The School Shootings Report, written by Freydis
Synopsis
This is a research report about school shootings
and it covers a time period from around 1997 to the present,
focusing on shooting incidents, particularly deadly ones,
carried out on school grounds both in the United States and
around the world. Of course, school violence is a continually
occurring problem in various degrees throughout the world but
shootings are consistently reported on precisely because they
are unusual and extreme events. Violence, particularly gun
violence, is almost always picked up by the mass media and
reported upon and thus school shooting incidents serve as a
useful indicator for research purposes of the more dangerous
forms of campus violence. These extreme incidents raise many
questions about society, culture and the individual immersed
within it all. What cultural factors do these incidents have in
common? What common characteristics in personal backgrounds do
the school shooters share? What motivates them to act out,
physically injuring and even killing people around them?
The
intent behind this research report is to discover the consistent
elements within these seemingly disparate incidents of school
violence by comparing and contrasting the people, places and
events within them. In that regard the accuracy of the reporting
for school shootings, as it is for most any other contentious
and emotionally charged event, is both unreliable and
inconsistent. However, through the construction of a composite
consisting of multiple news sources it is possible to get the
key facts pinned down to a reasonable degree of accuracy. I have
not been able to capture every single incident that fits the
main criteria but I have made an effort to collect as many as
possible within the limits of the reporting that reaches the
world through the Internet and before the event is collectively
forgotten, because with the exception of Columbine incident,
most all of these school shootings drop out of the range of
public awareness as soon as the reporting stops. So, reaching
rational and objective conclusions concerning the causes and
solutions to school shootings is especially difficult without a
substantive chronology of the key people and events related to
school shootings, hence this report you are reading now.
Introduction
School shootings are
not a simple issue with a single solution. This
violence is rooted in psychological imbalances
within the students themselves, poor parenting
and a decay in significance of traditional
institutions along with the guilt forces they
rely on for effectiveness - to name a just a few.
Every psychologist, every news anchor or opinion
columnists, and every politician has an idea of
what must be done. Yet few of these ideas
have any element of common sense and even fewer
offer any strategic solutions. In a nation nearly
devoid of critical thought viable
solutions manifest as banning trench coats,
backpacks, black clothing and expelling students
for nail clipper weapons (Pensacola,
Florida June 1999) or jailing 7th
graders that write Halloween essays with violent
overtones (Ponder, Texas October 1999). In this
reactionary environment panic, paranoia and
irrational thought pour down like monsoon season.
Much of these
reactionary plans are quickly implemented because
legal issues within public schools have always
been fraught with uncertainty, indecision and a
liberal dose of authoritarianism. Locker
searches, clothing codes, and exorcising
everything questionable or objectionable pretty
much defines the legal standards and acceptable
limits on school powers of authority and
supported by Supreme Court decisions. But what
may seem surprising is that despite the already
authoritarian atmosphere in public schools, the
cameras and the security guards, shootings and
violent actions continue.
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The U.S.
Department of Education reports that
during 1997, nearly 6,300 students were
expelled from American schools for
carrying firearms. Fifty-eight percent of
the expulsions were for handguns and 17%
for shotguns. As evidenced in many of the
recent reports about school violence,
many students have chosen to express
their anger in destructive ways. Renate
Caine, former educational psychology
professor at California State University
at San Bernardino, states that when
students feel threatened, their brains
shift into primitive, instinctive states
for defending themselves (Easterbrook,
1999).
The
way some schools have responded to the
threats for greater violence has been
tighter security. A few of the violence
prevention measures include spiked
fences, motorized gates, bulletproof
metal-covered doors, metal detectors, and
security guards who search student desks
and lockers. Some complain that this only
makes prisons out of the schools. Other
schools have hired more counselors and
violence prevention coordinators.ą
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The Parents
Actually the
statistics show that these events are becoming
less frequent but more high profile. Gangs
beating up other kids for trendy shoes or lunch
money just doesnt carry the same headline
grabbing material as a multiple shooting massacre.
But whatever the statistics say public schools
are very violent places, much in the same way
that prisons are violent and dangerous places
despite the omnipresence of authority.
Intimidation, extortion, sexual harassment,
assaults, drugs, and guns are just the tip of the
iceberg for unapproved extracurricular activities
that happen on campus every day across the
country. This is not unusual, even the teachers
get implicated in it. Parents must be totally
oblivious of this because every time this hits
the news they act like it was totally unknown to
them before! Are they just covering their glaring
inadequacies with ignorance or are they really
that tuned-out? These must be the same parents
that are unaware of their cute kid building pipe
bombs in the garage or using the backyard as a
firing range.
Part of the problem
arises from the fallacy that since kids do these
things, it must be inherently less harmful, less
serious, its just play. But now
that deadly force is involved, whoa its
a different story. I guess assault and robbery is
ok every now and then but a shooting isnt,
or perhaps its just because the news media
has picked up on it in a thinly veiled effort to
extenuate a gun control agenda? The last one
seems the most likely because gang violence using
guns, knives and clubs is so common in urban
areas that it doesnt even illicit news
coverage, but it is certainly no less deadly.
Besides prescription
drugs no preventative effort is being made to
help students with psychological and emotional
needs before they blow up into crisis and the
teens see no alternative but violence to solve
their accumulating internal and external problems.
Unless you include metal detectors and ID cards
as preventative solution, and if thats the
case you obviously havent learned anything
on the issue yet. The United States has no public
social services available to middle class
families and only limited support for the poor.
