The Complexities of School Shootings in America

The first known school shooting in the United was the Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764 near Greencastle, Pennsylvania. Four American Indians went into a schoolhouse and shot and killed the schoolmaster, following, they killed nine or ten children (reports vary on this number), and only one of the children in the school survived (“List of School Shootings in the United States”). After the school shooting in 1764, there have been hundreds more like it in the United States. The problem that society and analysts are having today is with identifying the cause of school shootings. Generally, analysts and various activist groups argue for one cause of these massacres of students, which is where finding a way to prevent the acts becomes a hard equation to solve. School shootings are much more complex than any one cause of violent entertainment, gun laws, or mental illness, rather it is a combination of different reasons that these events happen.

Various causes have been tossed around between different studies about school shootings, some of which can be excused as mere blaming out of discomfort towards new sources of media entertainment. Other single-cause explanations tend to be arguments made by activist groups who merely take the example of a school shooting and explain how the event proves that something needs to be solved about their particular complaint. One example of this is how after the Columbine school shooting in 1999, some people blamed violent video games as the cause of the shooting. They also blamed Marilyn Manson in particular for his ‘dangerous’ music style—rock music. In the article “'Bowling For Columbine' Still Has Some Frightening Lessons For Our Country” by Erin Fuchs, she explains that Michael Moore, the producer of the documentary Bowling for Columbine argued that “[i]f the public is going to blame rock music or video games for the Columbine massacre,…it might as well blame bowling – the last thing teen gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did before they shot up their school” (Fuchs). Even though violent video games and rock music are much more widely accepted by the American culture in the years after the Columbine shooting, Marilyn Manson is still arguable someone that some people associate with school shootings. In Simon Lindgren’s article “YouTube Gunmen? Mapping Participatory Media Discourse on School Shooting Videos,” he shows through his analysis of Google search trends that  “[s]earch activity relating to gun control and Marilyn Manson increases when school shootings take place, and declines within around five or six days” (Lindgren 126). Therefore, even though rock music like the kind that Marilyn Manson is known for is not so blatantly said to be a cause of school shootings, the people who see a relation of the two are still in significant number according to Google search trends.

Gun ownership laws are arguably one of the largest blames for school shootings by people today. On March 13, 1996 in the city of Dunblane, Scotland, a fourty-three year old man named Thomas Hamilton killed sixteen children between the ages of five and six, their teacher, and injured two other teachers before committing suicide. In the news article by CNN, “Dunblane: How UK school massacre led to tighter gun control” by Peter Wilkinson it says that “[w]ithin a year and a half of the Dunblane massacre, UK lawmakers had passed a ban on the private ownership of all handguns in mainland Britain” and that there was a reprieve, “resulting in the surrender of thousands of firearms and rounds of ammunition” (Wilkinson). Since the ban on handguns, there have been no other school shootings in the areas where the gun law took effect.

The United States, unlike England, does not have laws restricting all citizens from owning guns. Currently, the U.S. has the leading amount of gun ownership at approximately 270,000,000 guns owned by civilians (Rogers). According to the blogpost “Inconvenient Truth: Violent Crime Rate in the Gun-Free UK Is 800% of the Heavily Armed US” by Steven Goddard, Goddard shows through FBI and UK government websites that in 2012, there were 1.2 million violent crimes in the US versus the UK that had 1.94 million violent crimes in the same year, pointing out that despite the fact that the UK is gun-free, they are more violent than the leading gun owning country in the world (Goddard). Criminologist Peter Squires in the CNN article about the Dunblane shooting says: “[a]ny weapon can be misused in a crime. Gun control will never be a complete solution to events like the mass shooting we saw in Connecticut…” (Wilkinson). Since the UK is gun-free and had more violent crime than the U.S. in 2012, it goes to show that gun laws will not fix all our problems and therefore is not the only cause or solution to preventing future school shootings in America.

In the case of Elliot Rodger, who shot and killed six, and injured thirteen people because women at his college—University of California Santa Barbara—would not date or have sex with him, different advocate groups used  the shooting to benefit their own arguments. In Mark Manson’s article “How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings,” he points out that after the Santa Barbara shooting, gun control advocates argued for stricter gun laws, mental health officials argued for better health care, feminists argued for more awareness for violence against women, and social justice advocates used it to talk against white male entitlement despite the fact that Elliot Rodger was mixed race (Manson). Manson’s article further explains how the blames that people place on the cause of school shootings leads to arguments and gets the country no closer to a decline in these shooting incidents, that while everyone is arguing for their cause, a potential shooter might be out there “researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world. And no one is paying attention to him” (Manson). Instead of listening and paying attention to the potential shooters, people are too busy trying to fix other problems in the world, ones they believe in the most. Meanwhile, the amount of school shootings in America is increasing drastically every year.

