Oh no, not again! is
what we keep saying to ourselves, every time there is another mass
killing. Now it is a student at a
community college in Roseburg, Oregon who kills 9 students and teachers, and
when the police arrive, kills himself (October 1, 2015).
Almost everything
about this is familiar, including the ensuing debate. For one side, the obvious solution is more stringent gun
control; ideally this would turn the U.S. into a low gun-ownership country like
others where mass killings are rare. On the other side, the immediate reaction
is keep our guns: it's our Second
Amendment right; banning guns would criminalize many law-abiding people; and in
fact more guns on the ground would be the way to hold off these killers.
Neither of these
positions would be such an easy solution as envisioned.
Most importantly,
the current political reality is that no sweeping shift in gun control is
likely to happen very soon.
Is the only thing we
can do to stop mass killings, is to keep struggling over gun control? Is there
nothing else we can do, right now?
We tend to assume
that in public issues, state agencies should take care of it for us; we just
have to mobilize ourselves to demand that the government do what we want. But
is there nothing that people themselves, on the spot, can do about heading
off potential violence?
In fact, research in
the micro-sociology of violence suggests things that people can do in the
immediate situation. There are turning points that swing either towards
violence or away from it; and the right action at these turning points has
proven successful in heading off things like fights, rapes, and riots. I have
summarized some of these actions in the Practical
Conclusions at the end of my book, Violence:
A Micro-sociological Theory, and in my June 2014 Sociological Eye blog
post, "Tank Man and the Limits of Telephoto Lenses: Or, How much Can
Individuals Stop Violence?"
http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2014/06/tank-man-and-limits-of-telephoto-lenses.html
In two other posts I
have pointed out key features that distinguish mass killings from other kinds
of violence.
One of these clues is that potential killers' pattern of amassing guns is different from ordinary gun-owners. They don't look like ordinary American gun-owners, and this difference is important as a clue as to who is dangerous and who is not.
If this difference
were better known, it could help overcome one of the worst political aspects of
our polarized reaction to mass shootings. As it stands now, gun-control
advocates tend to treat gun-owners in general as the problem; and gun-owners--
a large segment of the American population-- feel themselves as the object of
attack, virtually as if they themselves were responsible for another
mass-rampage shooting.
If we can all focus
on the significant clues, both sides-- gun-control advocates and gun-owners--
can both help head off mass shootings. In fact, gun-owners are in a position to
do more about this in the settings where mass shootings are most common.
The most distinctive clues
-- A long period of clandestine preparation. Most other kinds of violence happen
rather abruptly. Quarrels which escalate into fights; domestic disputes that
boil over into hot rage with whatever weapons are at hand; street-crimes and
robberies that hinge on sudden opportunities; rapes at carousing parties: most
of these violent events would be unexpected a few hours in advance. Mass
killings of the kind that happen in schools, work-places, and more recently in
theatres, gyms and churches, are planned much further back, typically over a
period of weeks or months.
This period of
clandestine preparation is not just a time of getting the logistics together
and working out a rational plan of attack. The mood is not matter-of-fact but a
kind of private ecstasy, a fantasy-land of smothering oneself in the details of revenge for felt
social slights. Everything about
the imagined revenge scenario is something to brood over and to savor --
researching past rampage killings, fixing a target, imagining the scenario,
acquiring an arsenal complete with costumes and side-equipment.
-- An arsenal of symbolic overkill. Mass rampage killers almost always
amass far more weapons and ammunition that they need in their attack. They
carry more guns, magazines and bombs than they actually use, and when they are
shot, captured or commit suicide, they still have plenty more they could have
used to continue the fight. Another sizeable portion of the arsenal is left
behind, at home or in their car. Clearly they have an obsession with weapons--
the more guns the better, a 14-year old school killer in Kentucky said-- but
most of it is superfluous power in a practical sense; it is part of their
psychological preparation. Symbolic overkill is what gives them the emotional
strength to carry out this horrific action that cuts them off irreparably from
the human community.