Parents rely increasingly on the public schools
as educator, doctor and caregiver. Paradoxically
school funding and training are woefully
inadequate to deal with these additional roles,
hell they have enough problems just trying to
teach! Declining funds per student has also
forced many schools to integrate challenged
kids i.e. the mentally retarded and even the
autistic in with regular classes compounding the
tasks of a traditional teacher but saving dollars
for the school district. The school nurse is not
a psychologist; likewise few parents can afford
to have their child psychologically evaluated,
even if they have the foresight to identify
problems early on. Consequently, to say that
Ritalin and other psychotropic medications are
over-prescribed would be a serious understatement.
Psychotropica
Parents are a big
problem in this issue; some dont care what
their kids do and the rest are just oblivious.
Parents are all too often just self-centered
babies that never grew up themselves. They dont
want to discipline the brats or even appear as
the bad-guy by saying NO or denying
them toys or food or not doing homework for them.
Maybe it shouldnt be too surprising that
these 1960s losers turn to drugs as the
panacea for every childhood problem. The kids
depressed, theyre too excited, theyre
not paying attention, theyre not following
teachers instructions, they dont look right
or act right, easy just dope em up! And
then were supposed to act surprised when
they start shooting up the schools. Every school
shooting has had one or more suspects mentally
imbalanced due to psychotropic medications at the
time of the shooting. The Jonesboro kids were on
Ritalin, Kip Kinkel was fried too, and Eric
Harris had Luvox (a powerful drug often
prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder) in
his brain, according to the autopsy. Harris,
after lying on his Marine Corps application (wanted
to fight in Kosovo) was rejected April 15 when
the Marine recruiter interviewed his family and
found out about the prescription drugs.
This was a significant blow to his self-image and
probably did more than anything else to push him
over the edge and into a shooting rampage shortly
thereafter.
Between 1990 and
1995, use of methylphenidate more than doubled,
according to a 1996 study at Johns Hopkins
University. By mid-1995, it found, nearly 3
percent of American children and youths, or about
2.5 million, were taking it. And that number
appears to have kept rising, so that by now, it
may have hit 3.75 million, according to a rough
estimate by Dr. Lawrence Diller, author of "Running
on Ritalin" (Bantam, 1998).
"I think they
give out more psychotropic medication than a
psych hospital did when I did psych," she
said. "Not just Ritalin but heavy-duty
psychiatric medications."
From NYT Jan. 28, 1999
"We do know,
for example, that the 13-year-old in Jonesboro
was being treated. Apparently they were saying he
had been sexually abused as a child. They were
saying he was now a sexual abuser. He had a
hyperactivity type label put on him as well -- or
'attention deficit disorder.' So we had several
different things working with him. There is no
chance under the sun, moon, or stars that this
kid was not on drugs," described Clarke.
Many of these kids
have been on prescription medications from the
day they first enter school and even earlier,
literally their entire lives. Not only that but
the schools and doctors alter and increases the
drugs as they get older and more tolerant
switching from Ritalin to Prozac to Luvox etc.
Incidentally Prozac is not approved by the FDA
for pediatric use but evidently that hasn't
stopped any prescriptions. The use of these drugs
is a relatively recent event, especially on the
widespread almost universal scale that has been
reached. The increase in suburban and rural
school violence is directly related to the
increase in psychotropic drug prescriptions to
students in the public schools over the past 10
years. And tragically as long as the news media
and many analysts focus on the side effects and
accessories like guns or Goth clothing
nothing will be done about it. The use of these
dangerous chemicals will increase as will school
shootings. No one really knows what long term
effects these drugs will have on brain chemistry
and future adult behavior. The kids going
through school now are the first generation fried
on State administered mind altering chemicals and
as they reach adolescence and the emotional and
physical difficulties associated with it,
unanticipated and unpleasant reactions are
inevitable. Many things have been used as safe
and effective but after several years they find
out the long term costs of such chemicals;
dioxins, DDT, asbestos the list is endless. And
if that wasnt bad enough the behavioral
symptoms these drugs are supposed to cure are so
vague that nearly any kid can qualify, its
largely up to parental approval. Lazy parents
have a troublesome kid (and what kid isnt
at times?), the school recommends this wonder
drug, the parents say why not and
little Johnny gets his fix from the school nurse
every day until he graduates. Any chemical that
alters behavior will have have after-effects that
will magnify mental imbalances - even after the
prescription is discontinued. These reactions are
difficult to predict but the fluctuations from
extreme emotional peaks to troughs can be
magnified by sudden and significant personal
events like the Marine's rejection of Harris.
These extreme points are when violent outbreaks
are most likely to occur.
Too many people who
should no better fall into the trap of believing
oh its the media, violent culture, TV and
video games and guns that drive these perfectly
sane, normal happy kids to do bad things.
Thats total bullshit, uh I mean specious
reasoning because many more children play ultra-violent
video games or watch R rated movies and even use
guns but they dont shoot up schools
or kill their parents. These factors certainly
may contribute to violence but they are not sole
causes. A genuine cause is the fact they are so
fried and parentally unguided from day one that
they dont know what the hell theyre
doing and its not even theyre fault because
the people who should be looking out for them are
lazy and want a quick easy out so they just dope
'em up and then wonder what went wrong later..
A great deal has
been written about all of these [school shooting]
cases. There have, however, been no indications
that all of these children watched the same TV
programs or listened to the same music. Nor has
it been established that they all used illegal
drugs, suffered from alcohol abuse or had common
difficulties with their families or peers. They
did not share identical home lives, dress alike
or participate in similar extracurricular
activities. But all of the above were labeled as
suffering from a mental illness and were being
treated with psychotropic drugs that for years
have been known to cause serious adverse effects
when given to children.
Insight
Magazine June 28, 1999.
