12 ms·

Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Spread

48 points by e40 11y ago

monochromatic 11y ago
> 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. Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.
- melling 11y ago
  Well, as the population increases so does the number of disturbed: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf We are only talking about a handful of people.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Well, that's the opposite of what the article is arguing: everyone assumed LaDue was "disturbed", but struggled to find any evidence of it. 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.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    There's pretty obvious evidence that anyone who commits a mass murder is disturbed. Our society is too "stupid" to understand what that disturbance is, but that is orthogonal to the disturbance existing. All we really have in response, at the moment, is punishment, hand-wringing, and band-aids over symptoms. Clearly this is ineffectual.
    - 67726e 11y ago
      One need not be "disturbed" to carry out horrific acts of violence. Would you describe a fanatical terrorist (ISIS, Skinhead, whatever) as disturbed? Writing off anyone who decides to murder as "disturbed" is ignoring a whole swathe of folks. The US has easy access to firearms, and we glorify violence. There are many reasons why one will kill, and just saying "Oh, he's fucked in the head" is just another way of shifting focus from other problems.
      - AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
        Or a drone pilot, for that matter. Desensitisation to violence, or writing off the victims as something less than human, allows anyone to be a mass killer without being conventionally disturbed.
        Karunamon 11y ago
        That would depend on what your definition of "conventionally disturbed" is. Most modern diagnostic psychology is based upon deviations from some kind of norm (it's greatest weakness, because then you have to define the "norm", not easy to do objectively) ..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.
        pjc50 11y ago
    - monochromatic 11y ago
      Exactly. This seems like a definitional issue as much as anything--but any definition of "disturbed" that doesn't include a kid who's about to shoot up his school isn't a very good definition.
- saturdaysaint 11y ago
  Not to say that you're wrong and Gladwell is right, but you're ignoring most of his argument! The core, to me, is that a lot of these young men are just highly obsessive kids on the autism spectrum. They develop a fascination with the lore of school shootings (not hard to understand - I've read about too many of these kids myself) and are just missing a few emotional checks and balances that would stop a neurotypical person from obsessing over the methods of past shooters and planning an attack of their own. 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".
  - tremon 11y ago
    I don't think he makes the case that "many" are on the autism spectrum -- his article describes just one case. What resonated with me is the case that public violence has become so normalized that you don't need a violent nature to nurture violence yourself. 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.
    - kwhitefoot 11y ago
      > We've had the shootings in Norway, ... In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims 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.
- comrh 11y ago
  What does disturbed even mean? Mentally ill?
mc32 11y ago
This is a hard one to figure out, gladwell is also at a loss. It's not like postal worker violent outburst which seems to have been mostly an organizational issue, addressed and corrected, for the most part. 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.
savanaly 11y ago
My impression after reading it all is that there may be some merit to the riot theory of escalating school shootings, but that LaDue is an outlier that doesn't fit into that theory. 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.
- sageabilly 11y ago
  I believe it does, as the history of school shootings itself gave LaDue material to obsess over. He is participating in the riot model because his interest was piqued by all of the shootings that had already happened and he did not have the mental ability to realize that mass murder is not a socially acceptable hobby. If the first 99 shootings had never happened, then perhaps LaDue would have found a different hobby.
  - savanaly 11y ago
    Definitely, and I now realize I wasn't clear in my comment. LaDue doesn't fit smoothly into the particular series of dominoes envisioned by Gladwell. But he does fit in the much more general sense of "people who alter their actions based on what they've heard about school shootings in the past".
    - digibo 11y ago
      I think the comparison got a bit diluted, because the initial mention of a 100 threshold sounds like "pretty much anyone", while LaDue comes out more like a 50 threshold or at least something that feels like middle ground - equally (dis)interested in cold violence and empathy. 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.
DanBC 11y ago
This article describes a bunch of events where people obtain weapons, plan an attack, and carry out an attack with the intent to kill others, but end up shooting fewer than 4 people. These are not, but probably should be, counted as mass shootings. 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.
- minority-one 11y ago
  What did you expect from making schools Gun-Free Zones? 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?
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    I know many would disagree, but I don't consider rival gang behavior mass shootings. for some reason in my mind the come from a different perspective and rather than mental illness, they are more driven by turf wars and issues of "respect" or revenge. So yeah the shooting at the neighborhood block party committed by one or more gang members or the area drive-by just aren't the same kind of thing.
  - 01Michael10 11y ago
    What did you expect from making schools Gun-Free Zones? Staff, students, and visitors would not be bring guns on the grounds. 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.
peterwwillis 11y ago
School shootings are memes, plain and simple. You don't have to be a certain kind of person to disseminate a meme. You just need to want to perpetuate the meme, for whatever reason you choose. The fact that the meme is there and you identify with it is often reason enough.
rrauenza 11y ago
The author states that "School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile." ...but that seems like a weak argument since "lower profile" can be arbitrary. 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 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/ http://southernoklahoma.com/schoolshootings/ ...how much is the escalation (perception and cause) due to the 24 hours news cycle?
- tremon 11y ago
  The subject of the article surely did know about the Bath School disaster -- he mentioned Andrew Kehoe to the police officers.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> Was John LaDue’s deviance counterfeit? He told Cranbrook that he would have gone ahead with his plan had he not been stopped, and she believed him. The second of the psychologists to examine him, James Gilbertson, also felt that LaDue’s threat was real: his obsessive preparation had created a powerful momentum toward action. 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?
- agarden 11y ago
  Rock star and wide receivers don't get to anoint themselves. They can only achieve their goal if other people cooperate and give them that status. This guy did not require anyone's cooperation and his motivations were internal. Maybe he would not have followed through, but prior to discovery there wasn't much to stop him.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
    I'm honestly trying to understand your point of view, and coming up empty. 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.
tunesmith 11y ago
I sort of wish the article had gone further, it seems there is plenty of room to research and discuss other examples where negative behaviors became contagious or normalized, and were perhaps later arrested or where that segment of society "grew out of it" in some sense, and what efforts or policies were put in place to encourage that shift. 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.
agarden 11y ago
It seems to me that at this point there is a certain script for violence. It involves guns and maybe bombs, and the point is to kill as many people as possible to get as much media attention as possible. To a certain kind of person, that sounds like glory. 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.
- hga 11y ago
  Every principal's office should have a instant open (biometric and push button pattern, as well as slower methods) safe with a few easy to use carbines (short rifles) with optical sights. 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.
  - saltedshiv 11y ago
    I don't even know how to begin to search for sources about "when in the late '40's/early '50s lots of kids took a gun to school and stored it in their locker..." 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.
    - 11y ago
Animats 11y ago
The article offers a conjecture, but other than that, it's not too helpful, and focuses too much on one incident. 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 https://library.stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootings-america

