I FEEL REJECTED: ALIENATION AND SOCIAL CONNECTION IN THE PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Communication, Culture and Technology By Mihika Sapru, B.A. Washington, DC April 22, 2019 Copyright 2019 by Mihika Sapru All Rights Reserved ii I FEEL REJECTED: ALIENATION AND SOCIAL CONNECTION IN THE PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS Mihika Sapru, B.A. Thesis Advisor: Leticia Bode, Ph.D. ABSTRACT The media have long perpetuated the stereotype of school shooters as disaffected loners. This has become the default narrative following an attack, even in the absence of supporting evidence. Disaffection and isolation are manifestations of social alienation–a psychosocial phenomenon. The media discourse and academic literature both suggest that social alienation in the lives of these gunmen is worthy of further exploration. This paper asks: What types of social alienation do school shooters express in their own words? Do they also express social connection, and if so, how? And finally, are there specific examples of thematic patterns and vocabulary that are used when communicating social alienation? These questions are resolved through a three-part qualitative content analysis of the personal narratives of nineteen rampage school shooters. The first part of the analysis applies a model of alienation developed by social psychologist Melvin Seeman to the corpus. This model breaks alienation into six elements: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, self-estrangement, cultural estrangement, and social isolation. The corpus is also analyzed for references to social connection in the second part of the analysis. The third part of the study is an inductive analysis that resulted in the creation of a thematic framework that is grounded in the lexicon of school shooters. Ten categories were created to reflect how the shooters convey alienation. iii While every shooter in my analysis expressed alienation in some form, no two shooters expressed the same combination of elements. Fourteen of the nineteen sources studied included some form of social connection, too. The media rarely shows this side of the shooters, sacrificing nuance in favor of perpetuating the myth of the disaffected loner. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................ 6 School shootings and the media ...................................................................................... 6 What is a ‘school shooting’? .......................................................................................... 9 Why alienation? ............................................................................................................ 11 What exactly is alienation? ........................................................................................... 15 The shooters in their own words ................................................................................... 19 School shooting prevention and shooters’ writings ...................................................... 23 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY .................................................................................... 26 CHAPTER 3: APPLYING SEEMAN’S MODEL OF ALIENATION ............................ 38 Powerlessness ............................................................................................................... 38 Meaninglessness .......................................................................................................... 41 Normlessness ................................................................................................................ 44 Social isolation .............................................................................................................. 47 Self-estrangement ......................................................................................................... 50 Cultural estrangement ................................................................................................... 52 CHAPTER 4: SOCIAL CONNECTION .......................................................................... 56 CHAPTER 5: THE LEXICON OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS ............................................ 62 Social hierarchies in school life .................................................................................... 64 Insignificance ............................................................................................................... 65 Supreme power over others .......................................................................................... 66 Societal control ............................................................................................................. 66 Ideological justifications ............................................................................................... 67 Martyrdom .................................................................................................................... 69 Prolonged and unrelenting humiliation ......................................................................... 70 Emotional stagnation ................................................................................................... 71 Reaching breaking point ............................................................................................... 71 Preemptive attempts to control the post-attack narrative .............................................. 72 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 74 Limitations .................................................................................................................... 75 Future research ............................................................................................................. 78 Implications ................................................................................................................... 78 Ethical considerations for responsible research ............................................................ 80 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................. 82 v LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 Synthesized definitions of the six facets of alienation from Dean, Mau and Seeman ............................................................................................................................. 16 Table 2.1 Source type and word count ............................................................................. 29 Table 2.2 About the shooters ............................................................................................ 33 Table 2.3 Coding table for initial analysis ........................................................................ 35 Table 4.1 Examples of social connection in the personal narratives of school shooters . 57 Table 5.1 The lexicon of school shooters: emotional vs. “rational” justifications .......... 63 Table 5.2 The lexicon of school shooters: thematic framework and definitions ............. 63 Table 5.3 Social hierarchies in school life ....................................................................... 65 Table 5.4 Insignificance .................................................................................................... 65 Table 5.5 Supreme power over others .............................................................................. 66 Table 5.6 Societal control ................................................................................................. 67 Table 5.7 Ideological justifications .................................................................................. 68 Table 5.8 Martyrdom ....................................................................................................... 69 Table 5.9 Prolonged and unrelenting humiliation ............................................................ 70 Table 5.10 Emotional stagnation ...................................................................................... 71 Table 5.11 Reaching breaking point ................................................................................ 72 Table 5.12 Preemptive attempts to control the post-attack narrative ................................ 73 vi “I’m not what the media says I should be.” -Jon Romano vii Introduction There is a crisis in the United States of America. This crisis is the emergence of a cultural script that instructs young people–overwhelmingly young men–that one possible solution to the struggles they are facing is to bring weapons to school and devastate their communities. We know that–statistically speaking–school shootings are rare. And yet, the destruction they cause is profound and far-reaching. Worse still, experts believe that future shooters with fame-seeking tendencies will “innovate” more shocking and disturbing rampages in their search for infamy, with these attacks becoming more deadly to outdo prior attacks and ensure they cannot be ignored by the media (Lankford, 2016, p.127). Perhaps because of the depravity of this particular breed of mass murder, school shootings have become media spectacles (Frymer, 2009). Beyond the initial rush to cover the incident while the shooter is still active and share the human