Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Spread
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The Stanford libraries have a mass shooting tracker.[1] It's not complete; it comes from what they could find with social media. They have an interactive map. Interestingly, some likely areas show few mass shootings. Manhattan has zero. New York City as a whole has two. (One was family related, another was someone shooting their supervisor, so they were ordinary motive-driven murders, not random targets) New York City is doing something right.
Looking at incidents on the map, it's striking how few of the motive-less killings happened in major cities. It's more of a suburban problem.
[1] https://library.stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootings-america
I think the way to stop the trend is to break the script. The key to it is that everyone cowers before the power of the attacker. For a brief moment, he can feel like a god. Make these attackers look incompetent, weak, and ineffective and the allure of the thing dies. If we could somehow change things so that the next time someone tries this no one cowers, but the perpetrator is instead killed or incapacitated or in some way humiliated by those he intended to victimize, the script breaks.
To take one of many examples, yet another autistic shooter who seems to fit at least some of the patterns in this, the administrators and teachers at Sandy Hook were entirely willing to die to protect their charges (per the official story). Which did neither of those groups any good.
Somehow, though, this sort of thing is "unthinkable". Just as school shootings were unthinkable in my father's days, when in the late '40s/early '50s lots of kids took a gun to school and stored it in their locker, to save an extra trip for before or after school hunting. Only a few years younger than my father Supreme Court Justice Scalia related in the Heller oral arguments that he would carry his .22 target rifle on the NYC subways to and from the range.
Various things have changed since then, and in this area nothing good.
I'm not questioning your own validity, I'd just love to know how pervasive this was and where it was happening.
I was able to find references about Justice Scalia in the Heller arguments.
I have no idea of how pervasive it was outside of Joplin (MO) High School in that period, but given that Joplin is somewhat urban, with a population of 39,000 then, I'd expect it to be very widespread when you add more rural districts.
Anecdotally, growing up in Northern Wisconsin in the 1980's, storing guns in lockers would not have acceptable, but this was a non-issue because many students drove themselves to school and would keep their hunting guns in their car rather than bringing them inside. It's possible this it was officially forbidden to have a gun in the car on school property, but in the absence of other circumstances wouldn't have been any cause for concern.
You mean like those comprising Western Europe, and, say, include Canada to pile it on? The former has had more of them in recent decades than the US. Here's the detailed accounting I did for Western Europe 2+ years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970408 and with more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5070201
Wikipedia seems to have rearranged their previous lists that made this a lot more clear, but see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres_by_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#Notable_school...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers#School...
He wasn't interested in the glory. He has a mild case of autism, displaying what is called a "restricted range of interests" causing him to obsess deeply over various aspects of his chosen field, individual acts of terrorism.
On some level, he understood that what he was planning was wrong, and self-sabotaged his efforts at a subconscious level. I get the impression that if left alone, he may have talked himself out of doing it "this year," setting subsequent dates that will then get put off in the same manner.
What seemed to drive him was his very obsession, carrying it out would have robbed him of the ability to keep obsessing. Redirected, his obsession would make for a great career in law enforcement, once he gets his condition under control.
It's the riot theory the article starts with. If you can deter the people who get the riot started, you can possibly deter the people like LaDue who follow along just because it is now a thing that people do.
There have been 294 mass shootings this year - where a mass shooting is 4 people shot in one incident.
> But compare him to a post-Columbine shooter like Darion Aguilar, the nineteen-year-old who last year killed two people in a skate shop in a Maryland shopping mall before killing himself.
> Aaron Ybarra walked onto the campus of Seattle Pacific University and shot three people, one fatally.
294 mass shootings is fucking horrific. And the number of events where someone planned to kill other people but somehow didn't is much larger.
Did you expect criminals to obey the sign?
How many school shootings do you think we would have per year if schools were full of security guards?
How many bank shootings have we had this year? Do banks employ lots of security guards?
How ridiculous is it that we protect cash so well but we don't think kids should be protected?