48 points by e40 11y ago

> 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. Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.

melling 11y ago
Well, as the population increases so does the number of disturbed: http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf We are only talking about a handful of people.
pjc50 11y ago
Well, that's the opposite of what the article is arguing: everyone assumed LaDue was "disturbed", but struggled to find any evidence of it. 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.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  There's pretty obvious evidence that anyone who commits a mass murder is disturbed. Our society is too "stupid" to understand what that disturbance is, but that is orthogonal to the disturbance existing. All we really have in response, at the moment, is punishment, hand-wringing, and band-aids over symptoms. Clearly this is ineffectual.
  - 67726e 11y ago
    One need not be "disturbed" to carry out horrific acts of violence. Would you describe a fanatical terrorist (ISIS, Skinhead, whatever) as disturbed? Writing off anyone who decides to murder as "disturbed" is ignoring a whole swathe of folks. The US has easy access to firearms, and we glorify violence. There are many reasons why one will kill, and just saying "Oh, he's fucked in the head" is just another way of shifting focus from other problems.
    - AdeptusAquinas 11y ago
      Or a drone pilot, for that matter. Desensitisation to violence, or writing off the victims as something less than human, allows anyone to be a mass killer without being conventionally disturbed.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        That would depend on what your definition of "conventionally disturbed" is. Most modern diagnostic psychology is based upon deviations from some kind of norm (it's greatest weakness, because then you have to define the "norm", not easy to do objectively) ..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.
        pjc50 11y ago
  - monochromatic 11y ago
    Exactly. This seems like a definitional issue as much as anything--but any definition of "disturbed" that doesn't include a kid who's about to shoot up his school isn't a very good definition.
saturdaysaint 11y ago
Not to say that you're wrong and Gladwell is right, but you're ignoring most of his argument! The core, to me, is that a lot of these young men are just highly obsessive kids on the autism spectrum. They develop a fascination with the lore of school shootings (not hard to understand - I've read about too many of these kids myself) and are just missing a few emotional checks and balances that would stop a neurotypical person from obsessing over the methods of past shooters and planning an attack of their own. 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".
- tremon 11y ago
  I don't think he makes the case that "many" are on the autism spectrum -- his article describes just one case. What resonated with me is the case that public violence has become so normalized that you don't need a violent nature to nurture violence yourself. 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.
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    > We've had the shootings in Norway, ... In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims 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.
comrh 11y ago
What does disturbed even mean? Mentally ill?