Students are in a
crucible 24/7, under stress academically to get
good grades and enormous social pressures,
especially the ones that are ostracized or
unpopular. Top that off with the usual litany of
biological stresses then mix in a cornucopia of
drugs to their brain and what do you get? Maybe
now we're beginning to see the long-term
consequences of a young life hooked up to a black
rainbow of behavior altering drugs.
Evaluations
But weve shed
enough tears for little Johnny, turns out hes
actually one sick case. Any psychologist will
tell you that about the only sure sign of a
future serial killer / psychotic is when they
torture animals. Many of these cases do exactly
that; anyone that tortures animals is about the
lowest form of life I can think of, and
from what Ive found on the biographies of
these school shooters that seems a pretty
accurate description. If they hadnt killed
a few classmates they would be on death row in 10
or 20 years anyway.
Little Johnny was
not a nice kid despite what his parents may say
of him; and this is clearly borne out by
classmate testimonials, psychological evaluations
and court proceedings.
Kinkel:
"Megan
Conklin, a junior who took the same school bus
with Kinkel, said after the shooting, "He
said on the bus that he was mad and he was going
to do something stupid. He's a mean kid. He'd
said some horrible things to me before."
Several students said Kinkel had been upset over
teasing from older students, and that he had a
temper and a troubled past. The police said that
the boy had once been questioned by officers in a
neighboring county for throwing rocks at cars
from a freeway overpass."
Not to mention that he was caught with a stolen
pistol in his locker or that he bragged about
torturing animals.
Edinboro event:
Lucas and Mills [his
friends] said Wurst had a troubled home life.
They said he had recently argued with his parents
over his poor grades.
From the trial of
the Pearl High School shooting:
"In
his closing arguments, Assistant District
Attorney Tim Jones described Woodham as "mean"
and "hateful." CNN
The investigator
also read portions of a manuscript, ostensibly
written by the Woodham youth and labeled a
manifesto by prosecutors, that described the
gruesome torture of his dog, Sparkle, by Woodham
and an accomplice. Eklund said he believed that
the accomplice was Boyette. Last April, according
to the document, the two teen-agers repeatedly
beat the dog with a club, wrapped it in garbage
bags, torched it with a lighter and flammable
fluid, listened to it whimper and tossed it in a
pond.
Oct. 15, 1997 NYT
And from Paducah
Kentucky:
"Bond
said, "He acted just like he had been caught
with some minor offense." ...He [the
Principal] said the teen-ager calmly inserted
earplugs, then drew the pistol from a backpack
and opened fire.
"
From the AP
Those victimized
heros of Columbine:
In February they
completed a "diversion program" for
first-time juvenile offenders, after their arrest
for breaking into a van and stealing electronic
equipment, the Jefferson County District Attorney
said. April 22, 1999 NYT
Kid's say the
darndest things...
Harris wrote:
"My
belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am
the law. If you don't like it, you die. If I
don't like you or I don't like what you want me
to do, you die."
He added, "Dead people can't do many things,
like argue." And "Don't let me catch
you making fun of someone just because they are a
different color,"
May 1, 1999 NYT
Johnson from
Jonesboro:
"He said,
'Everyone that hates me, everyone that I don't
like, is going to die,' " recalled Dustin
Campbell, also 13, who considered himself a
"sometimes friend" of Mitchell.
From
NYT March 26, 1998.
Conyers Georgia
statements:
"He
kind of had a natural high, pulling the trigger,
like it was some kind of game to him, like he was
having a good time." ABC
news
One student who said
he took a class with the suspect said he was
disruptive, often forcing the teacher to repeat
instructions. Another student, Chris Dunn, said
he had seen guns at the students home but
never heard him mention plans to shoot anyone at
school. He did notice the boys grades had
been falling. "He wasnt even trying
anymore, which I was kind of concerned about,"
Dunn said.
From
MSNBC but credited to AP & Reuters
Alienation is not
the sole cause either, many of these students use
their separateness and alienation as a badge of
honor. By wearing strange clothing and saying
weird things they gain a solidarity amongst their
clique and delineate themselves from the rest of
the school, its as simple as we are
better than they all are. "They
were just a little weird," said Dara
Ferguson, a 17-year-old junior and a cheerleader.
"They wanted to be different." As was
said of the Columbine High teens."
What we have here is
a common theme of revenge against school,
authority figures, parents, jocks and basically
anyone that utters something the shooter doesnt
like. Just go back and read what Eric Harris
wrote or Kip Kinkel. These teens have a stunted
mentality that has been debased to the point
where nothing else matters except what "I"
want, I should have absolutely everything I
want right now and anyone that says otherwise or
gets in my way I kill'. Are these teens
nihilistic revenge seekers without remorse or
awareness of good and evil? Or just schizoid,
pharmacological basket cases waiting like time
bombs to go off when sufficient provocation
coincides with their drug induced emotional
nadir?
Cultural Turmoil
How does someone
reach that point, a level of total selfishness
and self-interest where they care nothing about
other people, society, church or country? It
certainly starts with their parents, the original
role models for ethics and morality. But everyone
is influenced by collective social standards and
expectations too. If you think about it America
doesnt really have too many expectations as
far as civic duties go, no compulsory military
service, no compulsory community service no
compulsory anything except paying taxes and doing
time from K-12. You dont have to believe in
a specific State religion, the Queens not
going to give you a morality lecture, you dont
have to be part of the official Party for
promotions, its an environment totally
devoid of values like an undefined field without
beginning or end, future or past, purpose or
reason; welcome to America. All the traditional
institutions of authority from Nixons White
House to Janet Renos Justice Department to
Jim and Tammy Bakers Church have been
discredited and Im sure you can think of
many more examples. The things that used to have
value and significance no longer do, today little
if anything has value besides the basics or
survival like money, food, friends, clothing, or
housing. Teens just like adults realize this and
they realize the nature of the social order they
live in. Adults have certain faculties and common
sense that adolescents and juveniles just have
not developed yet; they react to the same
situation in less predictable and less mature
ways. As they float in the sea of nothingness
that is everyday American life they react in ways
that are dangerous and foolish to themselves and
others. They lose fear of authority because
everywhere they look its either hollow or
has been discredited. The public school teacher
isnt going to do anything to stop them, the
Principal can only give them detention or perhaps
suspension which is almost a gift to some kids.