Did you expect criminals to obey the sign? No, the sign it not meant for criminals.
How many school shootings do you think we would have per year if schools were full of security guards? A lot of schools do have security guards. Most schools DON'T have the funds to employ small armies.
How many bank shootings have we had this year? Do banks employ lots of security guards? I didn't look it up but know there are a lot of armed robberies in the US. I suspect there is not a lot of shootings because they are there to rob the place not kill people.
How ridiculous is it that we protect cash so well but we don't think kids should be protected? You have a point but there are a lot more bank robberies then school shootings.
You've touched on one of the problems with that argument, but the rest are even easier to address. Money is more easily corralled (it doesn't need to have daily recess). When banks are targeted, the goal is to leave with a bunch of cash; when children are targeted, the goal is to cause as much shock as possible. Banks have a much longer history of robberies (a la wild west and earlier), that stimulated them to have security guards. Those guards are a cost that hasn't historically been necessary for schools.
The shootings that disturb us so -- school shootings and the like -- do not disturb because there are four or more people killed, but because those people had nothing to do with anything. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, falling victim to someone who just wanted to kill as many people as possible. There have probably not been 294 four of those this year.
It's kind of like, say you had a murder down the street. You'd be shocked either way, but if a wife murdered a husband for money, you're maybe not as concerned about your community as you would if it were an unsolved unconnected murder rape. Yeah the murder for money shows up as a murder, but it's one you could calmly write out the conversation about crime.
that's why I hate that 294 number people touting lately. Really it's kind of BS.
In other words, there are some crimes you could maybe use laws to kind of get out in front of, but some are just gonna happen, only the means might change a bit. The game is the game always.
NOBODY on the gun-control side of things care much about the VAST majority of gun deaths; namely, gang-violence or drug-related shootings. By far, these are the largest component of murders by gun and yet the thing that really motivates Sally Housewife to get politically involved is a shooting involving "good people."
MOST gun deaths are suicides. MOST gun murders are committed with handguns. Please explain to me how favorite talking-points like "we need to restrict assault weapons" or "we need to restrict magazine capacity" or "we need to expand background checks" do anything to tackle the real meat of the problem. HINT: they don't.
The problem of gun violence is simply a sub-type of the problem of VIOLENCE. If we could figure out how to completely eliminate violence, we'd have done it by now. My suspicion is that we're asking for the police/government to do something that is impossible: keep all the bad people away from me. if only it were so simple.
And it's not just me. There have been many many campaigns to reduce gang violence that have wanted to ban guns.
"NOBODY" is wrong.
And here is the issue: you can't ban guns. Even if you do, it doesn't affect gun violence AT ALL. I can point to examples like Washington, DC, NYC, and Chicago as examples. All cities have had very strict gun control laws (and even knife control laws) and yet they haven't eliminated gun violence. In some cases, it actually increased.
So this is a sociological problem that doesn't have a simple answer. Making "guns" the boogeyman is just another example of avoiding the problem by politicians. That's a real issue when it comes to restricting a fundamental right to bear arms.
And yes, I said fundamental. The Constitution was designed to recognize and protect rights, not grant them. Those rights are natural rights given to men by virtue of their existence in the world, not their presence in any particular jurisdiction. It's a distinction that I wish more people were aware of.
I find it hard to believe that anyone actually holds that opinion. Am I misunderstanding you?
Withholding my own opinion, I think this is a very common sentiment in the US. Among other things, this is used to justify the lack of action on inmate-on-inmate violence in prisons. More generally, you commonly find people cheering the violent deaths of anyone deemed a terrorist by the government. I don't think this is restricted to the US.
Separately, I don't think 'agarden' is intends to make any normative statement about the correct attitude. Rather, he's pointing out that "innocent" victims tend to receive greater sympathy. If there is a bank robbery in which 4 hostages are killed, there will be greater outcry than a bank robbery in which the 4 perpetrators are killed.
This doesn't mean necessarily that people don't care if the criminals are killed, but does mean that they care less than if non-criminals are killed. Do you doubt this?
