Discussion Post: A Few Scattered Thoughts on School Shootings
School shootings are among the most appalling news stories imaginable. There are many reasons for this. Most obviously, they target young people. The younger the victim, the more life you are robbing from them.
Second, school is a place you go to for your future. You go to school because you want and expect a happy, successful, and long life. This is why thinking about the potential of these victims is so gut-wrenching.
Third, when you send your kids to school, you are trusting that they will be kept safe. Sending your kids anywhere without your supervision can be hard for parents, as it requires a tremendous amount of trust. This is especially the case for the parents of little ones. We don’t want our children’s first encounter with life outside the home to feel unsafe.
I’m sure I’m missing some key components here, but the point is that there are many reasons why school shootings can feel impossible to process. This may be why some people immediately reject stories like this and invent conspiracy theories around them. It is a sort of defense mechanism. For example, a friend of a friend thinks that this story was conjured up simply to promote gun control laws. This is an egregious dismissal and minimization of suffering, and yet I wish it were something I could believe. It would certainly make this all easier to process, and less painful to grapple with.
Perhaps even more difficult to understand is the shooter’s motives. Yes, they must be sick; yes, they must be rageful; yes, they must have been hurt in some way by the world. But why kill kids a decade younger than you? It would be easier to wrap my head around him targeting people who have bullied or hurt him in the past, but these kids were completely innocent. How can anyone be capable of this?
This is something that is difficult to study firsthand, since the sample size of school shooters is small and, mostly, deceased. So, I am left to speculate. No doubt, the availability of guns in America has something to do with mass shootings. As many of us have heard by now, there are more guns than there are people in the US. Pair this with how easy it is for bad people to buy guns: the very day the Uvalde shooter could buy a gun – on his 18th birthday – he did. This should not be able to happen. Someone along the way should have realized that giving this kid a gun was a bad idea. The gun purchasing process should include investigating such suspicions.
With all that said, gun availability certainly plays a role, but it is not the direct cause of school shootings. We could be swimming in guns, but someone still has to be able to point a gun at a group of people and fire – no easy psychological feat. Some have opined that the normalization and glorification of violence in America plays a role. Perhaps. But data scientists have yet to find a strong correlation between, say, violent video games and violent behavior (that I have seen – correct me if I am wrong here). It could be that violent video games provide an outlet for sickos to live out their fantasies virtually, which is a good thing. So, I’m open to the idea that this is part of the problem, but it is certainly not all of the problem.
The problem could simply be that since the Columbine shooting, and the subsequent sensationalization of it, shooting up a school just comes to mind for people depressed, angry, and deranged enough. There have been enough school shootings since then for it to be considered a pernicious and malignant meme within our culture. This is partly evidenced by the fact that mass shootings tend to cluster – that is, mass shootings are more likely to happen right after other major mass shootings have been covered in the news. So, social contagion likely plays a role.
School shootings also provide the gunners with instant fame, they scare the shit out of everyone, and the pain is felt nationwide – the perfect act of terrorism. For someone who feels hurt by the world, there is perhaps no better way to hurt it back than to murder its next generation.
It could be that, since America is so diverse racially, socioeconomically, religiously, politically, etc., we simply have more opportunities for in-group-out-group conflict. I am not sure this came into play for the Uvalde shooting, as the shooter seemed to be targeting his own community, but it could play a role in why violence is more normalized in America than in other countries.
Forgive the lack of data in this post, but there just isn’t enough out there to answer these questions in a convincing way. This is meant to be a discussion post; I want to hear your thoughts. Let me know if you have come across any convincing arguments that I have not mentioned here in the comments below. If we are going to prevent such events in the future, we need to understand why they happen in the first place.
Tbh I don't buy your premise that guns aren't "the direct cause" of school shootings. If you could run an experiment where you randomly assigned societies to having either lots of guns or very few guns, I think it's safe to say there'd be more shootings where there are more guns. That's how we typically think of causality in science.
I think what you're really asking is what motivates violence. The U.S. isn't super special in that regard. Other countries are pluralistic and have similar social conflicts, and America isn't the only place where troubled young men crave notoriety. It's more like the U.S. just sees to it people have increasingly sophisticated means to act on their violent motives.
I regularly visit 4 chan's /pol and reddit, and after a while, school shootings kinda makes sense.. the amount of hatred, of reification, the violence, against jews, nazis, antifa, trumptards, qultists, BLM members, black people, transexuals, political correctness transgressers, white supremacists, RINO s, pedophiles, women, Muslims, atheists... Is staggering.
We allow ourselves to hate on each other, to say the unspeakable, casually.
Not sure it explains anything, but after spending a long time lurking in these very active, very public forums, shootings just don't feel that unthinkable, and shooters sound sadly familiar.