The Parents dont care or dont know
what the kid does thats the schools
responsibility , the police at worst send
them to juvenile hall for a night and usually
just release em back to Mommy and Daddy for
punishment (yeah right). A significant portion of
growing up is learning that actions have
consequences, but in this type of an environment
what are kids really learning? Knowing nothing
but ineffectual and inept authority they will say
I can do whatever I want, they cant
stop me, they cant hurt me.
Summary of
important factors contributing to school
shootings and other deadly violence often
overlooked:
-
Very
large schools have more problems
than small one due to the alienation
factor and because of the greater
personal distance between faculty
and students.
-
Pyschotropic
drugs (like Ritalin) factor into
most of the junior and senior
high school cases but medical
records are notoriously difficult
to obtain to link all of them one
way or the other.
-
The
school shooters nearly always
have an inability to grasp the
gravity of their drastic actions,
that of their own situation or
the repercussions that follow.
Trite
targets include:
-
Video
games and a 'violent culture'
-
Immorality
(lack of God and religion)
-
Lack
of security (metal detectors,
security guards etc.)
-
Guns
But in
reality...
The guns in these cases are almost always
stolen anyway. The schools are
increasingly heavily guarded but no
connection can be found that this
decreases violence; on the contrary it
increases the sense of alienation and
oppression which actually increases
school violence. And finally if video
games and a 'violent culture' are really
to blame then someone has to answer why
the vast majority of kids that are
immersed in this don't act out.
|
It used to be
reasoning would never even progress that far
because of childhood discipline; enforcement of
the rules and boundaries of conduct would keep
unruly kids from crossing the line. And even if
that didnt work guilt was the next speed
bump. Kids felt remorse when they stole or broke
the rules because it was a sin or it
discredited the family or something along those
lines. Guilt just like Church no longer works to
force kids to do the right thing,
largely because both the parents and the kids dont
really know what that right thing is
anymore.
<
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THE EVENT MATRIX
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Event Timing
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Dates of school shootings listed in this report
January 13, 2004
January 15, 2002
January 16, 2002
February 23, 2006
March, 1998
March 22, 2005
April, 1998
April 14, 2003
April 20, 1999
April 24, 2003
May 19, 1998
May 20-21, 1998
May 20, 1999
August 30, 2006
October 22, 2002
October 29, 2002
September 13, 2006
September 24, 2003
September 27, 2006
September 29, 2006
November 8, 2005
December 1, 1997
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When does the
shooting start?
These are all
the start times for the school shootings I’ve been tracking.
In some cases I don’t have a time recorded, so those cases
are not included.
2 pm
afternoon
11:20 am
8:30 am
10:30 am
7:30 am
~11am
1:15pm
3pm
7:45 am
1 pm
12:41 pm
11:40-4
8 am |
|
When
these dates are sorted by season we can see that 9 out of 22 cases occurred in the spring around the end of the school year
(March to May), while 13 out of 22 cases occurred during the
first five months of the calendar year (January to May). |
Out of 14
instances 7 occurred roughly between 11 and 1 pm. The time
to be extra vigilant against school shootings is around the
noon lunch hour. |
The New Cultural Symbol
School shootings have become so common that these events have
achieved a level of cultural symbolism all their own. And it
isn’t very surprising that they do continue to occur since the
source of the problem has not gone away – a society that
generates large scale economic redundancy as well as personal
isolation and alienation amidst an artificial and extremely
hostile environment towards mental health. All of this is
occurring amidst a mainstream culture that has its language and
symbols defined by a commercial mass-media that perpetuates
false expectations to motivate rampant consumerism. Fear,
insecurity, and inadequacy are powerful marketing forces that
have unintended psychological consequences on the unsuspecting
public.
The homogenization of culture means that it doesn’t matter
whether the school shooting occurs in Canada, Australia or the
United States because it is the same mental-cultural environment
with similar symbols and expectations being perpetuated by the
same profit-motivated commercial forces.
The Revenge Motivation
Revenge seems to be a common thread that runs through all of
these events. School shootings are primarily acts of revenge.
Revenge is rooted in a sense of real or perceived injustice
towards the perpetrator of the shooting and injustice is the
feeling that ‘I should have something that I don’t'. Many school
shootings are fomented by a desire for revenge against society
and a simmering anger over being denied an entitlement such as
respect or personal recognition.
Extensive research has shown that the teenage brain is not
nearly as developed as an adult brain and because of this
emotion, reason, and a proper sense of self and others are often
in an acute state of imbalance. A sense of personal injustice to
a teenager may stem from what an adult would consider to be a
minor or inconsequential event, yet to a teenager this situation
could be of extreme significance. Similarly, the way teenagers
respond to violence is also of notable difference to the way
adults respond to it. Put these two things together and mix them
with the ever present general state of confusion and angst as
the young person struggles to construct and define their sense
of personal identity, and a very volatile cocktail is formed.
Teenagers are more selfish than adults because they use a
different part of their brain to make decisions compared to
adults, new research suggests.
The work has implications for the types of responsibility
given to adolescents, Blakemore says: “Teenager’s brains are a
work in progress and profoundly different from adults. If
you’re making decisions about how to treat teenagers in terms
of the law, you need to take this new research into account.”
