In Search of Meaning: Are School Rampage Shootings Random and Senseless Violence?

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Joel Best's (1999) notion of random violence and applies his concepts of pointlessness, patternlessness, and deterioration to the reality about multiple-victim school shootings gleaned from empirical research about the phenomenon. Best describes how violence is rarely random, as scholarship reveals myriad observable patterns, lots of discernable motives and causes, and often far too much fear-mongering over how bad society is getting and how violent we are becoming. In contrast, it is vital that the media, scholars, and the public better understand crime patterns, criminal motivations, and the causes of fluctuating crime rates. As an effort toward such progress, this article reviews the academic literature on school rampage shootings and explores the extent to which these attacks are and are not random acts of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Homicide
• mass murder
• random violence
• school rampage
• school shootings

Author Note

Eric Madfis, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where his research focuses on theoretical criminology, the sociology of deviance, mass murder, hate crime, school shootings, and the school-to-prison pipeline. His work has been published in American Behavioral Scientist, Critical Criminology, Homicide Studies, Journal of Hate Studies, Men and Masculinities, The Social Science Journal, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, and in numerous edited volumes. He recently completed a book entitled The Risk of School Rampage (2014, Palgrave Macmillan) that explores how threats of multiple-victim rampage shootings are assessed and prevented in American public schools.