I am thinking that maybe the current fad of school shootings is just copy-cat behavior. There are a lot of historical precedents for this - after the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther in Germany, there was a fad of suicide. After Kurt Cobain shot himself, a lot of others did, too. There was a fad of snipers for a while.
Once someone commits a formerly unthinkable act, it becomes thinkable.
The people who commit these types of acts are maladjusted, and I would go so far as to say sociopaths. They are rejected by their peers for a reason, I suspect, and it's not just because they don't fit in. A lot of kids don't fit in but they don't act out by killing others.
We see a lot of shootings in the DC metro area, teens killing teens. It's usually black on black, usually gang related. Shooting someone because they dissed you seems to be a common occurance in the inner city, but it doesn't get national coverage because it's "them".
Only when it's white on white in the suburbs - except that these white guys don't just kill the guy who dissed them, they kill everyone in sight. That seems to be something only white men do. The prototype mass murderer is a white male loner. We've had those for a while, remember the Texas bell tower incident? I shouldn't say "only" white men, there was that train incident in New York, where the shooter was black. I can't think of another one. He suffered from paranoid delusions, maybe schizophrenia.
Something wrong in the brain, not society, is my vote. Schizophrenia usually doesn't manifest itself until the teen years. |
