School Shootings: Why They Do It

At the request of the National Research Council, my research team spent two years studying the rampage school shootings of the late 1990s, interviewing everyone from teachers and principals to parents and acquaintances of the perpetrators and the victims. Our findings surprised many, including us, for they upended a lot of received wisdom about why and where rampage shootings happen.

The first thing to know is that initial media accounts are often dead wrong, often because they labor under misconceptions about rampage shootings. And since we have very little information about the accused Perry Hall High School shooter, Robert Wayne Gladden Jr. — and especially about events that may have preceded Monday's tragedy — only time (and careful investigation) will tell as to whether the general scenario applies in this case.

But looking at what we learned from a large body of evidence, we know a lot about why these things happen. It helps, of course, to carefully examine the kind of violence we are trying to understand: rampage shootings, which are different than targeted attacks. They are random in their impact, and the shooter often has no idea who has been hurt until he or she is sitting in a jail cell, if indeed the shooter survives at all. It is the institution or the group that is under assault: the school, the community, teens as a whole.

Sadly, the shooter is usually trying to solve what he (and it is virtually always a he) sees as a serious problem: social acceptance. Rampage shootings are generally the last act, not the first, in a series of attempts to change a damaged reputation. The shooter is rarely a loner. He is, rather, a "failed joiner," someone who has tried, time and again, to find a niche, a clique, a social group that will accept him, but his daily experience is one of rejection, friction and marginality. These experiences are amplified by social media: Facebook and its electronic cousins speed the damage done by teasing, stigma or outright bullying.

So is the shooter reacting in anger? That is not what we found. Instead, the perpetrator is looking to change the definition of his public personality from "loser" to a notorious anti-hero. The "Trench Coat Mafia" in Columbine had an image in mind, and they weren't its authors. They had plenty of popular culture to lean on that connects masculinity with violence. Those movie magazines that feature Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, those rippling muscles and outsized shotguns — they are the epitome of what young men believe we admire. When rampage shooters kill or maim, sadly, they are hardly giving any thought to who they will hurt. They are thinking about how a dramatic act will change the way their classmates think about them later.