A very good theory on the rash of school shootings

[unclejumbo]

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...t-explanation/

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyonearound him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Gladwell then argues that Columbine changed the thresholds. The first seven of the “major” modern school-shooting incidents were “disconnected and idiosyncratic.”

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

Here’s the most ominous part of the Gladwell thesis. The “low threshold” shooters are motivated by “powerful grievances,” but as the riot spreads, the justifications are often manufactured, and the shooters more and more “normal.” Here’s Gladwell’s chilling conclusion:

In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.

[GunLawyer001]

Very plausible. People are herd animals, they do what they see others do.

[Gun]

Very plausible. People are herd animals, they do what they see others do.

This is why people will wait in long lines to ride the roller coaster.

[Walleye Hunter]

The more often it happens, the more 'normal' it becomes.

[Daycrawler]

Very plausible. People are herd animals, they do what they see others do.

I agree that's how we all learned. Good things can be repeated as well as bad. In the case of school shooters, the bad is being repeated over and over. Kids need new role models, like Mothers and Fathers.

[bravo30]

i still think if the media stops reporting them, they go away.

[JDA58]

i still think if the media stops reporting them, they go away.

I've thought this too... or hoped this would be the case

[Berncly]

I agree, I think it's media driven.
The major media turns these events into amplified never ending echoes that serve to bathe the next budding sociopath in the suggestive glow of repeating the pattern.

[raxar]

Nope, everyone just wants to point fingers and say "If you just listened to me this wouldn't have happened". Nobody will approach the subject objectively, nobody will approach the shooters like they are people.

[Tacgunner]

The shooters have made a cognitive choice to perform their actions. They decided, for whatever reasons, to do this act. They planned and performed it. Working backwards, what compelled, motivated or drove them to this decision? Why was this their choice of things to do? Why perform a "shooting" instead of some other action?

Was it peer pressure, drugs, bullying, dysfunctional family, social media, mental illness or societal pressures? I'm not buying the "herd mentality" reason. Someone, whose job it is to write "profiles", knows what makes up these people, what sets them up & sets them off. It would be handy to know what the benchmarks, or parameters, are that we all should be looking for in certain people. What are the "signs" of such an "at risk" person?

We do know that the school shootings are focused on one thing: the school, or what it contains or embodies. The target is either the facility, the students, the staff, or the whole embodiment of the "school" as an entity. All the hate, aggression and willful terror is focused on that. Question is: why, and specifically who/what at the school?

Is it simply that the whole "school" environment has become too pressurized and toxic to some people that they snap and do these shootings as a way to express their mental anguish being trapped in this environment, with no escape other than destruction?