Canadians are once again sadly familiar with the horror that follows from a rampage school shooting. The injured and the terrified in Montreal will never be the same; the rest of us are left shaken, wondering what pushes a young man over the abyss into mass murder.
That was the question that drove my research team into action in 2002, when we began studying these kinds of tragedies in the United States. We learned a lot about what prompts them, why no one sees them coming despite ample evidence that something awful is afoot, and what might be done to prevent them.
Rampage school shootings are never spontaneous. The two shootings my team studied in Westside, Arkansas, and Heath, Kentucky, were planned over a period of months. The shooters were not quiet about their intentions, and in this, they were typical. Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, then 13 and 11, in Westside, and Michael Carneal, then 14, in Heath, let fly with dozens of hints, ranging from vague comments like, "You'll see who lives or dies on Monday" to more specific warnings to friends to "stay away from the school lobby" before they, too, gunned down innocent students and teachers.
This Montreal episode was preceded by postings on a Goth website promising action by an "angel of death" posing with guns. This was a very public proclamation, complete with pictures of the shooter with a shotgun balanced on his shoulders. While this shooter is somewhat older than those we studied, I suspect that when we examine his history, we'll find a similar profile.
Why do school shooters broadcast their intentions? They are trying to pique the attention of people they hope will embrace them as friends, but who have typically denied them the social status they crave. Shooters have spent years trying to plug themselves into peer groups that repeatedly reject them. They are not loners; they are failed joiners who have experienced exclusion on a daily basis. Some end up attaching themselves to other socially marginal cliques and this becomes the "last stand," their final attempt to find a place in the fraught world of the youth pecking order. Perhaps this is what the Montreal shooter was looking for in the Web-based "vampire" community.
Michael Carneal desperately wanted the acceptance of the Goth group in his Kentucky high school, even though they barely tolerated his presence. The more he talked about taking over the school and shooting people, the more their ears perked up. It was this attention and approval Michael was after. He wanted to be transformed from a dweeb into a darkly notorious figure. But once he announced his intentions to the Goths, he risked the ultimate failure if he declined to go through with his deadly plot. The morning of the shooting, he pushed himself past his own ambivalence, repeating to himself, "You have to do this."
School shooters are virtually never the hell-raisers that teachers and other authority figures finger as problems. They fly below the radar screen that captures egregious troublemakers, building up low-level but periodic infractions that tend not to register in disciplinary records. Mitchell Johnson, one of the two shooters in Westside, was sent to in-school suspension for wearing a forbidden baseball cap, where he impressed the detention supervisor as an angry boy with revenge in mind. But most teachers thought of Mitchell as one of the most polite and courteous kids in his school, the boy mostly likely to say "Yes, sir" or "No, ma'am." These conflicting images made it hard to piece together a coherent picture of him until it was too late.
While the Dawson College case occurred in Canada's second-largest city, Westside and Heath are rural towns, hours away from cities, and this is by far the most typical locale for a rampage shooting in the U.S. In smaller places like these, everyone really does know your name. If a young person steps out of line, some adult is likely to get on the phone to let his mother know about it. How is it that in communities that are this high in "social capital," such murderous trouble could be brewing and no adult was the wiser?
It turns out that there were warning signs of trouble outside of school. Andrew Golden was known as a menace on the block. He did terrible things to cats. Michael Carneal repeatedly told his Lutheran Bible study class that the best solution to ethical and social dilemmas was to get a bazooka and blow somebody away. Did anyone ever come forward to tell the families about these odd behaviours? No. In communities where people live next door through three generations, neighbours worry about losing friendships and starting feuds. So they keep their observations to themselves and don't come forward.
Hence, neither in the school nor in the community is the evidence of mounting trouble getting to the people who could do the most to stop a plot in its tracks. Young people don't come forward when they hear threats because they worry that their concerns will not be kept in confidence and what they hear is often too ambiguous to interpret with certainty. If the cost is high -- to their reputation or their friendships -- and the signal is noisy, it makes more sense to stay quiet.
The U.S. Secret Service is in the business of profiling rare events and has concluded that we will never be able to predict who will become a school shooter. We cannot create a profile that will capture the variations of these individuals' backgrounds. What we can do is encourage kids to back off on the bullying and harassment that sends school shooters over the edge. And we can think again about the images of manhood that promote violence or convince a teenage boy that if he isn't the captain of the football team, he is a worthless misfit.
Most of all, we should direct our attention to increasing the probabilities that more people will come forward, while we work harder at curtailing the peer pressures that produce shooters in the first place.
Katherine S. Newman is a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.