An Unpopular Opinion on What Causes School Shootings

Before I hit an open nerve, let me just say: I'm not writing this to oppose whatever action you feel like the country ought to take right now. I understand you're worked up and I don't want to argue with you.

If you want to try some type of gun control, I will not stand in your way. If you want to tax me a little more so the country can provide more mental health services, you are welcome to a share of my wages. If you want me to make personal efforts to reach out and include people who feel marginalized, I will do so (not out of fear that someone in my circle of influence will snap and become a mass shooter, because that's a weird thing to think about, but because I genuinely like people and feel like everybody does better if I can help smooth over the friction of human interaction a little for someone else).

Look: I'm willing to try it all, even if I don't actually think it will do much to reduce, let alone end, school shootings.

If you will give me a moment to be honest, though, I will admit to you: I think the main cause of American school shootings is the way Americans talk about school shootings. And if I had a magic wand to wave on this issue, I would use it to convince people to change that.

Let me back up and lay out my case before you dismiss my conclusion.

It seems like we can all agree that a school or other mass shooting has three essential elements:

1) Someone who hates the world and wants to die.
2) A gun.
3) The idea that shooting a bunch of people with a gun would be an effective way to show the world how much you hate it.

I've seen a lot of people who talk about elements #1 and #2 above. After I review them quickly, I want to talk about the typically neglected element #3.

Mental Health Options

One school of thought on how to prevent school shootings is centered around changing the shooter. If no one hated the world and wanted to die, the thinking goes, then no one would go shoot a bunch of innocent people and get themselves killed in the process.

So far, so good...but can I get people to stop hating the world and wanting to die? That seems like a question that philosophers, saints, and psychologists have been wrestling with for an awfully long time.

Could we do it by funding more professional psychiatric care? Maybe. A little bit. Counselling does make a significant difference in many people's lives--but it's not like everyone who has ever gotten counselling or other psychiatric attention acts as a good citizen thereafter. Even if we could get everyone who hates the world and wants to die into counselling, we can't come close to guaranteeing that they would listen to the counselor or that the experience would change them.

And how do we figure out who needs intervention? If there were a reliable test to diagnose murderous world-hatred, nations, employers, and school counselors alike would be all over that thing. But there's not. So how reliable can we be at getting at-risk people into counselling? It's tough.

One solution offered by many religious groups is to treat everybody as a risk and get them in for regular counselling. At least weekly in church, though multiple times a day seems like a good way to play things safe. The only problem with that approach is that you have to mobilize basically your whole community of believers to come close to meeting demand, and we're not terribly well trained. God himself has to cover for a lot of the empty spaces, and he seems to have a hard time getting through to people, too.

So there are some big limitations on our ability to adequately tackle mental health. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it's one of those big, endless tasks people are always getting tired of. Do we have other options?

Well: as many commentators have pointed out, people in lots of countries hate the world and want to die. But they don't seem to carry out mass shootings anything like as often as Americans do.

Gun Control Options

Which leads us to element #2. The main focus of debate after a school shooting seems to be on this one. In what is either common sense or totally circular reasoning, we can state with 100% confidence that every mass shooting involves a gun. Otherwise it would be a school stabbing or a campus bombing or an anthrax attack. Etcetera ad naseum.

Would gun control measures stop mass shootings? My Facebook friends are passionately split over this issue.

One thing seems clear. If we could get rid of the supply of guns altogether, we would, at a minimum, replace mass shootings with another form of mass violence. Quite possibly with a less lethal form--though unless you follow news about China, you might be surprised how many people die in mass stabbings.

One immediate problem, though, is that most people see the total eradication of firearms as either unattainable or undesirable. Because we generally accept that we won't get rid of guns altogether, most proposals involve trying to limit the supply of a certain type of gun or taking measures to keep a certain type of gun out of the hands of a certain type of person (who, going back to element #1, might be at risk for hating the world and wanting to die). What if we made, for example, a rule that said a person who had certain, measurable risk factors had to wait a certain amount of time before purchasing a certain type of gun? Or ammunition? And maybe had a stiffer penalty if they got caught stealing or borrowing one?

It can get a little Rube Goldbergy at some point to think about how many steps there are between a prospective rule and a potential tragedy.

Gun control measures might make a real difference addressing other problems. Fewer guns and more training have a good chance of reducing the number of children who play with guns and shoot each other. I've seen compelling arguments that wait times could help reduce the suicide rate. But while feasible gun control measures might have a distant trickle-down effect on mass violence, they hardly seem to be the golden ticket to give everyone what they want: which is to live in a world where they don't have to think about violence against the innocent anymore.

Which leads us to element #3 in my list above. Assuming that there will always be people in your society who hate the world and want to die, and assuming that there will be guns lying around in homes and stores and wherever else guns lie these days, a mass shooting still requires the idea that shooting innocents is an effective way to show the world hatred.