According to the FBI, mass shootings—killing four or more people—happen on average every two weeks in the US (Manson). Manson says that these frequent mass shootings are not heard about very often because most are easily explainable. School shootings are four percent of all mass shootings according to Manson’s article, and they dominate news media for a number of reasons that Manson points out. The reasons that school shootings are publicized more on the media than any other mass shooting is because they happen in public locations that are generally believed to be safe, the victims in the shootings are targeted and killed at random, the victims are innocent bystanders and often enough, children, the killers often leave behind a lot of material about themselves for the media to share to the public, and the perpetrator and victims are typically upper-middle class, white and privileged (Manson). The appeal of news media to school shootings is because the events and the people involved are very complex and can catch the attention of the public for quite some amount of time.

According to Manson’s article, an FBI study on school shooters had results that showed that school shootings are not a result of some ‘crazy’ person suddenly ‘snapping’ or ‘going off the deep end’ (Manson). In several different studies and articles authors write that these school shooters take the time to plan the attack on the school for months and sometimes years on end before they actually attack the school. Not only do these shooters plan their attack for a long time, but they also “almost always ‘leak’ information about the attack beforehand, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes in incredibly obvious ways” (Manson). Some ways in which these shooters ‘leak’ the information about their future attack on their schools through casual talking with friends and also some of their actions. Antonio Preti’s article “School Shooting as a Culturally Enforced Way of Expressing Suicidal Hostile Intentions,” he states that “[m]ore than 50 percent of school shooting events were preceded by some action that might have warned of the potential for impending violence” (Preti 546). In the cases of Eric Harris—one of the Columbine shooters—and Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter, “[b]oth put their intentions and their angry rants up on the web for everyone to see” (Manson). Eric Harris left various journals and videos for the media to publicize. Elliot Rodger posted various YouTube videos about his hatred of couples and blond girls who rejected him and his plans to punish those who went to his college. In Elliot Rodger’s last video, the one just a few hours before the shooting, it begins with Elliot stating: “[t]his is my last video. It all has come to this” (News Now, “Elliot Rodgers Retribution – The Last Video”). Elliot continues by saying that the ‘day of retribution’ is tomorrow—the day that he did in fact kill six people, and injure thirteen before killing himself. He described his plans in the video stating: “[o]n the day of retribution, I am going to enter the hottest sorority of UCSB and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up blonde slut I see inside there” (News Now, “Elliot Rodgers Retribution – The Last Video”).  He continued the video with talks of killing guys that had lived a better life than him and then a plan to kill everyone he sees on the streets of the town after he finished the first two parts of his plan. His use of YouTube to publicize his hatred towards the people of his college—blond women in particular—was his own way of leaking his plans out to the public before he attacked, a chance to stop the act, and perhaps the fact that no one did stop it before it happened was another sense of achievement for him.

Eric Harris and Elliot Rodger were by far not the only school shooters who left behind information about their plans or publicized and/or leaked their plans before they attacked their schools. The Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho emailed NBC his confession video along with 20 or so photographs of himself, most of which he was holding a variety of weapons. Adam Lanza, who killed approximately 26 students and teachers was a part of various forums online and many of his posts hinted to his reasons and planning of the Newtown shooting. In Jesse Singal’s article “Why Kids Shoot Up High Schools, Why They Only Do So Outside of Big Cities, and How to Stop Them” the author uses the book Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings by Katherine Newman as a source to back up his arguments about school shootings. In arguing that school shootings are very rarely a surprise, he quotes Newman in saying: “‘What was striking to me was that very often the kids don’t need the police to tell them who did this [after a shooting]. Some of them don’t come to school that day, because they were afraid of something coming’” (Newman qtd. in Singal). Kids often pick up on the rumors and overhear shooters talk about their plans casually with friends so they can generally put two and two together after an attack occurs. The reason however, that students do not speak up which is “partly because the threats are ‘coming from someone who’s been saying crazy things for years. Because it’s the last act, not the first act, they’ve been trying to get attention for a long time,’ and therefore it’s hard to know how seriously to take their talk of violence” (Newman qtd. in Singal). Shooters, therefore, generally leak information on their plans to attack a school, and since the leaking of this information is continuous, people tend to not believe them until it is too late, until the student starts to open fire on his classmates.

