Why do people commit school shootings? I can’t understand what it is that the perpetrators think they will gain by doing so. Are there common motives?
They were bullied and picked on.
It is a revenge killing
If their mind is addled or depressed they might not be able tell you why.
It’s the same motive for kids smashing mailboxes, throwing rocks at street lights (does anyone do that anymore), defacing property with graffiti (not the good artistic graffiti), bullying, etc., it is the workings of the immature, not fully formed, and usually injured mind which when in pain seeks to hurt others. These shooters are in serious pain, see no future for themselves except for further pain, and if they think they will gain some reprieve even if momentary by hurting others then it’s no surprise that they will consider creating the most pain for others that they can. These people are victims themselves in some way, either victims of bad acts by others, or just unfortunate to have serious mental problems, but like most victims they will identify and live as a either a victim or perpetrator. Those that take the victim path usually end up in self destructive behavior, often killing themselves slowly or quickly. On the perpetrator path they harm others, and we’ve made it very easy to kill people en masse, and even glamorized the practice, turning it into a media event.
Motive is not much of a question here. Motives for bad acts are simple, anger, greed, jealousy, just basic emotions. It’s the circumstances that turn these simple motives into great tragedies.
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
- Want to hurt people, maybe out of malice or revenge
- Want to go out in a blaze of glory and publicity (the media loves to lavish attention on these shooters)
I think trying to imagine motive here is kind of useless. All we can do is project along our own experience–what makes us violent? What motivates us to hurt others? All we can ask it “what might make me do this?” I just don’t think that applies. Think about Sandy Hook: someone watched themselves put bullets into babies. Watched babies explode, heard them scream. I can buy that I might be moved to murder a person out of guilt or greed or anger or fear. But shooting kids? That’s no where on my spectrum.
Specialists are actually studying these attacks, though. With the goal of thwarting them. We can also ask the perpetrators who survive why they did it, or examine the manifestos etc. left behind by the ones who don’t. It is possible to get some clues about motive --commonly a sense of grievance and following a cultural script that guarantees notoriety, as Velocity said. (And sometimes add in psychosis: “the voices told me to.”)
I think I see what you mean, though: it seems like we’ll never really “get it,” because it feels like no sense of grievance could possibly make me kill little kids. Or strangers.
Many years ago, I was watching a Milwaukee TV station, ten oclock news on as Sunday night. Somehow anchored by a very young woman, maybe an intern or a low staffer. There was a story about a woman who gave birth to a baby on a plane, and abandoned the infant in the lavatory. All the standard hair-pulling in the report, Oh, how could anyone do such a thing. The anchorette came back on camera, and said “They just don’t know what it is like to be desperate”.
I strongly suspect that that was the abrupt end of the woman’s very short career in journalism. But she remains my hero – the one who slipped through the armor and told the truth on the TV news, instead of just reinforcing the conventional wisdom.
They just don’t know what it’s like to be desperate.
My hardest class in college was organic chem lab. It was four hours of torture every week. After each lab, I’d nurse my wounds by flopping down on my sofa and crying under a blanket for two hours straight. Nothing anyone could say would make me feel better. By the middle of the quarter, I was entertaining fantasies of sending a wrecking ball into the chemistry building. The image of the wrecking ball smashing over and over into one particular professor would loop continuously in my head whenever I would think about that damn class.
I think if I had access to a wrecking ball and I was just a little bit more unhinged, I’d probably would have made fantasy come true.
It’s a deranged attempt to take back control. Whether bullied by other students, or sexually abused by a teacher, or simply facing the adult consequences of a failed high school career, pain was inflicted and control was lost. Just once, they want to be the one in control, the one causing fear instead of the one feeling it.
Immature anger is only survivable because we normally feel it when we are very small. If every toddler throwing a tantrum had an AR-15, human population would dwindle considerably. These are people who didn’t have the guidance, or the nurturing, or the stability, or the basic genetic/organic ability to mature beyond that phase.