As a Black kid, Jacob also experienced intense racial bullying at his nearly all-white high school and faced daily violent harassment. One of his classmates, “a cowboy guy [who] lived on a ranch, [made it] his hobby to see how many times he could call me a [N-word] before it pissed me off,” Jacob said.
Jacob became angry, depressed, and anxious, and was actively suicidal. He started cutting himself but said his teachers turned a blind eye.
His grandpa was a hunter who owned a lot of guns. They were behind a lock, in a cabinet, but Jacob knew where to find the key, and the ammunition was stored with the weapons. Jacob reported sitting in his living room sometimes, putting his grandpa’s shotgun in his mouth or under his chin to “dry-run” his death.
He was certainly traumatized, and he was in crisis; he also had the opportunity to commit a shooting and easy access to guns. Jacob didn’t just hate himself; he hated the people in his life who had made him feel the way he did. He decided that there was “only one way to take care of this,” so one morning he put one of his grandpa’s guns in his backpack and went to school with the intent to kill his classmates.
Jacob had spent his whole life feeling powerless, and to overcome the accompanying shame and frustration, he was strongly motivated to exploit whatever power opportunities he could lay his hands on. A gun and the will to murder are two of the purest forms of temporary, situational power. All he ever wanted was “to feel better, to feel safe,” and in choosing such a high-profile crime, he was reaching for one final chance to give his life meaning.
“It was like, the best day. It didn’t matter what anyone said or did. I held power over life and death in my backpack,” he told us. But as the day wore on, things weren’t living up to Jacob’s high expectations. Something was missing. There was no precedent, to his knowledge, for the type of violence he wanted to inflict, nowhere to look for models. It was 1998, and school shootings were still in the realm of far-fetched fantasy. The closest thing in Jacob’s mind was “Jeremy,” a Pearl Jam song about a real-life fifteen-year-old Texas boy who shot himself in front of his teacher and classmates in 1991.
Like Jeremy, Jacob expected to die that day, “maybe [in] a shootout with cops. Maybe shoot myself.” Unlike Jeremy, he wanted to kill his classmates first. But he was stuck on how to communicate his motive to the world. His goal was to “get people to stop hurting me or [to] acknowledge that I was being hurt.” But he knew that if he went through with the shooting, he’d be “just another Black kid who shot some white kids”—his message would be lost in translation. “I never even thought of writing a manifesto!” he exclaimed when we asked him. Of course he hadn’t—because no one had shown him how to do that yet.
Just a few months later, they did. The Columbine killers wrote the playbook for all future mass shooters by leaving behind legacy tokens of their act—multiple and detailed diaries filled with drawings, personal reflections, poems, violent rants, and kill lists, as well as “basement tapes” of their preparations for others to consume. They offered social proof of concept, sources for others to cite. And crucially, because of the timing of the internet, these items weren’t just filed away in court documents. They circulated. This is why Columbine is the one mass shooting against which all others are measured, and why Jacob never fired his gun.
—
If you look carefully at school shootings today, you will certainly see a pattern of ritual among them. School mass shooters tend to fit the mold of the Columbine shooters. They are either current or former students of the school, and, like the Columbine killers, they are young (fifteen and sixteen being the most common ages) white (76 percent) males (98 percent) with a disciplinary record or violent history who target suburban public high schools.
Curiously, college and university shootings look different. Like K–12 school shooters, they are insiders (78 percent are current or former students), but unlike their younger counterparts they are more similar to the image of the most high-profile shooter in this category, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter, who was a nonwhite immigrant motivated at least in part by psychosis. The nine college and university shooters in our database tended to be nonwhite (11 percent Black, 45 percent Asian, 33 percent white) males who targeted large, urban, public universities. A majority were immigrants, and psychosis played a role in 45 percent of their crimes.
Is this social proof at play? Hard to say, but what both K–12 shooters and college shooters shared was an interest in other mass shootings, notably Columbine, and a tendency either to leave behind messages about their crimes, such as videos or “manifestos,” or to incorporate an element of performance in their shootings, like a costume.
Like genre conventions in movies and pop culture, many mass shooters conform to expectations of what mass shooters do, mimicking those who came before, then adding their own flourishes. One mass shooting creates social proof for the next mass shooting and so on until, eventually, there is a generalized knowledge about mass shootings that resides in all of us. This script guides behavior and also tells participants what to expect—a mass shooting isn’t a mass shooting until it looks like a mass shooting. Social proof thus explains the preponderance of long black trench coats and even AR-15s in these events—the same props and weapons other shooters have used, thus giving them meaning beyond any intrinsic use.
You obviously can’t copy a previously unthinkable thing unless you see or hear about it first. Columbine was one of the most covered news events of the 1990s, receiving higher ratings on CNN than the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, and the death of Princess Diana, according to Nielsen. Columbine also left an indelible mark on pop culture. The shooting inspired Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, and countless true crime shows and podcasts; it was even made into a 2005 video game titled Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Artists ranging from rapper Eminem to indie pop band Foster the People have referenced Columbine in their songs, music videos, and lyrics.