I don't doubt it, but it's still hard for me to hear that other people in the same country just aren't bothered by thousands of preventable[1] deaths.
[1] (Not a gun control argument.)
>>The shootings that disturb us so -- school shootings and the like -- do not disturb because there are four or more people killed, but because those people had nothing to do with anything.
Which I actually agree with. People have always (and probably always will) kill each other for particular reasons: money, personal hatred, revenge, whatever. But a targeted killing of a particular person or people is far different than indiscriminately killing whatever random people happen to be in some random place at a random time. The former is something you might see coming and perhaps avoid. The latter is unpredictable, unavoidable and therefore more frightening.
1) Let's say the article was about people who fell to their death because there was no fence at the top of the Grand Canyon. Let's further suppose that this was a pattern and it has been happening with increasing frequency of late, but it is still rare because the random gusts of wind that push people over the edge are rare, and further that the people falling had no idea that it was a risk posed by touring the Grand Canyon. And then you posted that in fact 294 people fell to their deaths every year but that number includes all the people who were out climbing mountains for sport. That number might be horrific, but the mountain climbers understood the risk and chose to take it. The tourists at the Grand Canyon thought that what they were doing was safe.
2) The solution for the one problem likely has nothing to do with the solution for the other. If many of those 294 deaths are because of gang violence or criminal activity, magically removing all guns might reduce that number, but it probably wouldn't reduce it much. Someone who is out just to shoot up as many people as possible may well not try to kill anyone if he can't get a hold of a gun. But someone who needs Guido dead so that he can't rat him out, he is just going to move to the next best weapon for the job. A crossbow, or a knife, or a poison dart, or a baseball bat, or a rock, or something.
Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
We are only talking about a handful of people.
The article is arguing that school shootings have become "normalised" or even "traditional"; there's a template to follow and kids are adopting that role, assembling a collection of grievances and weapons. It's a sort of self-radicalisation, like the Unabomber.
All we really have in response, at the moment, is punishment, hand-wringing, and band-aids over symptoms. Clearly this is ineffectual.
..but it doesn't change the fact that most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent. Given that definition, yes, I could see how "disturbed" or "mentally ill" fits. Having the mindset that committing mass murder is okay or justifiable is an aberrant thought pattern. Full stop, end of story.
Address that pattern, and you address the root of the problem.
I find the idea that "desensitiation to violence" is at all meaningful to be spurious at best. More tractable types believe the media narrative about, say, Columbine being caused by the shooters being avid fans of the FPS game Doom, but study after study can't find a link between games and real life violence.
There's also proof by inversion - the USA is famously inverse of the rest of the world, puritanical when it comes to sex, okay with violence. Therefore, you'd expect if the desensitization idea held any water, that the rest of the civilized world has a bigger problem than the USA with sexually-based crimes. I haven't seen evidence to that effect.
> most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent.
That's how lynching used to happen; entire communities would turn out to murder some people simply because they were black.
US has been in more wars as the aggressor than any other country I'd guess, over the past couple of generations. Perhaps that mass death and resulting inpunity for people at the top contributes to these teenagers' lack of appreciation of the horror in their actions?
I agree 'conventionally disturbed' is a silly term. Hard to find one better; maybe, 'absent of any identifiable mental disorder that would likely explain their murderous actions'?
> glorify violence
> shifting focus from other problems
Blaming guns, violent video games, violent movies, etc. is just another example of shifting focus from the real problem.
Then there's the "threshold effect", which suggests that each shooter may require less emotional disturbance/aggression than the last - for just the right obsessive mind missing a few internal checks and balances, planning and executing an attack seems more and more perversely "normal".
Obsession and lack of empathy are still required though, for now. As such, ASD people are probably more at risk from the "normalization" of deviant behaviour than others. But there are many ways to de-humanize other people, and ASD is just one of them (radicalization is another one).