[1]
The psychological motivation for acting out in a violent way,
such as through a shooting at school, is rooted in more than
just the struggle to form an identity amidst a hostile culture
of commercialized consumerism and social atomization. The reason
it requires more is because even when these young people achieve
a sense of acceptance and belonging in a clique it’s still not
enough to stop them, as in the Montreal case in September 2006.
If they already have a group to belong to and a semblance of
unique personal identity then does this new separate identity
exaggerate their opposition mentality and drive them to attack a
society seen as hostile towards them? Or is it all just a
selfish and desperate attempt to sate a bruised ego by gaining
attention and personal recognition even if they have to die to
get it? Or maybe they are just so apathetic about existence and
future prospects that they lack interest and concern for life in
general and those around them. Lacking any sense of continuity
and historical context, cut adrift and alienated, this seems a
plausible explanation.
All of the teenage school shooters have been deeply influenced
by mass media, usually in the form of video games and movies –
and both media forms tend to be very vivid, intense and
increasingly photo-realistic. As the artificial media
increasingly comes to define the public’s sense of natural
reality the negative consequences of this will only become more
apparent and deadly. Teenagers growing up in the late 20th
century and today in the 21st are immersed in an extremely
hostile environment for the mind. This mental environment is
especially hazardous for the young mind that is not fully
developed and also lacking in the experience needed for balance
and proportional decision-making. 16.09.06
1.
'Why adolescents put themselves first', New
Scientist, September 8, 2006.
Two categories of school
shootings: Class A / Class B
At this point I think it is important to distinguish between two
categories of school shootings. The first class of school
shootings are the ones perpetrated by students at their own
school and against other students of faculty. I’m going to call
these events ‘Class A’ school shootings. Class A events are
the primary focus of research in this ongoing report.
The second category are the school shootings done by outsiders
(non-students or faculty) who come to a school ground, for
various reasons, with the intent of perpetrate a crime. I’m
going to call these ‘Class B’. In the future if these events
become too numerous I may have to remove them from the report,
or put them in a separate location.
Risk Factors
Post-event
interviews of students and faculty regularly express stunned
surprise that a shooting occurred at their school with typical
statements like ‘we thought it was a joke’ or, ‘it didn’t seem
real’. Yet as the reader can see here school shooting events cut
across most all social boundaries transcending race, class,
religion and age, and have occurred across the globe from
Australia to Finland. A student shooting can occur at
your school - don’t expect that it won’t and don’t wait for it
to happen!
Although Class A
school shootings have many elements in common several critical
factors significantly increase the likelihood of a violent
outburst at school. After studying
numerous examples of these events I, Freydis,
have developed these ten primary risk
factors useful in identifying a potential school shooter:
|
1. Male
2. Age 14-20
3. Troubled Home
Life
4. Mental Health
Problems
5. Pyschotropic
Drugs
6. Bullied by
Others
7. Poor Academic
Performance
8. Social Fringe/
Rejected by Peers
9.
Suspension/Graduation Timeframe
10. Frequent
Anger/Rage
|
What’s going on here and what do we do about it?!
The past month has had the most school shootings
for as long as I’ve been tracking them. Clearly something in the
effort to stop them is not working. Even though every school
administrator has to be aware of the chances of a school
shooting or similar violent attack occurring on their school
grounds, these events continue to happen with increasing
frequency!
Many schools have enacted ‘gun free zones’ on,
and around, campus but signs and rules are not going to stop
anyone determined to use a gun in a school. It’s quite possible
that these kinds of superficial responses to school violence
actually make things worse because they just create a false
sense of security. The ‘drug free zones’ around schools don’t
really stop drug dealing but they do give judges the capacity to
grant more severe penalties when the case goes to court. Yet a
legal penalty is useless against a gunman that kills himself, or
is killed, in the attack. Similarly, security cameras when and
if they are in the right position to record events, are great
for just that but they can’t stop any crime. Security cameras
are only useful in prosecuting the crime after it has occurred.
If an effort isn’t delivering results it usually
means it’s time to start doing something different. For
instance, what if the teachers carried a firearm and were
trained in how to use it? Other methods of self-defense
desperately need to be explored and implemented. Personal
self-defense classes should be offered in every school for all
the students, teachers and administrators. Some kind of mental
and physical training is definitely needed here so teachers and
students can fight back, or at least increase their chances of
surviving a school shooting or other violent event by knowing
how to react. It’s especially tragic to see students in a class
of questionable life-utility totally helpless when attacked and
even murdered, when they could have been taking a self-defense course
that would have given them the right frame of mind to deal with
a violent attack while giving them a useful skill for the
rest of their lives. Now that's a
novel notion for a modern school.
Education Methods Deserve Enormous Blame For School Violence
I know this is a
stunning news flash for most of you (that's sarcasm) but women
and men are not the same and they aren’t interchangeable units -
the have different ways of learning that are particularly
pronounced at young ages. You can’t just toss out some books and
lecture for eight hours a day and not expect the boys to go
crazy from boredom.
Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is just a slightly exaggerated
symptom of normal male behavior. When an increasingly large
percentage of the boys have to be drugged-up just to get them to
sit through an average school day without causing disruptions
then it should be obvious to even a half-wit that something is
not right with that educational equation. Boys cannot be
expected to sit in an uncomfortable chair for eight hours every
school day and listen to droning lectures from teachers without
reacting in a negative fashion. Mix in drugs to keep them sedated, violent
pop-cultural imagery, plus chronic social pressures, and it’s no
surprise that kids like Pekka-Eric in Finland flip out lusting for
revolution in the classroom.
