The Psycholijay of School Shootings: Part 1 (What it is not!)

                So as with the coming and going of the tides, and the falling of the leaves, and the setting of the sun, another school has suffered the consequences of giving emotionally turbulent and disenfranchised teenagers access to the ability to kill a multitude of their fellow man. Once again people have been surfing the corpses of this tragic occurrence towards whatever poetical or ideological horizon they feel will best serve their agenda, be it personal or collective. Fingers are pointed, blame attributed, condemnation loudly broadcast for all to see (and approve of, of course) and thoughts and prayers flood the internet with the frequency only matched by those criticising people for their lack of effective reactions, while simultaneously doing nothing themselves.

                So… before I discuss the events themselves, let’s look at some of the things that float across my newsfeed much in the way an errant post-curry turd might float across the North Sea towards some unsuspecting nudist beach.

                “School Shootings are Caused by Men/Toxic Masculinity!” : This argument rolls around much in the same way that a fervent but closeted racist (who would likely just call themselves a realist) might point to the abundance of black men in prisons and declare loudly that black men are just predisposed to criminal acts. It’s okay though, I am sure these people have a tonne of male friends! They’re not sexist, right?

Setting aside the fact that female school shooters exist, in fact they existed before we even coined the term “School shooter”. The reason it seems that it is predominantly a male event is down to how men and women view their problems. As well as the fact that such women are often depicted as "Mad, not bad."

                Men (as a rule) take personal responsibility for a problem and seek a way to solve it. Women (again; generally) prefer to analyse a problem, pick it apart and then delegate the problem, or simply ignore it all together once they understand it. Hence the cliché of women yelling at their partners “Why do you always have to solve everything? Why can’t you just listen!” and the culture of modern feminism that seems to think that highlighting a problem and then yelling at people enough will somehow motivate others to solve it for them. The reason for this difference in perspectives is the subject for another blog post, but suffice to say it’s down to a multitude of factors the least of which is biology.

                Women will also be much more subtle when they chose to kill a person, rarely favouring guns and instead opting to destroy people emotionally, hire/persuade an intermediary, or resort to poison. Thus a school poisoning is much more likely to have a female culprit, but lacks the sensation and visceral impact of a shooting spree, and it’s much harder to parade the dead body of a poisoned schoolkid around as a puppet for “poison control” or some other moral crusade. If you can feel the words “That almost never happens” marching to your lips as you don your whitest of knight armour and/or pink-pussy hat respectively, then let me share a titbit of information for you…

                I had the pleasure of meeting the UK’s leading expert in criminal toxicology during my chequered academic career, in fact he is the ONLY criminal toxicologist because his field is so niche that employing anyone to do his job outside of very densely populated areas is considered a waste of police resources, but I digress.  He revealed that he is responsible for detecting 95% of the attempted/successful poisonings in the UK and subsequently sending those people to trial for murder/attempted murder, going on to say he is only responsible for 8% of the population.  So for 92% of the UK population, when people are murdered by poison it’s got only a 5% chance of being flagged as a crime, and not just an unfortunate victim of a mysterious ailment. For you see doctors as a rule don’t presume poisoning when they could instead diagnose an illness because they are trained to diagnose illnesses and not presume you’re being maliciously poisoned. Indeed, sometimes the treatment for the “illness” they diagnose you with can end up killing you.

                In short: A lot of ladies out there are killers, and a lot of them get away with it. While a man may reach for a gun, a woman will reach for the weedkiller, and one of these is much easier to detect and prosecute as a murderer.

                “It’s a white male problem”: Yeah, I’m tempted not to give this the time of day, so I’ll just say there is no link between the melanin in your skin and your propensity towards violence. This is like saying, “Gang culture is the result of being black.” It is quite literally, retarded.

                “It’s a gun problem!” :  This is the closest to the truth, though only in the sense of it’s hard to go on a school shooting without a gun. I tried pointing my finger at some of the kids in my classes and going “pew-pew” but they remain obstinately alive. Having access to a gun does not somehow cause a flood of aggression and insanity to wash over the human brain, but it does provide a quick and simple solution to a serious power imbalance.