News media is generally relied on to bring information to the public on major events that have happened around the world, however, in the case of school shootings, it can also be used as a weapon and a way to motivate potential criminals. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, used news media as a platform to cause fear. Mark Manson, in his article mentioned previously on how people miss the point of school shootings says that “[Eric] would not kill jocks or preps, he would kill indiscriminately, because that’s what caused the most fear and got the most attention” (Manson). Media was Eric’s main weapon in his act, and his attempts for attention worked, as there was 24 hour coverage of the shooting for weeks on end. In reference to Eric Harris’s Journal, Manson says “[i]t’s not about the guns. It’s about the television. The films. The fame. The revolution” (Manson). Eric Harris left behind various journals and videos about his planning and why he wanted to attack his school, and for him, that was just another way to lure media in and cause fear to the public.

Other shooters left similar evidence behind of their plans to attack their school as well. Left behind material, according to Antonio Preti, “indicate[s] that school-shooting perpetrators desire that other people understand their reasons” (Preti 547). In the cases of Elliot Rodger and Virginia Tech Shooter, Cho, the videos they left behind were more of a way to justify their actions rather than a pure want to cause fear like Eric Harris had. Elliot Rodger, in his last YouTube video before the shooting tried to justify his actions by saying: “You [the girls that denied him sex at his college] denied me a happy life and in turn I will deny all of you life” and “It’s only fair” (News Now, “Elliot Rodgers Retribution – The Last Video”).  Cho left behind a similar confession video, which he emailed to NBC. In his video, Cho said: “you had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today but you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours” (Woodytyler’s Channel, “Virginia Tech Shooting Confession Video). The actual targeted ‘you’ that Cho referred to in his video was not specified like Elliot’s confession video was, but both shooters still used videos as a means of leaving material behind to justify their actions of mass murder.

As news media is becoming more widely watched and turned to for updates on what is happening in the world, copycat killers are becoming more of an issue. According to Antonio Preti in his article “School Shooting as a Culturally Enforced Way of Expressing Suicidal Hostile Attentions,” he states: “Copycat crimes were reported to follow violent episodes that received wide coverage in the media” (Preti 546). In the part of his article about copycat crimes, Preti talks about the influence of media on potential criminals and says that “[c]oncerns have been raised on the chance that sensational publicity about a violent crime or suicide may cause an increase in similar violent behavior” (Preti 546). Copycat crimes can arguably be seen clearly influencing different school shootings in particular and it can be argued that not only do other crimes influence school shootings but they also influence the amount of school shootings and the fact that they have become increasingly more common in suburban schools.

Eric Harris, again, one of the Columbine school shooters, was a copycat criminal himself. In Mark Manson’s article he explains how Harris was obsessed with the bombings of the Oklahoma City federal buildings which killed 168 people and injured another 600. “Eric wanted to top that[,]” Manson explains in his article. The argued copycat shooting, where the inspiration was a bombing of federal buildings that killed over a hundred people, was the source of copycats as well. The Columbine shooting was televised for weeks on end, and “[i]n the four weeks immediately after the Columbine incident,…up to 350 students were arrested in the United States on charges of having raised some kind of threat against a school” (Preti 546). The evidence that the Columbine shooting was the cause of this increase in student threats against school is obvious. The Columbine shooting can also be argued to influence school shooters to this day as well. In Simon Lindgren’s article on YouTube gunmen and school shooting videos, he explains through analyzed data of the comments posted on the original Columbine security video posted on YouTube in 2006, that after a school shooting, there is an increase in comments on the Columbine video (Lindgren 134). The fact that when a school shooting occurs people generally still think of Columbine is a type of copycat killing mindset, not just for the shooter perhaps who attacked his school, but society makes the connection as well.

As years have passed since the Columbine shooting, which at one time was the worst school shooting in the United States, the amount of school shootings happening per year has increased drastically in the last five years. Since news media is not simply going to stop covering school shooting events on television, Antonio Preti argues in his article that to avoid copycat killings “[t]he perpetrator should never be glorified, but neither should he or she be demonized, to avoid glorification by rebellious counter cultures” (Preti 548-549). The constant way that the Columbine school shooting was televised and the two shooters lives were made public can be argued as a way in which news media in 1999 both demonized and unintentionally glorified the two shooters, causing 350 students to make similar threats in just the four weeks after the shooting, as Preti pointed out in his article.

