2008 Woodie Awards
How does one mass shooting beget others?
By Scott Canon - McClatchy Newspapers
Issue date: 2/21/08 Section: News
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As the bizarrely awful becomes a recurring tragedy, troubled souls see how someone else shot his way out of a bind, crime and mental health specialists say.
One man's burst of twisted glory doesn't exactly prompt a copycat crime, they say. Still, it at least makes more plausible the possibility of grabbing attention, revenge or whatever wild escape shooters hope to find by gunning down the defenseless on their own sprint to suicide.
"The shooter in the news serves as a role model for a kind of behavior that wasn't in the viewer's repertoire a moment earlier," said Park Dietz, a psychiatrist and instructor at the FBI academy at Quantico, Va. "Suddenly, it's brought into his consciousness that there's another way. You can get even ..."
Theories to explain the shootings run as varied as the killers. Bullied boys obsessed with violence and infamy. A mental illness unchecked. Irrational anger. A life in freefall. Who knows why?
The temptation to find a motivational thread is as tempting as it is illusive.
"Nobody's an expert in this," said Steven Mandracchia, a forensic psychologist at Western Missouri Mental Health Center. "People want answers. People want explanations. But the reality is there are no explanations. There's no way to conceptualize irrational acts."
But those who study crime and the mind say the people who unload their weapons in school cafeterias, college campuses or the office don't necessarily share much more than tactics. If one mass shooting begets another, it's largely in the way that each bloody rampage makes clear the possibility of another.
Inspiration abounds.
The killing rage by two students at Columbine High School in April 1999 that left 12 dead and 23 wounded in Littleton, Colo., stands out in American culture as the dawning of a frightening age of school shootings. Yet it was preceded a year before by the work of two middle school students who shot to death four girls and a teacher and injured nine more.
Before that came the slaughter by a Chinese graduate student at the University of Iowa in 1991, when he executed five of his academic advisers on a cold November afternoon after he felt cheated out of a physics prize.
More recently, Seung-hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University last spring. A town gadfly opened fire this month at a city council meeting in Kirkwood, Mo., and killed five. A woman - in the sort of crime usually limited to boys and men - went into a classroom at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge last week and shot two dead.
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Bonnie
posted 2/21/08 @ 6:06 PM MST
Also of note is that all or nearly all of the shooters have a history of prescribed psychotropic drugs. This needs to be mentioned FAR more often than it is. (Continued…)
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