The girls aren’t
getting much out of contemporary education methods either but
crudely speaking women can be programmed, read this book
and listen to this lecture then take this test, but men have
to be trained, show then do then test. Yet it’s just so
much cheaper and quicker to teach the female way than it is to
do it the male way because the school system can buy a few books
and hire some hack to talk to the kids all day and they don’t
have to do any of the necessary but slightly more expensive
hands-on, out of the classroom type experience-based education.
Consequently school becomes a prison sentence for the boys who
just get increasingly angry and agitated as it goes on and a
gossip session for the girls waiting for the bell to ring.
09.11.07
The
Psychology of School Shootings
Every Class A school
shooting is basically about two things: power and revenge – the
gun grants power to those that feel powerless, while pulling the
trigger on someone confers revenge.
When kids suffer
abuse at home from parents and siblings, then they go to school
and suffer bullying from peers and an endless series of dictates
from teachers, they begin to feel trapped because no matter
where they are they can’t avoid abuse. And when they see that
the authority at home is part of the problem and authority at
school is either unconcerned or inept at helping them they
gradually realize that authority is fundamentally hypocritical
since it is not based on benevolent guidance as officially
stated but is instead is based on controlling and exploiting the
less powerful. Consequently these kids begin to perceive the
world as the ‘strong’ towering over and abusing the ‘weak’.
Feeling trapped and
powerless they naturally search for a way out. The easiest and
most effective way to acquire power is to get a gun. Kids easily
believe that using a gun is an effective method for resolving
their problems because every movie and television show they
watch depicts the world through this foolish one-dimensional
lens of power expression and problem resolution via deadly
violence. And these kids believe that it’s acceptable to act-out
their drama as a school shooting because that’s what other
students have done before.
This is the
psychological basis for a school shooting. The only piece
remaining is a sufficient triggering event to push them over the
edge. 11.11.07
Same Violence, Different Weapon
The British government has announced plans to search every
student for weapons in order to stop a knife-violence
'epidemic'.
The
Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, will put the battle against
illegal weapons at the top of her agenda when she unveils her
Tackling Violence Action Plan tomorrow. The blueprint for
tackling knife-related violence will include a radical move to
give police hundreds of metal detectors to catch young people
carrying hidden weapons in schools, clubs and pubs.
...
It has now emerged that the number of
people sentenced for having an article with a blade or point on
school premises has risen from just 12 in 1996 to 45 in 2005 –
peaking at 106 in 2004. From:
Body search plan to fight knife crime in schools, by
Brian Brady, The Independent, February 17, 2008.
So instead of making any attempt to find out why kids are
acting out in violent ways, or funding any program to prevent
violence in the first place, the British government, already
having banned pointy objects with obvious success (that's
sarcasm), is going to buy thousands of metal detectors and hire
more police instead! Well, I'm sure this plan will have just as
much effectiveness at stopping violence with knives as it has
been at stopping violence with guns, and every other weapon,
elsewhere. 18.02.08
|
SCHOOL SHOOTING
EVENTS
2005-PRESENT |
Northern Illinois University, February 14, 2008 - Class A Event
Who:
Steven Kazmierczak, 27, a dean’s award winning sociology
graduate from Northern Illinois University.
Where: Cole Hall,
Northern Illinois University, 25,000 student population.
When: 3:06 p.m.
Thursday February 14 (Valentine’s Day) 2008.
Weapons: Remington
12-gauge shotgun, .22-caliber pistol, 9 mm Glock pistol,
Hi-Point .380 pistol, and possibly a 45-caliber Glock
semi-automatic handgun. 48 pistol casings and six expended
shotgun cartridges reportedly found at scene.
Killed: Ryanne Mace,
19; Gayle Dubowski, Catalina Garcia, and Daniel Parmenter, all
of whom were aged 20; and Julianna Gehant, 32, (five killed and
sixteen wounded).
Event: Reportedly
wearing black clothing, jeans, t-shirt, and carrying his weapons
in a guitar case and hidden under his jacket a tall, thin Steven
Kazmierczak entered Cole Hall auditorium at Northern Illinois
University where class was being held and, armed with one
shotgun and at least three handguns, opened fire on the audience
from the stage, injuring 16 random people, killing five, and
then himself. "It didn't seem like he was
aiming. He just raised a gun and shot immediately," said Paul
Sundstrom, a student who was sitting in the class with his
brother Kevin when the gunman opened fire. [2]
Kazmierczak rented a
motel room for three nights before the shooting at a Travelodge
in DeKalb. He paid in cash and signed his name only as "Steven",
according to the hotel manager. Items found in his room included
empty cartons of cigarettes, containers of energy drinks, and
cold medicine. More energy drinks were found in the
refrigerator. [3] Kazmierczak likely planned his shooting-spree
at least five days in advance. He left no
known notes behind, said Donald Grady, the police chief at the
university. He had no known relationships with any students or
teachers inside the class. He had no previous run-ins with the
police. [1]
Background:
Kazmierczak seems to have had a fairly normal childhood but a
few events are of note. Mr. Kazmierczak
grew up on a tree-lined street of ranch-style homes in the
suburbs of Chicago with a sister and parents who retired to
Lakeland, Fla., in recent years, records show. His mother, Gail,
died in 2006, at age 58. [1] His mother died from ALS, a
form of motor neuron disease.
At one point
Kazmierczak was in a mental health center.
A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said
Kazmierczak had been placed there after high school by his
parents. He used to cut himself and had resisted taking his
medications … Kazmierczak spent more than a year at the
Thresholds-Mary Hill House in the late 1990s, former house
manager Louise Gbadamashi told The Associated Press. His parents
placed him there after high school because he had become
"unruly" at home, she said. ... He
also had a short-lived stint as a prison guard that ended
abruptly when he didn't show up for work. He was in the Army for
about six months in 2001-02, but he told a friend he'd gotten a
psychological discharge. [3]
Judging from the
interviews Steve made a positive impression on those around him.