-- Clandestine excitement. From previous case studies, we have
seen that this period of working in one's private underground-- either alone or
with a small number of conspirators-- is the high point of their lives. "It
was the only adventure I've ever had," the 14-year old Paducah, Kentucky
school killer said. Life has been
a downer of social isolation or shame; now the tables are turned, and I-- the
future killer-in-preparation-- am doing something far more significant, far
more powerful than the people I am going to kill. What needs to be emphasized here is that this high point is
in the period of clandestine preparation; what the actual moments of the mass
shooting are like is hard to tell, since few perpetrators survive, but
motivation is in the present of on-going time, and it is clear that they are
enjoying the build-up to the mass shooting. The very fact that it is hidden away from other people, that
there is a danger in being found out, makes it an adventure. This clandestine
excitement gives purpose to their lives. And it gives them emotional energy,
the forward-moving confidence and momentum that propels them down the emotional
slope that leads to mass killing.
The difference from ordinary gun-owners
Ordinary gun-owners
are not like this. They don't
spend long periods working out a a scenario of using their guns. They don't
spend months obsessively planning the details of when and where the shooting is
going to take place. It is not difficult to distinguish an ordinary gun-owner
from someone who is preparing a mass shooting; the pattern of their daily life
and state of mind are quite distinct.
Ordinary gun-owners
are not involved in symbolic overkill. On the whole, they do not amass arsenals
so huge that they never could be of any use. True, there is some symbolism in having guns and historic
weapons; it says something about one's self-image. But the key difference is
that ordinary gun-owners are not so intensely focused on their
weapons-collection as potential mass-killers are. It is not the center of their
self-image, the most important thing in their lives; it is not tied to an
obsessive plan for action that is building up in the middle-range future.
Ordinary gun-owners
are not full of clandestine excitement.
Their guns are clearly on display; or if they are locked away in gun
cabinets, their existence is not a secret; there is no excitement about hiding
them while looking forward to the day they will be used. The emotional
atmosphere is different.
Seen up close, there
is little danger of mistaking an ordinary gun-owner for a rampage killer.
Gun-owning adults are the best observers who
can head off mass killings
Once a mass killing
has taken place, public scrutiny soon zeroes in on the lead-up to it.
Retrospectively we learn about the killer, his (almost always a male) sense
of social grievances, his obsessive revenge planning and
arsenal-collecting. What we need
it for someone to see the warning signs, while it is still in the stage of
fantasy killing, before it turns into real killing.
The persons who are
in best position to do this are those close to the potential killer, members of
his family, neighbors, and
acquaintances. This is especially important when the people nearby in
his network are gun-owners. For one thing, gun-owners are usually the ones who
have introduced the potential killers to guns, have given them knowledge about
them; often they have been the source of guns (as in the case of the Sandy Hook
mother who bought guns for her son), or because their guns were stolen by the
perpetrator.
Gun-owners bear a
special responsibility for those in their immediate social network who might
get access to guns. And this goes beyond conventional gun-safety training. It
is not just a matter of trying to ensure that guns are not fired accidentally
or in the wrong direction; it
becomes a matter of making sure someone with an alienated world-view doesn't
fire guns at all at their chosen target.
Gun-owners need to
become alert to the warning signs: social alienation, mental illness, and above
all their combination with a young man's clandestine obsession with guns over a
long period of time, accumulating symbolic arsenals, and centering one's life
around the clandestine excitement of a scenario of violent revenge. Discerning
this isn't easy; there are plenty of alienated youths, and today's
entertainment culture is full of fantasy violence. It isn't playing the violent
video games that is the problem; it is the accumulation of a real arsenal with
all the paraphernalia of a mass murder scenario. When this goes on for months, in one's own home, a concerned
family member should get a sense of it.
Gun-owning parents need to encourage each other to look for the warning
signs, and to take action when they see them.
The Roseburg, Oregon killings and its
predecessors
In previous posts, I
have analyzed the details of the December 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in
Connecticut; the July 2012 Aurora,
Colorado theatre massacre; the July 2011 mass shooting at a Norway youth camp;
the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. I have drawn especially on the
psychological dynamics of the would-be killer assembling a clandestine arsenal
leading up to the mass shooting at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997.
All these cases show
the long pattern of obsessive preparation of a clandestine scenario, centered
on collecting an weapons arsenal. Like the rest of them, the Roseburg, Oregon
shooter had assembled far more weapons than he actually used. He carried six guns with him to Umpqua
Community College, along with five magazines of ammunition and a flak jacket.
At home in his mother's apartment, he had seven more guns and large amounts of
ammo. It looks like the same
symbolic overkill. It seems likely that as further details come out, we will
find the pattern of obsessive clandestine preparation over a period of months.
