Chapter 1
This is not a simple topic. Many people seek to reduce school shootings to a bite-sized explanatory chunk, but the phenomenon defies easy analysis. There is no one cause of school shootings, there is no one intervention that will prevent school shootings, and there is no one profile of a school shooter. Apart from stating the obvious—that school shooters are people who use guns to shoot other people in educational settings—it is hard to make a statement that is true of all school shooters. Despite the frequent use of sound bites and simplifications, school shooters cannot be reduced to a stereotype.
The most common error in discussing school shooters is the assumption that they are a homogeneous group of people—that they can be lumped together and discussed as if they were essentially the same. This assumption simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There have been targeted attacks against specific individuals, random attacks against strangers, and attacks that included targeted as well as random victims. There have been narcissistic shooters who sought fame and a sadistic thrill, and there have been desperate, depressed youths lashing out against the world. Some shooters sought vengeance for real or perceived wrongs, and some believed their attacks were justified by political ideology or paranoid delusions.
The perpetrators presented in this book range from eleven-year-old Andrew Golden, who attacked his middle school, to sixty-two-year-old Biswanath Halder, who stormed a building at his former university; from isolated, barely functioning Adam Lanza to Harvard graduate and mother of four, Professor Amy Bishop; from sixteen-year-old, thrill-seeking Brenda Spencer to thirty-year-old, bitterly disappointed and ruthless Laurie Dann; from grandiose and sadistic Eric Harris to his depressed and desperately lonely partner in crime, Dylan Klebold.
All of these people committed school shootings, but their personalities, family dynamics, life histories, and motivations were dramatically diverse. Despite these variations, there are two things that all these attacks had in common. First, they occurred in schools or school-related settings. Second, the perpetrators intended to kill multiple people, though they did not always accomplish this.
There are many widespread misconceptions about school shooters. It is often said that they are middle class, white males, and loners. Rampages have been blamed on media violence, peer harassment, psychiatric medications, poor parenting, and easy gun access. Even when there is some truth to these ideas, it is never the whole truth. Yes, some shooters were loners and some were bullied, but so are millions of students who never go on rampages. Yes, some shooters had dysfunctional parents, but so do many other youngsters. Simplistic statements about the identity of rampage shooters and the causes of their attacks fail to capture the complicated reality of the phenomenon. It is necessary to explore the lives of each shooter to see the complexity of factors that contributed to their violence.
Attempting to make sense of the lives of forty-eight school shooters without any guiding principles or structure, however, is overwhelming. There are so many differences among them that it might seem impossible to draw meaningful conclusions. Interestingly, dividing them into various groupings allows remarkable patterns to emerge.
THREE POPULATIONS OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS
There is no reason to assume that the motivations of teenage shooters are the same as those who commit rampage attacks in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, or sixties. Nor should it be assumed that the same factors cause some people to attack their own schools and others to attack schools with which they have no connection. These distinctions are useful in dividing shooters into three populations.
One population consists of secondary school shooters. They were either secondary school students at the time of their rampage or they carried out their attack at a secondary school they had attended within the last three years. Another population, college shooters, committed their attacks at colleges or universities. Most of these perpetrators were current or recent undergraduate or graduate students. Three, however, were university employees. Their attacks could be viewed as workplace violence rather than school shootings; because they occurred on campuses, however, they are relevant to violence prevention in higher education. I call the last group aberrant adult shooters. These perpetrators were at least nineteen years old and had no current or recent connection, as either students or employees, to the schools they attacked.
THREE PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS
In addition to dividing the sample into three populations, I also discuss them in terms of the typology I established in my last book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. The typology is based on psychological characteristics, categorizing the perpetrators as psychopathic, psychotic, or traumatized. Though the three types are explained in detail in the following chapters, a brief statement about each is in order.
Psychopathic shooters were profoundly narcissistic, arrogant, and entitled; they lacked empathy and met their needs at others’ expense. In contrast, psychotic shooters suffered from schizophrenia or a related disorder. They were out of touch with reality to varying degrees, experiencing hallucinations or delusions. Unlike the psychopathic and psychotic shooters, who generally came from well-functioning, intact families, traumatized shooters endured chronic abuse as children. They grew up in violent, severely dysfunctional homes.
These three categories do not, by themselves, explain school shootings, because the vast majority of people in these categories do not commit rampage attacks. By recognizing the differences between these types, however, we can begin to understand the perpetrators and why they might be particularly vulnerable to stresses such as bullying, romantic rejections, and academic failures.
For instance, although most students handle rejections and failures without becoming killers, a student with a psychopathic personality may react with fury to anything that seems like a put-down. Alternatively, if someone has paranoid delusions, harassment or rejection will be perceived through the lens of his psychosis, exaggerating the magnitude of the situation. Finally, a child traumatized by abuse may experience bullying, school failure, or discipline as the final victimization that spurs him or her into violence.
Beyond the typology, there were other influences that shaped the behavior of school shooters. These factors will be discussed throughout the book as the lives of the shooters are presented and compared. All the school shooters presented in this book had a history of trauma, psychopathic personalities, or symptoms of a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. When life’s stresses became overwhelming, the result was rampage.