He had been pursuing a masters degree in sociology at the
University of Illinois in nearby Urbana-Champaign and
self-described his academic interests as
“corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice”.
Also, Kazmierczak had served as a member
of the NIU Academic Criminal Justice Association, was a teaching
aid during his undergraduate years and in 2006 even received a
Dean's Award from the sociology department. [2]
 Kazmierczak
was meeting cultural standards of behavior, getting good grades,
was academically involved, had a girlfriend and employment at
least intermittently. Nonetheless he had some underlying trouble
that was being repressed. He liked violent gore-horror themes
and films; he had some elaborate tattoos to show it. One
interview claimed that he “was abusive,
had a temper," she said. "He didn't actually hit her; he would
push her [his girlfriend] around." [3] Steven’s
family stated that his behavior had become erratic recently
after he stopped taking medication used to regulate an
unspecified psychological disorder. No other overt indicators of
impending violence have been reported besides that and his
recent weapons purchases. Kazmierczak said nothing when he fired
on the class and left behind no known written material or
statements of any kind.
Survival is easy.
Success is impossible.
It’s worth mention
that the shooting occurred on Valentine’s Day and that
Kazmierczak recently broke-up with his longtime girlfriend,
although he was still sharing an apartment with her. This
shooting could have been triggered by relationship trouble
combined with preexisting psychological problems. Nonetheless
Steven didn’t fit the stereotype as an ‘angry loner’ and his
recent life did not appear to be particularly rough, certainly
not to enough to initiate a sudden leap into mass-murder and
violent suicide. So, why resort to such drastic actions, and so
suddenly without even any effort to fix the things going wrong?
This question can be asked of many other school shooting events.
Are some people just too sensitive and too weak to deal with
social difficulty and life trouble? Is it easier to pick the
quick solution just like in the movies? In modern life survival
is easy but success is impossible because of the skewed
standards and expectations imposed upon us through an incessant
avalanche of advertising pushing commercial values that profit
from imparting a false sense of inadequacy.
For millions of people modern life is increasingly like a waking
dream. The stereotypical school shooting event has permeated
cultural consciousness to such an extent that it has become a
symbolic act, a reflexive action even that plays out in the
subconscious mind of millions -- the school shooting dream --
and if the connection to waking reality is broken such an event
can be acted out for real by the mentally unstable. 18.02.08
1.
Gunman Showed Few Hints of Trouble, by Monica Davey, New
York Times, February 16, 2008.
2.
Who Was the Illinois School Shooter?, by Emily Friedman,
ABC News, Feb. 15, 2008.
3.
Gunman's Contradictions Confound Police, by Ashley M.
Heher and Caryn Rousseau, AP, February 17, 2008.
Jokela High School, Tuusula Finland, November 7, 2007 - Class A
Event
Who: Pekka-Eric
Auvinen (18), dubbed the You-Tube killer by mass-media for his
videos posted on that website under multiple aliases such as
Sturmgeist89 and naturalselector89 (account banned).
Where: Jokela High
School in Tuusula with 400 students between ages 12 and 18, located
in a small town 30-40 miles from Helsinki.
When: Wednesday
November 7, 2007 at approximately 11:45 am. The shooting was
probably timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Bolshevik
revolution.
Weapon(s):
Semi-automatic .22 Sig Sauer Mosquito pistol named Catherine by
Auvinen, 69 bullets fired,
police reportedly found 320 more bullets with him, also he had
an flammable liquid that he tried set fire to a second floor
corridor with.
Killed: School
principal Helena Kalmi (61), nurse (42), five boys aged between
16 and 18, and a 25-year-old single mother. Twelve others
injured. Except for the principal, the targets appear to be
random. Eyewitness claims Auvinen forced Kalmi onto her knees
and then shot her. “Helsingin Sanomat
has been told that there had been an argument between Auvinen
and the principal before Wednesday.” [6]
Event: Much of the
event timeline remains undisclosed at this time. We know that
Pekka-Eric Auvinen used his .22 caliber pistol to shoot multiple
people and after about twenty minutes he shot himself in the
head in a toilet stall beside the school cafeteria. About 90
minutes later police found him and took him to the hospital
where he died eight hours later.
Background: Very
little has been published on Pekka-Eric Auvinen's background but
we have been told that he has a younger brother and that
Auvinen's father worked on the Finnish railways for decades, is
also a guitarist, and his wife is a vocalist.
Depressed in Finland
Pekka-Eric
Auvinen was taking anti-depressant medications.
“In
a video that he placed on YouTube, Sturmgeist89 displays
packages of Cipralex, Zoloft, Luvox, and Prozac pills.”
The drugs were prescribed for depression.
“The National Agency for Medicines
recommends against prescribing SSRIs for people under the age of
18, because of the self-destructive or hostile emotions that
they have been known to provoke.”
[5] Fellow student Tuomas Hulkkonen states the he
knew the gunman well and that he had been acting strange lately,
"He withdrew into
his shell. I had noticed a change in him just recently, and I
thought that perhaps he was a bit depressed, or something. But I
couldn't imagine that in reality he would do anything like
this."
His 18 year-old (or 20
depending on source)
girlfriend Tana Scheel recently left him,
"He was my boyfriend. I have received many emails and phone
calls claiming it is my fault and that I am a murderer because I
rejected him. But many people are rejected without going out and
murdering.”[4] She also claims that banning his YouTube
accounts, "... would have done nothing but
take away his ability to express himself through his videos, one
thing which made him happy and curbed his homicidal tendencies."
