Inside the minds of school shooters.
My country, ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From ev’ry mountainside
Let gunshots ring!
https://fox4kc.com/news/olathe-east-hs-shooting-videos-audio-inside-the-school/
March 4,2022
Just after 10:30 this morning, Kansas Police Department responded to shots being fired at Olathe East High School. Audio of the security resource officer can be heard on the link above giving details of who had been shot. Three, adult males were shot: the security resource officer, the principal, and the suspect. Two critical. One stable. It’s believed that the suspect was a student who attended Olathe East High School.
According to a CNN tally, this shooting marks as the twelfth school shooting on an American K-12 campus in year 2022. Twelfth. In three months, the American children have already experienced twelve shootings. So, I ask you, is it freedom that’s ringing in our hallways… or gunshots?
Why?
That’s what many parents and citizens of this community are asking this evening. Why did this happen? It’s a question we all find ourselves asking when once again our sense of security for the most innocent is threaten by a senseless act.
Psychologists for years have studied signs and symptoms to look out for in children who show potential for re-creating heinous acts through mass destruction, in hopes of saving many souls from future terrorizing events.
The Trinity of Reasons:
*The McDonald Triad
“Threat to kill,” a 1963 article published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, highlighted John Marshall McDonald’s founding on three common traits seen among sociopaths and the indications of their importance. These were:
1.) Pyromania (attracted to fires and produce fires)-predicts violent and antisocial adulthood
2.) Cruelty to animals- shows a lack of empathy to a defenseless being.
3.) Enuresis or bedwetting- creates low self-confidence which encourages an increase in discomfort emotionally and psychologically.
According to McDonald, any two of these traits present in a youth served as a predictor of “violent tendencies in relation to serial offenses.”
*Triunal Rigidity
Triunal Rigidity, a concept adapted from neuroscientist, Paul MacLean’s Triune Brain model, looks at the brain in three parts: upper (thinking), middle (emotional), and lower (fight/flight). The idea is each part of the brain becomes lock onto the other, while a fixation on an external goal or mission is created, making it close to impossible to redirect. Coupled with bad genetics and trauma due to external social pressures, this can become dangerous for society.
The last category of three was giving by psychologist Dr. Peter Langman, who believed that any youth explemfing these traits have the greatest ability to become school shooters. And these are kids who are narcissistic and sadistic, kids who have hallucinations and or delusions, and kids who have been abused and or traumatize.
A trait of loneliness was also seen in school shooting suspects. This type of loneliness is different from seen in introverts because these individuals are lonely by force and not choice. They long to fit in, but don’t fit the normalcy of society, leaving them on the outskirts as spectators.
| “I’ve had to rot in loneliness. It’s not fair.”
Elliot Roger, 22 was a product of narcissistic personality disorder. In a video he uploaded to YouTube before his massacre, he complained that he was a virgin at 22 and life was not fair. He also expressed that since women didn’t reciprocate feelings in choosing him, they “did not deserve the right to choose who to mate with and breed with…” He believed the world deserved his massacre, “just for the crime of living a better life than him.” After posting this video, he went into a UC Santa Barbra sorority house, killing six.
Eric Harris, too like Roger, had a grandiose idea of himself. Grandiose idea of self is a key symptom of narcissistic personality disorder. Harris believed he was a sort of “messiah,” deciding who should live or die. He was one of the killers in the tragic Columbine shooting.
Harris’s partner, Dylan Klebold didn’t illustrate grandiose thinking as much as Eric but showed a sense of longing. His desire for human connection and his inability to connect caused him to feel displaced, encouraging him to partner with Harris in one of the U.S. most horrific school shootings.
Alaska’s only school shooter to date, Evan Ramsey, claimed to kill two classmates due to bullying. According to Ramsey, “What I wanted was to get people to leave me alone.”
This article is no way designed to justify the actions of school shooters because actions of school shooters are never justified, whatever the reason may be. Answers searched for by psychologists are merely a way to help society have an answer to why?
Why would a youth decide to end lives and shatter legacies? Is there something we can do as a society to prevent future shootings in our schools? Could we possibly save those future menaces to society before they reach a breaking point?
While the mindset of school shooters and prevention is relatively new, it’s still unclear of the proper steps to take to reduce and eliminate the tragedies completely. Now is the time, for each and every citizen to lay aside politics, no matter which side we may sway to, and figure out as a whole what must be done. If we want our children to be able to sing ‘let freedom ring,’ we must first guarantee their freedom of security.
Links to the sources quoted in the article:
Inside the Mind of a School Shooter | Psychology Today
American Narcissism and Mass Shooters | Psychology Today
School Shooters On Why They Did It — Listverse
Inside the Mind of a School Shooter | Psychology Today
Why kids kill: Inside the minds of school shooters. — PsycNET (apa.org)
