Psychological Profiles of School Shooters: Positive Directions and One Big Wrong Turn

Abstract

A wave of school shootings in the mid- to late 1990s led to great interest in attempts to “profile” school shooters with an eye both on identifying imminent perpetrators and preventing further incidents. Given that school shootings are generally rare, and many perpetrators are killed during their crimes, the availability of school shooters for research is obviously limited. Not surprisingly, initial profiles of school shooters were arguably of limited value. Although school shooting incidents, particularly by minors, have declined, some evidence has emerged to elucidate the psychological elements of school shooting incidents. School shooting incidents may follow extreme versions of etiological pathways seen for less extreme youth violence, and youthful school shooters appear more similar than different to adult perpetrators of mass shootings. The quest to understanding school shootings has led to several wrong turns, most notably the quixotic desire by politicians, advocates, and some scholars to link both school shootings and less extreme youth violence to playing violent video games, despite considerable and increasing evidence to the contrary.

KEYWORDS:

• School shootings
• youth violence
• aggression
• computer games
• video games

Notes

1. It is noted that this very term, while colloquially popular, is somewhat misleading, particularly as several of the incidents discussed in the paper are mass school knifings. However, the term “school shooter” here is used as a general collective term.

2. Original “video game violence” research of the 1980s and early 1990s even considered games such as Pac Man, Centipede, or Zaxxon as “violent” games. The notion that such games are contributors to youth violence would seem near comical now; however, studies based on these games are still taken seriously among some scholars and are regularly included in current meta-analytic reviews of video game research alongside studies of more graphic games such as Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, as if no difference existed.

3. The Ybarra et al. (2008) article presents something of a warning to scholars when reviewing video game research. From their Figure 2 it is quite clear that, controlling for other variables, video game violence had no correlational relationship with youth violence. However, reading the abstract of the same paper, no indication of this important finding is given.

4. Television violence research has likewise been highly controversial. See Freedman, 2002; Gauntlett, 2005; Grimes et al., 2008; or Savage & Yancey, 2008, for discussions.

5. One of the problems with the video game field is the degree to which not only politicians and activists but also some scholars have been willing to simply ignore any evidence that contrasts with their own views (see Ferguson, 2010, for a review of scholarly biases in the video game literature).

6. “Sarah Palin has blood on her hands!” was one blog post witnessed by the first author discussing the 2011 shooting of U.S. congress woman Gabrielle Giffords and many others attending a rally. The poster was condemning the vitriolic and hyperbolic state of political discourse in the United States, apparently with no sense of irony.