In an episode of Law & Order, a masked teenager shoots up a high school cafeteria and the cops spend the rest of the first half-hour trying to track him down. One of the suspects come up with is a black kid; the lieutenant protests that a black kid doesn’t fit the “profile” for school shooters. (Turns out a white kid did it.) What’s the basis for this? Why should there be a racial differential in such behavior? And how can there be a valid “profile” anyway? I would not think there have been enough school shootings for generalizations to be drawn from the population.
There is a racial component to it but it isn’t deterministic. White males do make up a disproportionate amount of true serial killers even taking racial breakdown into account. Likewise, young black men do a disproportionate amount of drug related violence. These patterns exist for all kinds of crime and investigators use them officially or unofficially to rule suspects in and out.
In other words, they are simply playing a probabilities game with data collected through correlational studies or their own experience and taking the nature of the crime into account. Of course, investigators and the public can get burned playing these numbers. The DC Snipers were thought to be white males by investigators and the media even though the perpetrators turned out to be two black men.
To answer your question more directly, white males are stereotyped as doing more of the disaffected, disturbed, and calculated crimes of evil while minorities, especially blacks, do more simple hoodlum crimes including robbery and impulse shootings.
There may be some truths to this but investigators are simply playing a numbers game when they make these kinds of statements.
Of course there have. School shooting is not some sort of a natural occurence, like say “radon exposure” or somesuch. School shootings are caused by students shooting guns at other students with the intent to harm or kill them, by definition.
Look at all the recorder school shootings and patterns start to emerge.
(Warning: Wild speculations ahead)
As how the race thing plays into it, I can only speculate, but I think their guess is correct. Shooting up a school (disregarding gang-related assasinations and such) requires some sort of intent and preparation. Intent comes from anger, built up anger and frustration that reaches a critical point at which you decide that shooting up the school is the prudent course of action. The goal is typically to cause physical and emotional pain, demonstrate power and control and simply to show what your antagonizers have driven you to.
African American culture is fundamentally more accepting internally than the white suburban culture. You are less likely to be an outcast or to be picked on, and there is usually a niche you can find for yourself. This stems from the history of African Americans and the community spirit of overcoming difficulties together - slavery, the civil rights struggle, etc.
White Middle-Class culture, in contrast, often unintentionally underlines personal success at the expense of others, as well as having more rigid social stereotypes people feel compelled to adhere to. Also, as a white suburban male you have very little outlets for anything internal, especially if you have two working parents, no siblings and no interest in sports or academics.
When somebody shoots up the school, I’d check the loner middle-class white “only child” males with mediocre grades first. I was there, I had those thoughts, I know where they come from. The difference is how you act upon them, and obviously I’m still here.
Although there is a profile for school shooters, the sample is so tiny a fraction of the population that it has limited usefulness. Tens of thousands of depressed, bullied, sullen, loner white teenage males never do anything violent, despite listening to heavy death metal music and playing Quake and Doom 20 hours a week.
I had a class on this in my first-year. During which, it was mentioned that school shootings involving blacks are shootings that just happen to be in a school. It isn’t related to the student body at large, just their enemies (other gang members and such). With whites, it was the “traditional” Columbine-style shooting. I don’t have the cite handy, but I’ll dig through my notes if you really care.
We learned a zillion of these little profile things. Frankly, most of them were pretty bunk. We saw such a range of motives and methods that you really couldn’t fit people into group without needing an unwieldy number of categories.
Cool class though, despite being pointless. Did a presentation on Frederick Cowan, who was quite the character. He crushed a car with his bare hands!