Before Columbine, there was no accessible script for how mass shooters should behave, dress, and speak—no common knowledge.8 This is why many assume the Columbine shooters turned to fiction for inspiration. The Matrix was released in theaters exactly three weeks before Columbine, and there was a lot of speculation at the time that the shooters had evoked Neo, Keanu Reeves’s character, when they donned their trench coats and packed duffel bags full of weapons. The fact that the Columbine shooters referred to April 20, the day they murdered twelve students and one teacher, as “the holy morning of NBK”—a reference to Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone’s 1994 satire on the media’s obsession with and inadvertent glorification of violence—only added to the intrigue surrounding their crime.
Some pundits in search of easy causation blamed Columbine on violent video games, namely, because the shooters had enjoyed the popular first-person shooter game Doom. Today still, politicians and the media cite violent video games as an inducement to mass shootings. After a spate of shootings in August 2019, President Donald Trump called for an end to “gruesome and grisly video games.” However, according to our data, only about 14 percent of all mass shooters played violent video games, and in those cases, what they played had little bearing on their decision to pull the trigger. For every scientific study that has found an association between violent video game use and real-world aggression,9 there is a better study that has found no relationship whatsoever.10 Playing violent video games may well desensitize people to the horror of violence. Soldiers do train on first-person shooter games to overcome the natural aversion they have to blood and gore in a virtual environment before they confront it in real life. But, as the Supreme Court ruled in 2011, there is no evidence that violent video games cause real-life violence.
Perhaps the best way to think about the role of violent video games in mass shootings is as an accelerant. In 1977, master of horror Stephen King wrote a psychological thriller novel titled Rage under the pseudonym Richard Bach
man. The novel describes a high school shooting in which a young man kills his algebra teacher and holds his class hostage. At least four high school shootings between 1988 and 1997 came to vaguely resemble events in the book. After the book was found in possession of one of those shooters, King instructed his publishers to pull the book from publication. (It is now out of print.) The author explains that Rage “did not break” those boys or “turn them into killers.” Instead, “they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken.”11 Rage was an accelerant. After each of the four shooters had reached an identifiable crisis point, the book offered someone—albeit someone fictional—with whom they could identify and an imaginative framework for the idea of a shooting. Video games do the same, nothing more.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, elderly people were more susceptible to the disease because their immune systems were weaker. They were also more vulnerable to exposure by virtue of communal living. For mass shooters today, exposure comes from spending time on the Internet immersed in the lives of past mass shooters. Susceptibility comes from past trauma and personal crises. The Columbine shooters were clearly susceptible, but the fact that they did what they did without the same exposure tells us that they were somewhat different from those who followed in their footsteps later; their barrier to entry was higher. The principle of social proof tells us that the greater the number of people who find an action correct, the more the action will seem to be correct to us. With each new person we see jumping on the bandwagon, our threshold for it drops, until eventually we reach the tipping point, and the pace of mass shootings starts to accelerate.12
—
Another legacy of Columbine is the active shooter drill, which is fast becoming its own form of social proof. The self-declared “gold standard” in active shooter response is ALICE, which stands for “Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate.” Its full two-day certification training costs about $700, but its creators also offer a forty-minute online introductory course for $99. It starts with an ominous mash-up of archival news footage from Columbine and other school shootings, with the message “This course will help you participate in your own survival.” One of the exercises involves hearing loud banging sounds and seeing if you can identify which ones are gunshots. (It’s a trick; they all are.) The training recommends having a five-gallon “go bucket” in the classroom filled with duct tape, food and water, toilet paper, and a space blanket. Cartoon children in a cafeteria throw food at a kid dressed in black to “force him to flinch.” And you watch child actors throw themselves on top of a large man armed with an assault weapon, piling their small bodies on top of his in an effort to “overpower a shooter using strength in numbers.” The video is both tragedy and comedy.
One study found that one in ten fourth-through twelfth-grade students experienced a negative psychological outcome after ALICE training.13 Students otherwise fearful of crisis/emergency preparedness practices were worst affected. One parent we interviewed described the impact of these protocols on her young son. “In kindergarten, every time there was a lock-down drill—I think there are four a year—that day, he’d come home and wouldn’t talk,” she said. “His extremely extroverted self would hide inside a shell, and not knowing what had happened, as parents, we’d attribute it to a bad day. Sometimes that day he wouldn’t listen, and we’d automatically have one of those days that things are just off and [that] ends up in some manifestation of tears or time-outs.”
This parent started to notice a pattern. “Like clockwork, he’d admit at night in bed that he had [had] a lockdown drill, or some other parent would alert me that their kids [had] admitted it, and we’d sigh in a ‘aaaand that is why’ way.” Her son’s response to the drills became so routine that this parent would preemptively ask, “Was there a lockdown drill today?” when he was off, “because it was so correlative.”
