral. Now it appears to be consolidating a comprehensive medical-pharmaceutical dictatorship. Initiatives before state legislatures and the WHO to “leave no child behind” stand to ensure every child receives a psychiatric diagnosis to determine their “need” for drugs.
Much has been written about the veneer of specious, circular, self-referencing “research” propping up the edifice. Here is a former editor including editor-in-chief of probably the world’s most prestigious medical journal:
“The problems I’ve discussed [bad science and corruption by special interests] are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of ‘The New England Journal of Medicine.'”
~ Marcia Angell, MD
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption
Despite the expected resistance Angell was one of a number of doctors who favorably reviewed Whitaker’s ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’^:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/
In my books pols and apparatchiks have no more business arbitrating on medical-science than on religion. Our experts are as good or better than theirs. Curious that the left have no become true corporate believers and that the religious right is defending free scientific inquiry and bodily autonomy.
School was hell for me. Literally. Bullying. Anti-semitism. Bullying. Loneliness. Jealousy. Constant misery from grades 1-10. But maybe because I’m a girl, instead of going home and planning to blow others to bits (and my dad did own hunting guns), I would go home and wish I were dead.
So is it now being a toxic male to be angry at being made miserable by bullies?
I have another theory about why school shootings.
In the 70s women went to work outside the home en masse and increasingly left children to daycare. Desegregation was enforced. Divorce rates skyrocketed. Vietnam. Watergate. Carter Presidency and recession. Iran Hostage Crisis. American society went through at least 10 major crises during the decade alone.
But my guess that the largest two contributing factors to school shootings were women leaving children to be latch key kids, or day care. and the skyrocketing divorce rates. In short, Boys need good supervision to be brought up well and leaving boys unsupervised, without positive role models to chanel their social behavior, is a recipe for disaster. Or, how about people stay married and one parent stay home and watch the kids or work part time and be there for the kids in the afternoon? And if people need TANF in order to be able to be a good parent instead of putting the kid in daycare, then tough buggies. A child’s mind is a terrible thing to waste.