More recently, there has been a shooting that was much worse than the Columbine Shooting. In December of 2012, Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and shot and killed 26 students and teachers. There has been a lot of criticism on how the new media covered the shooting, and it can be argued that Adam Lanza was both made famous per se for it, and he was also demonized by reports where they stated over and over how he killed twenty children. He was demonized with the endless interviews of surviving teachers and parents of students who died and how angry they were at Adam. Lanza was unintentionally glorified with the way that the shooting was covered by news media for so long and how over-eager they were to update the public on new information. Reporters reportedly invaded the Newtown community, knocking on door after door to interview people of the community. In the article “TV Coverage of Sandy Hook Shootings Draws Heavy Criticism: Reporting Considered Invasive, Exploitative and Sensationalized” by Jamshid Ghazi Askar, Rodger Elbert, a film critic,  “proposed that the ongoing onslaught of TV coverage would perpetuate a vicious cycle by helping to trigger future shootings” (Askar). Listing of school shootings in the United States on Wikipedia—for lack of better chronological sourcing—shows that in 2012 there were approximately thirteen school shootings, the last of the year being the Sandy Hook shooting. According to the article “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook” on everytown.org, there have been 95 school shooting in America since Sandy Hook. In 2013 there were 36 shootings and in 2014 there have been 59, the last one occurring on December 5^th, 2014 in Claremore Oklahoma (“School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook”).

In his article “The Sandy Hook Slaughter and CopyCat Killers in a Media Celebrity Society: Analyses and Plans for Action,” Douglas Kellner says:

[t]here is no question but that the media nurture fantasies and influence behavior, sometimes sick and vile ones, and to achieve mental health in our culture requires that we are able to critically analyze and dissect media culture and not let it gain power over us (Kellner).

Kellner then agrees with what Rodger Ebert had said, that the way media outlets portray school shootings causes more harm than good. Especially for a student who is already thinking of harming people at his school, when a school shooting is on the news, the way that the event is talked about for such a long time and the shooter is so thoroughly made a concern, it influences the ‘fantasies’ that the student might have had. Like Eric Harris’s influence of the Oklahoma federal building bombings, many potential shooters are influenced by the information given to them by the news, the was that criminals are portrayed on the news appeals to them, it shows that they will finally get to say whatever they have been trying to say all the while. Ebert quotes himself from something that he said to NBC news in 1999 after the Columbine shooting,     “‘The message is clear to other disturbed kids: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. Kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory’” (Ebert qtd. in Askar ). As of right now, that is exactly what news media is doing, after a shooting incident reporters go on and on about the reasons the shooter attacked his school, who he was, the friends he had, every single dl that might have gone on in the shooter’s life and head is publicized. The way that media portrays school shooters attracts other people who have debated the same act, gives them the motivation to carry the act out, a previous shooter to compete with, to beat like Eric Harris had aimed to do.

            Often enough, school shooters are soon identified to have had a mental illness of some sort after a shooting occurs. Many of the articles previously mentioned have some partial conclusion about the United States needing better mental health care. In Douglas Kellner’s article he says that “[t]o address these problems [of school shootings], we need better mental health facilities and monitoring of troubled individuals, and also of institutions” (Kellner). Other analysts of school shootings come to a similar conclusion, but they also mention that better mental health care will not fix the issue entirely, just as stricter gun laws would also not solve the problem on its own. As Kellner says, “[m]ental illness is a complex phenomenon that has a variety of dimensions and expressions” (Kellner). Mental illness is more than just some issue that some people are born with, a lot of the time people form mental illnesses based of how they are treated by others and/or their surroundings. Since mental illness is not always genetic, it makes for better treatment of the mentally ill not the only suitable solution to stopping the increase of school shootings, and also a solution that cannot stand alone in the fight against school shootings.             

As just stated, better mental health care is not a solution to school shootings that can stand alone. However, often enough people get caught up in the fear of school shootings and name just one cause,  and this “ media panic mode of representation obscure[s] the multitude of social and cultural factors that clearly contribute to the events taking place” (Lindgren 123). The fear that society has for these shootings get in the way of fully realizing that it’s not just gun laws or mental illness or news media that plays a part in school shootings, but it is also something very cultural, and perhaps that is why in America we have so many more school shootings than any other country, it might be because we have an issue with a social or cultural norm in the country.

Kellner, in his article about copycat killers, the effect of media, and the cultural norm of masculinity, he says:

“the cycle of mass shootings throughout 2012 and the past decades suggest that young men are constructing media spectacles to achieve celebrity through attempting to overcome their alienation and failures by turning to weapons and gun culture, and carrying out mass murders” (Kellner).