To me, that's the real risk of today's media landscape. I don't mean just the Internet, even mainstream media does not back away from publishing the "manifestos" of these deviants. As such, the behaviour becomes more normalized and it's worrying that the threshold lowers with each publication.
This isn't just an American thing even. We've had the shootings in Norway, stabbing of an army sergeant in England, hostage taking at the Dutch public news channel. In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims, which disturbs me. That's also why I won't provide links or names for the above, I don't want to feel complicit.
Only outside Norway. Here the focus was on NOT treating him as someone special and on providing for the victims and the future. I see Breivik's name far more often in English language media than in Norwegian.
This is also not tied to guns, here Ladue was making explosives from everyday items, and guns were more contributor than central.
It's a strange cultural thing, not really greater culture but subculture with perhaps greater culture associations. I can't even say it's like something else, because there isn't something like this phenomenon, except maybe Isis, but even there there is active leadership leding impressionable youngsters into a violent morass. Here it's guys in prison who provide the model.
Gladwell is attempting to draw a parallel between the "hundredth rioter" who would only riot if everyone and their mother was already doing so, and LaDue, who is a mild mannered and non-malevolent hobbyist in mass murder.
But an autist who is obsessed with the concept of riots in general and goes about rioting with a clinical and scientific detachment devoid of emotion fits nowhere in the social theory of rioting which Gladwell is trying to bring in.
LaDue is probably much less "normal" than the 99 threshold comparison near the end suggests, but I believe the idea, that this "threshold expansion" may continue and get worse, was well enough communicated throughout the article.
It sucks that the subject is so difficult to talk about (in that it can politically go off the rails so quickly). There's not going to be one sufficient cause, that if addressed, will eliminate these outcomes. But if there's a contributory cause, that if addressed, will reduce this kind of violence... that's a lot of lives saved. And the bit about so many kids being influenced by Harris (to varying degrees) is pretty convincing.
I wonder if refusing to name the shooters is counter-productive. Makes them more forbidden and romantic and attractive to learn about.
I went searching for the bombing I'd heard of in the 1800's, and found this -- 1927, so might not be the one I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
But also accidentally found this which lists quite a few, (although some are just 1 on 1 violence): http://southernoklahoma.com/schoolshootings/
...how much is the escalation (perception and cause) due to the 24 hours news cycle?
It's strange that we believe the teenage boy would do what he claims when it's violence.
Would they so readily believe him if he told them he was going to be a rock star? Or an NFL wide receiver?
Maybe he would not have followed through, but prior to discovery there wasn't much to stop him.
Those misguided (or not) fools who think they can become rock stars often ignore the lack of cooperation. Even a few of the successful ones get where they are by ignoring the lack of anointment. It does not seem to be the requirement you make it out of... we live in a world of 7 billion people, after all, and the statistical noise alone is enough to give someone a fanbase of hundreds of thousands if they put in the effort and have a little luck.
But, most teenage dumbasses that claim they'll be a rock star spend a little too much focus on drugs, and not nearly enough on the effort part.
We don't believe them (or, at least, I don't believe them) not because it's impossible, but because they do not put in the work to back up their daydream fantasies.
Why would the same not be true of a wannabe shooter?
You've super-imposed your beliefs with the thinnest veneer of logic, but it isn't very convincing. Many people want to believe that these kids can be identified prior to massacres, because it would be comforting to live in such a world. But there is no way to do that. Jumping to the conclusion that his teenage obsession's paraphernalia indicates that he would have done this is silly. There's no way to know if there is ever any correlation between the two. Playing with fireworks (and even explosives) as a teenager is hardly unusual... I suspect this describes hundreds of thousands or even millions of them. If that were the case, then it does not correlate at all to future school shootings.
> Jumping to the conclusion that his teenage obsession's
> paraphernalia indicates that he would have done this is
> silly. There's no way to know if there is ever any
> correlation between the two.
It is. I fully agree. And this guy had put in the work.
He hadn't put much work in at all. He was the garage band dufus who spent plenty of time drawing up styles for his tour bus, but none practicing the guitar.