VU Research Portal School shootings Pfeifer, B. 2017 document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Link to publication in VU Research Portal citation for published version (APA) Pfeifer, B. (2017). School shootings: Existential concerns and implicit religion. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. E-mail address: [email protected] Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 Part one: Background of this study and overview of theoretical approaches of school shooting 1 2 1 About this research Since the middle of the 20th century, more than 160 school shootings have occurred worldwide, with several hundreds of victims killed and many others wounded. Many people wonder why and how these tragedies can happen. Many speculate, but what do we really know about these tragic incidents? Answers to these questions are urgently needed because they can inform prevention and response policies. We cannot act accurately when we are not informed correctly. “Tell me why, I don’t like Mondays, I wanna shoot the whole day down.” Unknown to many, perhaps, these iconic lines of the number one hit by Irish punk rock band Boomtown Rats (in the UK charts in 1979) actually refer to a school shooting. That year, Brenda Spencer killed two people at Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, California. When the police asked her why she fired a gun at teachers and students, she answered, “I don’t like Mondays.”1 But are school shootings truly that trivial and devoid of meaning? Regarding the impact of these events, the fact that the perpetrators plan the attacks over a period of time and accept possibly losing their own lives as a consequence means that one may assume that school shooters attach importance to their deeds and the guiding question of this study arises: What are the meanings attributed to school shootings? To answer this question, I analyzed in Part Two what meaning has been assigned to school shootings in the popular imagination. I was also looking for a creative, more out-of-the-box interpretation of the meaning of these events and therefore turned to popular culture, focusing on an analysis of movies about school shootings. In Part Three, I turned to the 1 “Sniping suspect had a grim goal,” The Milwaukee Journal, January 29, 1979, p. 33. 3 perpetrators. By analyzing egodocuments such as suicide letters or manifestos, I tried to “listen” to the school shooters themselves and the meaning they give to their deeds. Little is currently known about the motives of school shooters. Although they often leave manifestos or suicide letters behind, expressing their motivation, these messages have seldom been researched. Studies on school shootings mostly consider the psychological and social circumstances of the perpetrators in order to find a reliable profile to serve early detection and prevention. However, the available information about school shooters does not add up to a useful profile (O’Toole, 2002; Robertz, 2004; Vossekuil et al., 2002). This follows in part from the simple statistical logic that the number of school shootings is relatively low. Known shooters have different family backgrounds and educational histories, the socioeconomic context differs and their age varies considerably, between eleven and twenty-five years old (Langman, 2009). Nonetheless, based on previous incidents a number of characteristics can be identified. The majority of school shooters are male Caucasian keenly interested in weapons fond of presenting themselves in army clothes or black trench coats interested in violent movies or computer games (Kriek, van den Tillart, van Cooten, Timmer, Pfeifer, & Kobes, 2011). Obviously, these risk factors are applicable to a large number of people, and there is no reliable way to pick out the very few who will actually commit a school shooting. Therefore, it has to be concluded that at this stage profiling is not an appropriate method for preventing these attacks. Moreover, agreeing to a 4 list of characteristics to identify potential school shooters could, on the one hand, be dangerous, because warning signals of students who do not have the characteristics on this list could be overlooked, and, on the other hand, could stigmatize nonviolent students (O’Toole, 2002). But if profiling is not helpful, what method is, and what do we need to know about this phenomenon to prevent school shootings? Certainly, enlarging the body of knowledge of this phenomenon is important and relevant not only for social science but for everyone who deals with young people professionally or personally. Although no reliable profile of a school shooter exists, there does seem to be a popular image of the typical school shooter. Whenever a school shooting occurs, the media portray the perpetrator as a somewhat strange loner who had been bullied, and publish photos matching these assumptions. This creates stereotypes of school shooters and influences the popular perceptions of school shooters. To understand what these stereotypes are, as discussed in Chapter 3, I first identified a number of characteristics of school shooters based on media coverage. Second, I digitally asked an international panel of 142 individual education professionals, students and parents how typical these characteristics of school shooters are in their opinion. I argue that popular perceptions can be problematic because stereotypes and faulty perceptions hinder prevention possibilities. On the one hand, you could overlook a troubled youngster with violent fantasies just because he does not match the stereotype, and, on the other hand, you could stigmatize children as possibly dangerous because they happen to meet the stereotype. To illustrate this argument, I use an advertisement of the GSR Entrance Hall System titled “There is a threat disguised as a student.” Which one of these students should be identified as a threat? 5 Use of picture approved by Juliano B. Hennemann, SPR Agency, Novo Hamburgo, Brazil. Notably, the advertisers expected you to indicate the wrong student (which is the first student on the fourth row with a firearm in his hands). This advertisement problematizes popular perceptions of school shooters. 6 Identifying popular perceptions of school shooters and indicating to what extent the empirical evidence supports this perception leads to the first subquestion of this study: What are the popular perceptions of school shooters, how do these perceptions relate to empirical data and how do expressions of popular culture interpret the motives of school shooters? In order to answer these first questions, I have identified commonly- held beliefs about school shooters, and the extent to which this matches the empirical data. However, to truly deepen our understanding of school shooters, we need to put popular perceptions and statistics aside and start to listen to the perpetrators. What do they tell us about their motives? These mostly middle- class white boys with no history of extreme violence killed peers, friends, sometimes members of their family and often themselves. Considering the life- ending nature of this crime, a pressing question is what meaning they give to their own lives and the lives of others, and, conversely, to death. Fear of death is an existential concern; there is an instinctive fear of death in humans, from the most conscious level of human awareness to the deepest depths of the unconscious, which emerges in force during puberty (Yalom, 1980). Many of the analyses of warning signals, interpretations of motives, and risk-factors of becoming a school shooter fail to acknowledge that at least a number of shooters express clear and consistent existential messages of suffering or philosophical accounts of how they see the world and their place in it. As part of this project, school shooters’ struggle with existential concerns, such as loneliness and becoming an outcast were documented (Pfeifer & Ganzevoort, 2016). How far these existential concerns, as well as others, play a role in the genesis of a school shooting has never been studied, although such research can clearly deliver much-needed answers about the motives of school shooters. One 7 of the aims of the present study is to fill this gap. The next section describes what the term existential means in this study. 1.1 The Existential perspective This section does not aim to address existentialism as such but to frame the discussion about the existential dimension of school shootings. Obviously there is a lot to say about existentialism, but doing so would be beyond the subject of the present study. To make clear how existentialism is understood here, I use Reker’s (2000) understanding that “Existentialism is a philosophy that focuses on people’s attempts to make sense of their existence by assigning meaning to it and taking responsibility to act accordingly” (p. 40). The existential perspective, as addressed in this study, focuses on people’s attempt to make sense of their lives. Since school shootings always evoke the question of why they happened, many scholars have attempted to understand these attacks. However, despite numerous scientific approaches from scholars in sociology, psychology and criminology, a predictive understanding of school shootings has not been achieved to date.