Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Community Perspective
FAIRBANKS — I was doing research at a high school in Bethel when rumors spread about two boys bringing guns into the school. While I don’t remember all the details about what happened, I do remember that all the students (and me) were sent to the balcony and waited to see if the shootings materialized. Luckily for all of us, nothing happened and we could all go about our business.
This experience was in my mind when the the deadliest school shooting in the United States took place at Columbine High School, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 15 students (including themselves) as well as a teacher and wounded 21 other students.
The topic on everyone’s mind was “Why?” Speculation was rampant. The students came from good families.
Was it the influence of violent video games, the bullying the two boys had experienced, mental health problems, the Goth subculture and so on?
Any time there there is such a such a school killing, the press broadcasts it over and over. Schools institute foolish policies in reaction to it — like the New Jersey case where kindergartners were suspended from school for playing “cops and robbers” at recess and using their fingers as guns. They call this “zero tolerance.”
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal written in November 2013 by Aria Schulman, we should stop focusing on the shooters and their individual problems. We will just create what researchers call the “contagion effect” where suicides (and school shooters) spread to others.
Instead, we should first try to understand the basic psychology of school shooters —and then we will know how to reduce such school shootings.
According to the research, school shooters have a signature psychology. They want glory. They want people to remember them. Some compete to be the “baddest” of all other school shooters. Like terrorists, they are acting out a drama of anger and revenge which other potential school shooters can imitate.
Frank Robertz, a German criminologist who founded the Institute for Violence Prevention, points out in the journal Scientific American (August-September, 2007), that killings by school shooters (almost always male) across the globe have increased. The killings are more ritualized with some young men enacting similar scenarios and even referring directly to the Columbine shootings.
When we publicize these horrendous acts, we actually increase the likelihood that other young men will see school shootings as an outlet for their own black moods, revenge and frustration.
The media follow a formula, “When it bleeds, it leads.” School shootings are perfect examples. Their intense coverage, many psychologists believe, actually gives these disturbed young men a template to follow.
What would be far more likely to lower the rate of school shootings, Schulman argues, would be to take away the publicity that these school shooters seek. The media should minimize the glory that school shooters receive.
Instead of giving the killers publicity, the media need to relegate them to the back pages of the newspaper. Rather than emphasizing the killers, the media should emphasize the effects on the families of those killed. Don’t make the shooters look like heroes.
As Schulman puts it, “If we deprive the (shooters) of the ability to make his internal psychodrama a shared public reality, if we can break this ritual of violence and our own ritual response, then we might just banish these dreadful and also too frequent acts to the realm of vile fantasy.”
The idea is that many school murders are theater. If the audience doesn’t show up, the actors have less reason to perform.
Judith Kleinfeld, a longtime columnist for the Daily News-Miner, holds a doctorate from Harvard and is a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.