A CHILLING THESIS ON SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

I read an outstanding but disturbing article the other day (link to article at the end).  It framed the “school shooting phenomenon” differently than I had ever seen it framed.  And you know what?  It makes sense!  PROFOUND sense. I dug in an read additional articles that debated this analysis; I found their arguments lacking. The serious and dismaying downside to this “making sense” is that there is little to be done, it has already started… And since it occurs over time it is impossible to predict the “end.”

Let me explain.

We hear arguments about too many guns, guns in the wrong hands, moral decay, mental illness, drugs that treat mental illness, bad parenting, bad schools, lazy law enforcement, blah, blah, blah.  All are tiny parts of this to a degree, but removing or increasing any one of these things or all of them WILL. NOT. CHANGE. ANYTHING.

We have been looking at each shooter as though he is an individual and acting alone. What was going on with HIM?  Was HE mentally ill?  Was HE deranged?  Did we miss the signals HE was sending?  We have to pull back and look at them in a collective, as a singular event spread out over time. Much like the creep of a glacier, if put into time lapse photography over 10,000 years, it would look like an ice flow careening down a mountain.  This is a single event just spread out over time. The writer of the article describes the school shooter phenomenon as a “Slow-Motion-Riot.”  From Columbine, as has been identified by many as the trigger event for the modern phenomenon, forward, each shooter, save a scant few, has been a rioter in the SAME riot.

Yes “riot” is an odd way to describe this – let me explain.  When studying this as a singular event, this event’s epicenter was Columbine.  Everything changes after Columbine. It became a performance, a mission, a manifesto…none prior had been as captivating to those affected by it. Instead of a “riot”, this event could be described as a “movement” or a “revolution” but the riot analogy better explains why each successive shooting happens. A movement or revolution tends to have some reason behind it, even if weak. A riot doesn’t need one…and this “slow-motion-riot doesn’t really have one. That adds to the scary part of it.  There is no motive – just every reducing thresholds.

Many of you don’t remember the Rodney King Trial.  Without rehashing the whole thing it sparked riots in Los Angeles, California.  That City, or parts of it, were literally taken OVER by rioters – the riots lasted weeks; news footage of it made it look like a war zone.  Freeways in and out of the city were closed.

During the riots widespread looting, assault, arson, and murder occurred and estimates of property damage went over $1 billion. LAPD was totally overwhelmed. Then California Governor Pete Wilson called in the National Guard; George Bush deployed the 1^st Marine Division.  It was bad – Ferguson was a birthday party in comparison.   I recall on-the-street interviews and watching video of stores being EMPTIED because no one was there to defend the store or its merchandise.  

Some of the interviews were of “normal people” who decided to join in the looting; they actually talked to the camera because they had ceased being an individual – there was safety in numbers; they were one of many.  It was a weeks-long-free-for-all. It is safe to say a large portion of the people who looted would NEVER have shop-lifted on their lunch break or thrown a rock through a plate glass window on a Tuesday because they liked the leather jacket in the window display.  If they had been prone to that behavior already then the crime rate of LA on a normal day would have been magnitudes higher than it was. These normal people though became “looters” in this case because the guy next to him (or her) was looting, it was less of a crime, or less bad… However you frame that – the fact that others were doing it made it easier for the next guy to do!

The “slow motion riot” article said, “Social processes [like riots] are driven by our thresholds—which he [Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter] 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 [Eric Harris & Dylan Keelbold had a threshold of zero – neither had “cause” to do what they did; psychopaths can start a riot just to do it]. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first.

We all remember being a kid and saying, “I’ll do it if you do it.” Even as an innocent child we had a threshold that could be fairly easily reached and we would be willing to do things that were at the least unwise and at worst wrong. Someone doing it 1^st is more powerful than a “double-dog-dare” to a young person.

The article goes on.

The “I’ll do it if you do it kid” (or adult) has a threshold of one; he was the 1^st shooter after Columbine. Next in is the person with the threshold of two, the 2^nd shooter after Columbine. 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…[the shooter in Florida or Texas or…]” [inserts mine].  And pretty soon so many have done it before him it is a very low threshold and the next shooter hardly needs a reason at all.  At this point they don’t even need a “why.”  There is no “motive.”

The most ominous part of this thesis of Gladwell’s is “low threshold” shooters are motivated by angst and deep anger but as the riot spreads, the justifications are often manufactured, they are self-created and the shooters more and more “normal.”

A real-time, normal-speed riot generally runs out of energy, things to burn and loot and gets descended upon finally by law enforcement to put an end to it.  How do you end this sort of “riot”?  It is moving so slowly, like that glacier that it is imperceptible.  In the short term, law makers have discussed ideas like “firearms restraining orders” to be levied against individuals KNOWN to have tendencies and the ones who ARE sending screaming messages. Most of the shooters aren’t supposed to have any of the weapons they use anyway.  Another “law” isn’t going to change things. A firearms restraining order might have stopped Parkland – impossible to speculate; but Parkland should NEVER have happened. Local law enforcement is culpable, the school is culpable, the FBI is culpable – the gun didn’t drop the ball on that one.

What is true is that the lion’s share of shooters since Columbine DO in fact have a history, a disturbing one.  Most states have laws already requiring weapons in the house to be locked up if minors also live there and most have a criminal code as well as a civil code assigning liability if an owner allows his or her gun to fall into the wrong hands and it is used in a crime.  The first lawsuit against the Santa Fe, Texas shooter’s father has already been filed; more to follow and rightly so.  That man should NEVER have allowed his minor child access to his guns.  EVER.  Now that we know that there was some disturbing stuff about the kid, even MORE so.

A cultural return to morality might quell the riot but not for at least a generation or even the one more after that.  I don’t see that happening anyway, so not much point pondering the possibility. We aren’t allowed to impose morality on people anymore or stigmatize bad behavior.  We have told these kids they have a right to self-expression regardless of how abnormal it is. Hell, even implying that there is a “normal” is taboo and “passing judgement.”  Well, some of these boys are expressing themselves alright!  What did you expect would happen?

I DON’T believe that “guns” are the issue.  Guns are a vehicle of “expression.”  Each successive shooting gets easier and easier and the threshold lower.  I honestly think the only thing that is going to affect this, not stop it but affect it, in any immediate way is to SHOOT BACK and make sure that every kid knows (to misquote a misquote) that there may be a gun behind every text book or desk inside a school and that no one will hesitate to take him out. Yep, harden the target and it might become less of one.  No wonderful, ah-ah! solutions though…

Article URL: www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-do-mass-shootings-happen-best-explanation