After a school shooting, a lot of people say “we need to do something!”
Honestly, it’s said by people who don’t actually want to do something. I mean, THEY don’t want to do something. They want someone else to do something.
They passively want “something to be done.”
I’ll tell you how to stop school shootings, but you won’t like the answer.
You’ll dismiss it because it’s not as simple as wanting Congress to do something.
First, why are the shootings happening now more than ever before?
It’s not guns. There have always been guns. School used to have rifle teams. Kids would bring their rifles to school because there was a competition in the school’s gun range. What’s new is having kids who want to point a gun at people and kill them. That is what needs to be addressed.
And honestly, even if you think magically banning all guns is a solution, you’re still not getting to the root of why kids would even want to do this. As Henry David Thoreau said, “There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil for every one who strikes the root.” So let’s strike the root.
Three things to know about school shootings:
1) Schools shootings are contagious.
2) Everyone has a desire to belong to something bigger than themselves.
3) These shooters consider themselves not as individual shooters, but a part of one single mass shooting called Columbine.
On the first point, it’s easy for us to think of the flu as being contagious, but not school shootings. Suicides are contagious, too. When Robin Williams committed suicide, there was a 10% increase in the number of suicides over the next four months. This is why local newspapers don’t print articles about people committing suicide; it’s accepted that if you glorify suicide in any way, more people commit suicide.
It’s the same with school shootings. The more coverage we give to the shooters and read their manifestos and play their videos on the news and show their Instagram accounts, the more people we’re encouraged to go do this. They want the fame. They want to be seen. They want to be noticed.
Second, a major cause of these shootings is loneliness and isolation. I was talking to a friend who runs a youth mentoring program, Boys to Men Mentoring, and I asked what it means to be an “At-Risk” kid. And he said, “Slater, we’re all at-risk. The question is are there people, mentors, parents, friends, neighbors in the kid’s life to help them through life’s challenges. Are there other voices in this kids life other than just the one in his head? Because if he’s living with just one voice in his head all day every day, they will spiral and become more isolated and distant.”
The more these shooters are rejected from society, the more they hate themselves and the more they grow to hate everyone else. And they isolate themselves and spiral deeper and deeper.
None of these school shooters are the popular kids in school.
I’ll tell you right now how to stop school shootings. Rob Myers puts it best, “Notice those around you who seem isolated, and engage them.”
But we don’t like that answer because it involves me doing something. It’s way easier to want Congress to do something.
But what causes these isolated kids to spiral to such a depth that they’re willing to kill people?
Malcolm Gladwell has the best analysis of this, he says we look at the 25 fatal school shootings since Columbine as separate, individual events. The shooters don’t. They consider themselves all part of the same school shooting. It’s all one school shooting. It’s a slow-moving riot. And they want in the Columbine cult. And Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are their heroes. And that shooting is their initiation. Because they want to belong to something.
I could give many examples, Darion Aguilar he was 19 in 2014, he dressed up like Eric Harris, used the same weapon as Eric Harris, wore the same backpack as Eric Harris, hid in the changing room of a store until 11:14 (the exact time the Columbine shooting began) and then came out shooting. He killed two and then himself.
The shooter at Seattle Pacific shot three people, killed one. He told police he never would have done it without, “the guidance of, of Eric Harris and Seung-Hui Cho (the Virginia Tech shooter) … Especially, Eric Harris he was a, oh, man he was a master of all shooters.”
There was a potential school shooter in Minnesota, he was asked “when should he attack? April made the best sense, “because that’s the month that all the really bad tragedies happened like . . . Titanic, Columbine, Oklahoma City bombing, Boston bombing.”
It’s become ritualized, it’s cultish. And now their names – if they’re brave enough to follow through and kill – will live in infamy.
So, how do we stop school shootings? Short term, every school should train how to confront and take down a school shooter. If every potential shooter knew that their fellow classmates and teachers would fight back, they wouldn’t attack at all. Because they don’t want a fight. They’re cowards. Go to www.actcert.com if you want to know how to properly engage a school shooter.
But long-term, we need to engage with lonely and isolated people.
Not the answer you want, right? Because this involves work, it involves rolling up your sleeves and getting involved in someone’s life and it’s hard and selfless, and we would rather live selfish lives and every once in awhile complain about societal problems than actually do anything to fix or prevent them.
There are two types of people: Those who say “someone should do something” and then pat themselves on the back for thinking something should be done. And then those who are out there actually doing something. They’re too busy saving lives to pat themselves on the back.
If you want to prevent school shootings and prevent any other destructive behavior in kids lives, support Boys to Men Mentoring in San Diego. I’m sure there are similar boys mentoring programs in your city. Give them money, so they can help more boys get off of the wrong path, and give these “at-risk” boys some light, some relationships, a hope for a future of meaning, and train these boys to become MEN.