mc32 11y ago

This is a hard one to figure out, gladwell is also at a loss. It's not like postal worker violent outburst which seems to have been mostly an organizational issue, addressed and corrected, for the most part. 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.

savanaly 11y ago

My impression after reading it all is that there may be some merit to the riot theory of escalating school shootings, but that LaDue is an outlier that doesn't fit into that theory. 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.

sageabilly 11y ago
I believe it does, as the history of school shootings itself gave LaDue material to obsess over. He is participating in the riot model because his interest was piqued by all of the shootings that had already happened and he did not have the mental ability to realize that mass murder is not a socially acceptable hobby. If the first 99 shootings had never happened, then perhaps LaDue would have found a different hobby.
- savanaly 11y ago
  Definitely, and I now realize I wasn't clear in my comment. LaDue doesn't fit smoothly into the particular series of dominoes envisioned by Gladwell. But he does fit in the much more general sense of "people who alter their actions based on what they've heard about school shootings in the past".
  - digibo 11y ago
    I think the comparison got a bit diluted, because the initial mention of a 100 threshold sounds like "pretty much anyone", while LaDue comes out more like a 50 threshold or at least something that feels like middle ground - equally (dis)interested in cold violence and empathy. 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.

DanBC 11y ago

This article describes a bunch of events where people obtain weapons, plan an attack, and carry out an attack with the intent to kill others, but end up shooting fewer than 4 people. These are not, but probably should be, counted as mass shootings. 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.

minority-one 11y ago
What did you expect from making schools Gun-Free Zones? 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?
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  I know many would disagree, but I don't consider rival gang behavior mass shootings. for some reason in my mind the come from a different perspective and rather than mental illness, they are more driven by turf wars and issues of "respect" or revenge. So yeah the shooting at the neighborhood block party committed by one or more gang members or the area drive-by just aren't the same kind of thing.
- 01Michael10 11y ago
  What did you expect from making schools Gun-Free Zones? Staff, students, and visitors would not be bring guns on the grounds. 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.

peterwwillis 11y ago

School shootings are memes, plain and simple. You don't have to be a certain kind of person to disseminate a meme. You just need to want to perpetuate the meme, for whatever reason you choose. The fact that the meme is there and you identify with it is often reason enough.

rrauenza 11y ago

The author states that "School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile." ...but that seems like a weak argument since "lower profile" can be arbitrary. 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 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/ http://southernoklahoma.com/schoolshootings/ ...how much is the escalation (perception and cause) due to the 24 hours news cycle?

tremon 11y ago
The subject of the article surely did know about the Bath School disaster -- he mentioned Andrew Kehoe to the police officers.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

> Was John LaDue’s deviance counterfeit? He told Cranbrook that he would have gone ahead with his plan had he not been stopped, and she believed him. The second of the psychologists to examine him, James Gilbertson, also felt that LaDue’s threat was real: his obsessive preparation had created a powerful momentum toward action. 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?

agarden 11y ago
Rock star and wide receivers don't get to anoint themselves. They can only achieve their goal if other people cooperate and give them that status. This guy did not require anyone's cooperation and his motivations were internal. Maybe he would not have followed through, but prior to discovery there wasn't much to stop him.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
  I'm honestly trying to understand your point of view, and coming up empty. 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.

tunesmith 11y ago

I sort of wish the article had gone further, it seems there is plenty of room to research and discuss other examples where negative behaviors became contagious or normalized, and were perhaps later arrested or where that segment of society "grew out of it" in some sense, and what efforts or policies were put in place to encourage that shift. 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.

agarden 11y ago

It seems to me that at this point there is a certain script for violence. It involves guns and maybe bombs, and the point is to kill as many people as possible to get as much media attention as possible. To a certain kind of person, that sounds like glory. 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.

hga 11y ago
Every principal's office should have a instant open (biometric and push button pattern, as well as slower methods) safe with a few easy to use carbines (short rifles) with optical sights. 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.
- saltedshiv 11y ago
  I don't even know how to begin to search for sources about "when in the late '40's/early '50s lots of kids took a gun to school and stored it in their locker..." 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.
  - 11y ago

Animats 11y ago

The article offers a conjecture, but other than that, it's not too helpful, and focuses too much on one incident. 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 https://library.stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootings-america