[7]
Gun Culture
“People using guns are hunters. They
live in rural areas. It’s part of the life over there.”
[2] Auvinen had no previous criminal record and had no
difficulty legally obtaining his handgun. He was a member of
a hunting club and was practiced enough to direct most of his
shots at the head and upper body of his victims during his
20-minute rampage. "With 1.6 million
firearms in private hands, the Nordic nation is an anomaly in
Europe, lagging behind only the US and Yemen in civilian gun
ownership. According to a government study in 2002, only 14% of
homicides in Finland are gun-related.
[2] Finland has a strong history of armed self-defense,
most notable in the collective Finnish effort to repel the
invading Soviet Army over 60 years ago.
Misanthropic Malcontent
"Name: Pekka-Eric Auvinen Age: 18 Male
from Finland. I am a cynical existentialist, antihuman humanist,
antisocial socialdarwinist, realistic idealist and godlike
atheist." Pekka-Eric's own
words were decidedly aggressive yet equally unfocused. He wrote
of his rampage in advance, "Targets:
Jokelan Lukio (High School Of Jokela), students and faculty,
society, humanity, human race.” [3] It seems that, online
at least, Pekka-Eric was a hyper-aggressive and often bullying
person that made more enemies than friends. He fixated upon
weakness and believed that they should be killed by the strong.
“This is my war: one man war against
humanity, governments and weak-minded masses of the world! No
mercy for the scum of the earth! HUMANITY IS OVERRATED! It's
time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on
tracks!” – Pekka from his ‘Manifesto.doc' [3] Pekka is
clearly angry but why is less clear particularly because
his expression doesn't explain the problems he rails against nor
do they explain how killing students and faculty at his High
School will resolve the issues he is most concerned about. He
reportedly admired Stalin and Hitler indicating limited
Ideological and historical understanding but rather a craving for
power and desire to be a dictator. And now we are beginning to
see the source of Pekka’s discontent, he felt powerless and/or
controlled by others and his sudden, violent outburst was a
desperate, and probably delusional, effort to express himself as
a potent authority, hence his personal statement,
"I am the law, judge and executioner.
There is no higher authority than me." [1]
This is your teenage brain on drugs,
any questions?
Witnesses describe
him as running through the school hallways shouting
"Revolution!" and shooting people. Indeed, despite his
pleas to the contrary Pekka-Eric is convincing as being
mentally unstable. He did take anti-depressant drugs, probably
more than one kind, but we don't know the quantities or the
timing.
Unfortunately many key details on
this event remain unknown, for instance, how well was the
shooter doing at his school work? What kind of home-life did he
have? What did friends and other students see and think of him?
Was he really bullied by other students and if so, why? Lacking
these important pieces of information drawing any substantive
conclusions remains difficult for this school shooting event.
1.
YouTube massacre: Schoolboy gunman posts threat on the
internet then kills eight, by David Williams, Daily
Mail (UK), 8 November 2007.
2.
School massacre makes Finns defensive about gun culture,
uncredited, Breaking News.ie, November 9, 2007.
3.
[Copies of Pekka’s videos and documents maintained by an
online friend]
4.
Finnish School Shooter Was Bullied, by Peter Dejong,
AP, November 8, 2007.
5.
Jokela gunman said he used antidepressants, uncredited,
Helsingin Sanomat, November 9, 2007.
6.
School massacre: Ninth graders saw killing of school
principal, uncredited, Helsingin Sanomat, November 9,
2007.
7.
Ex defends school killer online, by Chloe Lake,
news.au.com, November 13, 2007.
SuccessTech Academy in Cleveland, Ohio, October 11, 2007 - Class
A Event
Who: Asa H. Coon,
age 14
Where:
SuccessTech Academy (High School) in Cleveland, Ohio. With an
academic emphasis on technology and entrepreneurship, the school
is a five-story converted office building with about 240
students, 85 percent are black, the remainder mostly Hispanic or
white, and all are considered poor according to federal poverty
guidelines. Although the school is equipped with metal detectors
and 26 cameras, security was intermittent and, apparently,
easily defeated.
When: Wednesday
Afternoon, October 10, 2007
Weapons: One .22
caliber revolver, one .38 caliber revolver, one box of
ammunition for each pistol, and three folding knives.
Killed: Asa H. Coon
(suicide)
Injured: The first person shot by Coon was Michael Peek, age 14,
who had punched Coon in the face right before the shootings
began. Darnell Rodgers, 18, black, was grazed by a bullet on the right
elbow. David Kachadourian, age 57, white, math teacher, was shot in the
back. Michael Grassie, 42, a multicultural studies teacher, was
the most seriously injured victim having been shot in the chest.
Event: Coon had been
suspended for fighting on Monday and the same day his older
brother, Stephen Coon, age 19, was arrested in
connection with an armed robbery. The week before Asa had made
threats to blow up the school and stab students but no one paid
attention.
Coon began on the
ground floor after changing clothes in a bathroom. The first shooting
happened immediately after Coon left the bathroom when another
student punched him in the face and he shot back. Coon went up
through the first two floors of administrative offices to the
third and fourth floor of classrooms. Coon proceeded to shoot
one other student, grazing his elbow, and two teachers but only
the teacher Michael Grassie seems to have been sought out by Coon. Coon
fired eight shots, and shot himself in the head when the police
arrived at the school.
Background:
Even though the school was small it was nonetheless overcrowded
and the teaching was impersonal. "I had
him since the start of the school year. So that's been about a
month and a half. So not a real long time. And the class is real
large, so it's hard to know students individually very well or
interact with them very much one-on-one.”
– David Kachadourian, math teacher
shot by Coon.
Asa Coon is a poster
chi |