Concept Contagion

I suspect that the availability of this idea is a major feature in the American cycle of mass shootings. We have had people who hate the world and want to die for a long time. We have had a lot of guns for a long time. The number of school shootings seem to have increased more recently, though, as the idea has permeated our culture.

School shootings are rare enough that I'm not aware of any research on the role of narrative availability in contributing to them, but we do have a substantial body of research on "suicide contagion." If you haven't heard of this idea, I strongly recommend looking it up. The gist is this: lots of people may be depressed enough to attempt suicide at any given time, but many won't actually get the point of making and carrying out a plan for a suicide attempt on their own. When people hear about another suicide, though--whether it's in their school, their community, or in media coverage of a celebrity suicide--the idea becomes more available and the suicide rate increases.

I did some research on this after a friend of mine committed suicide. A year or so before it happened, she'd worked with a theater company I was helping run. So as I processed the news of her death, I'd considered writing a play about suicide. As I started doing research for the project, I ran across a list of best practices for covering suicide. You can take a look at one now: I'll even give you a link.

You can see that there are ways to talk about suicide that have been demonstrated to increase the risk of contagion. As I processed them at the time, I decided not to write a locally timely play about it at all. The idea was already in the community at that moment, and I didn't want to get my storytelling wrong in a way that increased the suicide contagion risk. A while later, we did a play that did engage with the suicide in a way I would judge, based on guidelines, to be helpful: at a point of deep personal isolation and despair, the protagonist considered killing herself--and then didn't. And went on dealing, day by day, with the pain of life. We gave our attention to a story that could resonate with someone feeling a sense of isolation and despair, but one that highlighted the ongoing battle of life, not one that inadvertently highlighted or even glamorized self-harm.

Again: I don't know for sure if the psychology of copycat suicide and copycat mass violence is the same. But let's assume it is.

Research tells us that the copycat risk increases with the "amount, duration, and prominence of coverage." Guidelines say to avoid coverage that "describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/graphic headlines or images" and "repeated/extensive coverage [that] sensationalizes or glamorizes a death." The website I linked to above specific cautions against "describing recent suicides as an 'epidemic,' 'skyrocketing,' or other strong terms."

How do we hold up in terms of the media we consume, share, and create (keeping in mind that even a social media status is a kind of media)? Put another way: assuming there are people in the country now who already (or will soon) hate the world and want to die and have access to firearms, how much have we increased the chance that they will get the idea to go shoot a bunch of innocent people?

For amount, duration, and prominence of coverage, we fail miserably. We can't seem to keep ourselves from obsessing. We unwittingly imply that if you ever really want the world to notice you and how much you hate it, there is an easy recipe.

As far as describing the method and using dramatic/graphic headlines: we are awful. I can't even count how many infographics I've seen with little pictures of guns to show the number or feature a given model's role in mass shootings. We're not just handing people a script for this: we are giving them careful, detailed illustrations.

What about glamorizing? You could argue that we never glamorize mass shootings in the way that some coverage or fiction glamorizes suicide. And yet: what if the appeal of mass violence is not to be missed, but to be feared? Again, the way we talk about mass shootings tells the at-risk person in no uncertain terms that this is a way to be remembered--and furthermore, as a way to be remembered as someone who had power. During the shooting, power over victims and potential victims. And after the shooting?  Power continuing to play out in national conversation, in nightmares, in haunting parents' relationships with their own children. We fail the dark glamor test every time.

Finally (of the handful of guidelines I picked off the page at a glance--not finally in terms of actually keeping up with research), how are we doing in terms of how we talk about frequency? Have we used careful, neutral ways to discuss data rather than sensational ones? Or did we trip over ourselves trying to show how common this is? My guess is that going out of one's way to increase the total number of school shootings by counting accidental discharges of firearms on college campuses does not qualify as a best practice here.

Look. I know you feel bad when kids get killed. It's awful. It's awful when it happens from cancer, in accidents, and definitely when it comes unexpectedly through violence at school.

But what if our best shot at changing things is to change the way we talk?

Maybe you can, in your own way, do something. Maybe you can refuse to share sensationalized coverage. Maybe you can rethink the unintended side effects of tone and style in your political speech. It could make a difference: America had a long rash of campus and other bombing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those types of incidents stopped happening with the same frequency once they receded from national conversation. Forms of violence do go in and out of style.

And maybe we can do better than just swapping one form of violence for another. Maybe, even with millennia of conditioning against us, we can try to respond less viscerally to violence. Maybe we can learn to frame it as sad and pathetic rather than terrifying when someone resorts to force to try to lash out at others. It's a long shot, I know, but I think it would make a difference. I think we could teach people to be less violent if we could teach ourselves to be less impressed by violence.

I don't think we're going to have a world where no one hates the world and wants to die. But if we could give more attention to the devastating ways people have poured their pain into their music and poetry and novels and less attention when someone resorts to copycat acts of violence, then maybe (just maybe) people would think less of physical force when they decide to give their demons a voice.