But then, in first grade, her son came home from school one day and again he was “off.” After some probing, he admitted that there had been another lockdown drill. He explained that he had been “very quiet” during the exercise “but felt like coughing and tried his hardest to not cough. But underneath the hiding corner, he involuntarily coughed, I think the teacher reminded him to be quiet, and then he let out crying, because according to him, ‘I let the bad people know where we were, and because of me we could have gotten hurt.’ ” She added, “No kid should carry that load.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 95 percent of America’s schools conduct lockdown drills meant to protect students from active shooters. Some drills are obviously better than others, but an investigation by the Washington Post found that during the 2017–18 school year, more than 4.1 million students experienced at least one lock-down or lockdown drill, including some 220,000 students in kindergarten or preschool. These drills are required by state or local law in most cases with little guidance for how to run them humanely. Our home state of Minnesota mandates at least five lockdown drills per year, meaning that our children will experience seventy drills from pre-K through twelfth grade.
This would make sense if lockdown drills genuinely made students safer, but there is no evidence that they do. Deterred shootings (nonevents) are impossible to measure, but our data on 133 completed and attempted school mass shootings over the past forty years show that there were no differences in the number of people killed or injured between schools that regularly ran lockdown drills and those that didn’t. The number of casualties in school mass shootings has remained relatively steady over the past forty years, while our attempts at security have become more time-consuming, costly, and elaborate.
In fact, evidence suggests that active shooter drills may do more harm than good. Jill conducted one of the first and only rigorous studies on active shooter training with community college students.14 She found that although watching a mass shooting training video increased students’ feelings of preparedness compared to a control group shown a different video, it also increased levels of fear and anxiety (particularly among women). A more recent study of a large district in New York State found similar findings: The drills increased feelings of preparedness but decreased feelings of safety at school.15
According to Melissa Reeves, former president of the National Association of School Psychologists, “What these drills can really do is potentially trigger either past trauma or trigger such a significant physiological reaction that it actually ends up scaring the individuals instead of better preparing them to respond in these kinds of situations.” Dr. Laurel Williams, chief of psychiatry at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, argued something similar: “It’s psychologically distressing for a young child to practice active shooters coming into your area. It’s not clear to them that the drill is not real. The younger the child, the less likely they are to understand that an act of violence is not occurring during a drill.” The sense of dread these drills can evoke can be quite pervasive, Williams says. “If you’re constantly given the viewpoint that the world is scary and [that] unpreventable things happen, it pervasively makes us less secure as a society. We see everyone as suspicious, and it changes the way we act around people.”16
While it’s important for adults in the school to be trained in how to respond to a shooting, regularly running children through active shooter drills may essentially be writing and disseminating the script for mass violence at a very young age, drilling into young children’s heads that school is a scary and dangerous place and that the best they can do is hide quietly under their desks. It normalizes this form of violence by having children rehearse for it over and over and over again—which can create a fascination among vulnerable kids. It’s critical to remember that the majority of school shooters are current and former students of the school. This means that potential shooters are running through the drills along with everyone else, learning the school’s exact response, rehearsing for the act.
—
In March 1996, a forty-three-year-old kil
led sixteen children and one teacher at Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in British history. One month later, a lone gunman committed another mass shooting ten thousand miles away, in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing thirty-five people and injuring twenty-three—allegedly motivated in large part by media coverage of the Dunblane massacre, particularly the attention given to the perpetrator.
Mass shootings tend to cluster. In August 2019, there were three high-profile shootings in a week, first in Gilroy, California, then back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and then Dayton, Ohio. One 2015 study led by Sherry Towers, a mathematician at Arizona State University, found that a mass shooting was “contagious for an average of 13 days” and every one of them inspired 0.3 more, meaning that after three shootings, a fourth was imminent.17 In August 2019, that fourth shooting was twenty-seven days later, in Midland-Odessa, Texas, where a thirty-six-year-old went on a shooting spree from his vehicle, killing seven and injuring twenty-three.
Towers’s study compared three data sets to a mathematical model of a contagion: (1) mass killings where four or more people were killed; (2) school shootings; and (3) mass shootings where three or more people were shot but fewer than four people were killed. For mass killings and school shootings, the contagion model explained the data better than simply assuming the events were random. The third set of data, events in which fewer than four people were killed, showed no signs of triggering other incidents. The reason? Shootings with fewer than four people killed, while obviously troubling, are less well publicized and usually do not generate national news coverage.18
An analysis of data from an independent company that collects information from more than one hundred thousand news sources revealed that perpetrators of seven mass killings from 2013 to 2017 received media coverage equivalent to that of A-list movie stars.19 This model of heavy, transparent circulation inspires some people to take up arms and commit atrocities of their own. It also provides them with information they can use to plan their own shootings, potentially giving them clues as to how to cause more damage or evade capture for longer. Presumably, this is why the student suspected of killing three people at Naval Air Station Pensacola in late 2019 hosted a dinner party the week of his crime where he and his friends watched videos of mass shootings—to find proof of concept.
The Violence Project Page 12