                Picture this: Somebody (or more likely several somebodies) takes great delight in seeing you suffer, they take time out of their day, every day, to harm you. You’re literally living in constant fear that they will find a new way to injure, embarrass, torment, or further isolate you from anyone who can help you. Indeed, being seen as their target actively discourages others from trying to help you because people are afraid of sharing your fate. In desperation you appeal to a higher authority, but because they haven’t witnessed these events, or perhaps because they have been told you are the violent and sinister force in the school by your tormentors nothing happens, or worse, “Zero Tolerance” kicks in and you find yourself being further persecuted by the people you asked for help. You are quite literally, helpless, powerless and living in fear. A person in this situation generally see’s two solutions, remove themselves (suicide: Also depressingly common in young men), or remove the problem and find a way to fight back. To fight back you don’t have the physical power, or the power of a higher authority, so you resort to something that will level the playing field against your tormentors: a gun.

                The gun is not the “problem” the gun is a solution, a bad solution, and one that shouldn’t be available, but it is the solution of a desperate last resort. Because all other solutions have been taken away.

               

“It’s the violent kids! This never happened in my day!”:  A woman with a violent and abusive spouse of several years lives in an environment of isolation and fear, and one day she kills him while he sleeps. There is a precedent in law to allow her to claim “battered wife defence” and lessen or even mitigate her actions as a murderer. Yet a child, with even greater reduced capacity may live under the same conditions and when they snap, and resort to murder they are branded as monsters and prosecuted and derided to the fullest extent of the law. We are often gripped by the notion that children are not somehow “fully human” and therefore not afforded the rights and responsibilities of a functioning adult. Consider how many times people simply take objects from children without asking, contradict them without remorse, or force the child to do something they don’t want to “for their own good”, now imagine trying to do the same to an adult.  When a child acts in a way that we find to be horrific, this tendency to not view them as people is magnified considerably, they stop being human, or even second-class citizens and become monsters, and monsters exist to be destroyed and derided, not understood and sympathised with.

This is a variation on “the youth of today” argument that has existed for as long as civilization: That somehow standards are slipping among the young and they are therefore flawed, morally bankrupt and shameful to the older generation. If it’s possible to hold an entire generation responsible for the acts of a handful of it’s fringe elements, then I am happy to declare that all people over 50 as serial sexual predators thanks to the current actions of sleazy producers in Hollywood.

                “It’s the violent video games!” : Rather than have me verbally castrate this argument, let’s look at the numbers. Over 80million copies of GTA5 have been sold as of April 2017. This is a game that lets you gleefully murder your way through faux Los Angeles with wild abandon, you can curb-stomp, stab, shoot, bomb and tea-bag your way through hordes of innocent bystanders should this take your fancy. You can also play a round of golf, do some yoga, put on a fashion show and go parachuting. Let’s assume that a small fraction of these sales (say 1%) fall into the hands of people under 18 (as this is an 18rated game) that’s 800,000 kids playing GTA5 without adequate parental supervision. If computer games truly cause the “Violent rampage berserker” response to activate in a young child’s developing mind, I am pretty sure we’d have school shootings constantly.  Even with the depressing frequency of shooting as they are, suggesting that they are in any way statistically significant to the number of children who play violent games is stupidity of the worst kind. If your argument is that it may somehow contribute to an already unstable individual, then you may congratulate yourself and award your face a small smug smile, before wiping it off and replacing it with a gawping gasp of realisation. You see; if somebody is in a disturbed and violent state of mind they will seek out the media to realize these feelings, they won’t somehow manifest feelings from nowhere by being exposed to media around them.  It won’t “make them worse” if anything the vicarious enjoyment of living out their inner sinister desires may delay the day they decide to walk out onto the street for a quick game of “collect all the spleens,” so while it does indeed contribute to a disturbed state of mind, it is not necessarily a negative contribution.

                “It’s the effect of taking God out of schools!” : Let’s compare the number of serial killers/murderers who were on a mission from God with the number of school shootings… No wait; let’s just presume that young boys and girls, hiding under their desks at the sound of screams and gunfire weren’t crying, praying, and begging for God to help them as they listened to their teachers and classmates die, because it was against school rules to pray in school.

               

                Okay I’m done for now, the next update will look at the psychology of a school shooter, but that’s a pretty big order, hence this being a two-parter.  If you really want to make a difference to these horrible events, I’d encourage you to avoid “Simple solutions,” Scapegoats, and “Quick fixes” and instead entertain the idea that this is the result of something that will require more than hasty legislation, armed schoolteachers, or sex-segregated classrooms to fix.