(Image: Aaron Yost/REX Shutterstock)
The US experienced yet another school shooting last week, when a student at a community college in Oregon opened fire on his English class, killing nine people. How can we thwart such crimes?
It may sound a little “kumbaya“, but research on planned shootings that were prevented, as well as the psychology of loneliness, suggest that we have had the wrong idea about the role of mental health in these situations. Sorting out our thinking would help us identify individuals who may commit mass shootings, and empower communities to respond appropriately when suspicions arise.
A common stereotype is that the perpetrators are mentally ill, but that is not usually the case, says Eric Madfis, a sociologist and professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma.
“The majority of people who are violent are not mentally ill, and the majority of people who are mentally ill are not violent,” he says.
But one stereotype does seem to stand up: mass shooters tend to be isolated. Those who knew the Oregon gunman described him as “withdrawn and quiet” and an “awkward loner” – and that’s not an unusual profile.
The shootings are rarely impulsive, but they are often precipitated by a negative event, like losing a job or the break-up of a relationship.
“A lot of these folks are failing in both love and work,” says Reid Meloy, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. That failure turns to humiliation, which for some people turns to anger. “Of course, we’ve all experienced grievances, and most people pick up and move on. But there are a very, very few where it becomes the beginning of a pathway for violence.”
Research suggests that social isolation is bad for your health in a variety of ways: it can lead to heart trouble, altered immune responses and premature death, as well as increased anxiety and hostility.
But there are many other factors that play into whether someone will commit a mass murder, including access to weapons.
Some researchers have homed in on the statistic that 95 per cent of mass murderers are male. Most are also middle-class, heterosexual, white – all indicators of relative privilege in the US – and either in teenage or middle age. Madfis has argued that the “triple privilege of white heterosexual masculinity” makes failure and loss more unexpected and shameful for these men, who subsequently try to reassert their masculinity through violence.
“I think part of it has to do with male adjustment, notions of acceptable ways to perform your masculinity in the contemporary world,” he says.
Still, very few of the men who fit this broad profile actually try to commit a mass shooting. How do you stop the ones who do?
Meloy works in an emerging field called threat assessment, which combines psychology, social work and law enforcement to identify potentially dangerous individuals and intervene before they carry out their plans.
His research suggests that people who end up committing a mass shooting exhibit certain behaviours in the preceding days and weeks. Combining those features with the fact that most shootings are planned gives hope that they can be averted.
“People take the position that you can’t predict these events because the base rate is so small, and therefore you can’t prevent them,” he says. But just as a cardiologist can offer strategies to help prevent a heart attack even if they can’t predict who will have one, threat assessments can help reduce risk even if it can’t predict who will go on a rampage.
In a recent study, Meloy and his colleagues studied nine cases of school shootings in Germany, and 31 other “students of concern” who did not end up shooting people.
Of the eight common warning behaviours they identified, five turned out to be significantly more common among students who went on to commit a shooting than among those who did not:
Pathway warning behaviour: anything that is part of the research, planning or implementation of an attack;
Fixation: preoccupation with a person or a cause, often with an angry undertone;
Identification: whether with a soldier or warrior mentality or with previous attackers or assassins;
Novel aggression: an act of violence that seems unrelated to anything the person has done before; and
Last resort: evidence that the person thinks there is no alternative to violence and is feeling desperate.
“The science is very new in this area but I think we’re doing some stuff that may be of use for people to be aware of,” Meloy says.
Another such behaviour is telling a third party about a plan to carry out an attack, which researchers call “leakage”. The gunman in Oregon allegedly posted his plans on an online message board, for instance. “That’s classic leakage,” Meloy says.
Given that would-be shooters are prone to giving away their intentions, encouraging others to voice their concerns may be crucial, especially in close-knit environments like schools. Madfis studied 11 schools in the north-east US where a shooting had been forestalled, and found that in each case, the thing that helped was a student reporting the planned attack.
Candles spell out the college’s initials at a vigil following the Oregon shootings (Image: Chris Pietsch/REX Shutterstock)
That stands in contrast to most schools’ responses to the threat of violence on the premises: armed guards, metal detectors and punitive zero tolerance policies.
“Those just makes kids trust administrators less and not go to them,” Madfis says. “Having an environment where people believe they can trust people in the school, whether that’s at a high school or at a college campus, can diminish the code of silence.”
Some groups are picking up on this, and trying to spread a “if you see something, say something” campaign to avert campus violence. A group called Sandy Hook Promise, founded after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that killed 12 children, is launching a similar scheme called “Say Something”. And an app called Live Safe aims to make it easy to report suspicious activity on campus.
“When you focus on bolstering social support networks you’re tapping into the human desire, if not hunger, for attachment to other people,” Meloy says. “We know that that mitigates risk of violence. It’s not a predictor, but it’s a common thread, that threat managers can use to buffer risk.”
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