Kellner explains how the views on masculinity that Americans hold have a major effect on school shooters and why they choose to attack their schools in such a manner. From birth, males in America are generally raised in very strict manners; they must like cars, never play with dolls, and never cry. Boys are raised to be tough in most households, and girls are raised to be more girls. Despite progression in gender equality, as a nation the people of America still raise their children in a manner that is many ways parallel to how each gender has been raised for hundreds of years, the males to be tough and the females to be more gentle and caring. This method of raising children is backfiring on America. Because masculinity has become such a major part of the way boys are taught to act and think, it continues to be a factor throughout their school years and onward. The high need to be masculine can be specifically seen in sports, and Kellner points out that “[i]n many high school shootings of the 1990s, jocks tormented young teen boys who took revenge in asserting a hyperviolent masculinity and went on shooting rampages” (Kellner). The need to be masculine has caused teens to tease other boys for not being ‘manly’ enough, and as a result of enough of this teasing, these boys turn to attacking their schools in order to reassert themselves, to prove to the people who teased them that they are tougher than them.

            Elliot Rodger, in his last video before he shot and killed six people and injured thirteen others, he said some phrased which allude to the exact need to prove he is masculine that Kellner pointed to in his article. Though Elliot was not in high school and not necessarily at the time being bullied by jocks, he hated how the ‘popular guys’ had a better life than him and got the girlfriends and sex that he had yearned for ‘since puberty’ he says in his video. Among the phrases he used to assert his masculinity through stating his plans of attack he says: “[y]ou will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true Alpha male”, and he also calls himself the “supreme gentleman” (News Now, “Elliot Rodgers Retribution – The Last Video”). Elliot seemed to feel that if he proved he was masculine through violence that he might show the girls who would not date him that they had missed out, that through his actions they would suddenly realize that he was the one they wanted to be with.

            Kellner argues that “dealing with problems of school and societal violence will require reconstruction of male identities and critique of masculinist socialization and identities” (Kellner). He claims that in order to put a full stop to these males turning to attacking schools as showing how tough they are, that America must rebuild how they raise their children and not place so much pressure for boys to be so tough. He says “[i]t is essential…that we address the issue of a crises of masculinity and social alienation, and not reflexively resort to using simplistic jargon – “he’s just crazy” – to explain away the issue” (Kellner). That in order to fix this increasing issue that society cannot label a shooter as mentally unstable and be all right with that explanation, that people have to be willing to admit fault and also see how fully complex the issue of school shootings really is.

The cause of school shootings is extremely complex and “…we need to admit to both the complexity and the urgency of the problem of school shootings, and enact an array of intelligent and informed responses that will produce a more peaceful and humane society” (Kellner). As of right now, “[e]very school shooting incident comes in the same dreary package: an angry, politically-charged rant, shrink-wrapped around a core of mental illness and neglect[,]” and in order for this issue to be more straightforwardly solved, Americans need to step up and realize what is going on (Manson). As Mark Manson mentioned in his article, there could be a potential school shooter sitting in his room now, mapping up his plan to attack while calling for help and attention throughout his plan, but no one is listening to him. According to the article “A Qualitative Investigation of Averted School Shooting Rampages,” by Jeff Daniels and other authors, “students are more likely to seek assistance when they feel connected to the faculty and peers in their school” (Daniels et al. 19). When a student feels more connected with the faculty of their school they are proven to be more likely to tell a teacher if they overhear a plan to attack the school. Daniels’ article shows four different school shootings that were averted due to students telling faculty of the plans they overheard (Daniels et al. 9-10). If the students and faculty get along, the amount of these shooting rampages would decline. As previously stated, shooters often leak information about their planned attack on purpose, but for multiple reasons, the students who hear these signs do not tell faculty about it. Most of the time students to not tell teachers about the plans they overheard because the shooter has been saying those kinds of things for a long time, or they are just afraid that the teacher will not take them seriously, so they ignore what the potential shooter had said and the cries for help are forgotten.

School shootings are much more complex than violent video games, rock music, gun laws, or mental illness on their own. In the combination of all the sources mentioned above, it is obvious that there are multiple contributing factors to why school shootings happen as well as why these events are becoming more and more frequent. The first step to fixing the issue of these mass murderers in schools is for society as a whole to admit that there are more causes and faults to these events than just the one law or media outlet that they disagree with. People must realize the complexities of school shootings and also realize that it is not just the tangible that is at fault for these events, but that in order to put a stop to the shootings that the nation might have to reevaluate what they deem as normal, what they consider important, and how the next generations are to be raised.

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