There are already a
number of parallels to the Sandy Hook shooter. In both cases, the shooter lived
alone with his mother, who was devoted to caring for him. Both shooters had
Asperger's syndrome, and both mothers strongly indulged their strange behavior.
Both mothers were themselves enthusiastic gun-owners. Both took their sons
shooting at gun ranges; the Sandy Hook mother regarded it as one of the few
successful things they could do together. The Sandy Hook mother bought all five
of the guns that her son used (including the gun with which he killed her), as
well as his other paraphernalia of weapons, and his massive supply of
ammunition. Everything her son did, she interpreted
as a manifestation of his illness. The windows in his room taped shut with
black plastic were to her just a sign of sensitiveness to light-- even though
he could go outdoors when he wanted to. The possibility that he was hiding
something in the rooms she was forbidden to enter was masked in her own mind by
the feeling that she must do everything possible for her son.
At Sandy
Hook, we find all the worst ingredients combined. Some of them are already
visible in the Roseburg case. The socially isolated son; the single care-giving
mother; the diagnosis of mental illness that she is trying so hard to counteract.
The young man becoming obsessed with the pattern of previous mass shootings,
building up an arsenal, even imitating some previous features such as asking
victims if they are Christian.
Could
these mass killings have been stopped before they started? Yes, clearly the care-giving mother was
in a position to read the warning signs.
That
they did not is a pointer to the direction we need to go: much greater awareness
of warning signs, especially among ordinary gun-owners.
What follows is a
slightly modified re-posting of my September 2012 analysis.
CLUES TO
MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT
What can
the micro-sociology of violence contribute to understanding the mass killings
in Aurora, Colorado, and similar incidents? In the immediate shock of public
attention, there is an imperative to give policy answers. I could join the chorus advocating a
ban on weapons in the USA. This is
a hope; it is not a guarantee.
Mass shootings are very rare events. There are about 15,000 homicides per year in the USA; the
great majority are single-victim killings. Less than 1% are mass killings (4 or
more victims in the same incident). Spectacular mass shootings, where many
persons are killed or wounded, have been happening at a rate of about 1 or 2
per year, in the 30 years since 1980, for the most common type, school
shootings; shootings in other venues, apparently imitating school shootings,
are on the rise, especially in the last two years. It is their rarity that
attracts so much attention, and their out-of-the-blue, seemingly random
relationship between killer and victims, that makes them so dramatically
alarming.
This
rarity means that very distinctive circumstances are needed to explain mass
killings, and that widely available conditions cannot be very accurate predictors. There are approximately 270 million
firearms in the civilian population in America, in a population of about 310
million. The vast majority of
these guns are not used to kill people.
Even if we focus on the total number of yearly homicides by gun (about
12,000), the percentage of guns that kill someone is about 12,000 /
270,000,000, or 1 in 23,000.
Another way to put it: of approximately 44 million gun owners in the US,
99.97% of them do not murder anyone. It is not surprising that their owners
resist being accused of abetting murder.
My aim
here is not to enter the political controversy over banning guns. Many people
who own guns are gun-cultists, for whom guns are symbolic objects, connected
with their identity and lifestyle (analyzed in Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains). The political argument over banning or
retaining guns has strong emotional overtones on both sides. Anti-gun-cultists
dislike not only guns but the lifestyle and the values of the people who have
them; this is evident in the case of anti-hunting movements, including the
recently successful anti-foxhunting movement in England. (US surveys indicate
the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing
conservatives. Experian, 2012)
Both sides blur the gun issue with symbolic politics. What can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying
to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It
resembles TSA procedures of searching everyone who enters an airport gate area;
airplane terrorists are also extremely rare, and thus the vast majority of the
persons who are searched are innocent. More successful ways of heading off terrorists have
focused on their organizations and networks (Sageman 2004).
In the
case of mass homicides, micro-sociology can help by examining the details that
make this kind of murder distinctive.
Mass
murders are mostly committed by a solo individual, almost never by more than
two. Typically their target is a public gathering of 10 to several hundred
persons. Not everyone is killed; usually the number of wounded is larger than
the number killed; and many escape injury, since mass murderers resemble other
violent persons in this respect: they often miss their targets.
In mass
rampage killings, the killers are not aiming at particular individuals at all.
The victims are anonymous, representatives of a collective identity that is
being attacked. Hence mass attacks generally take place in institutional
settings: mainly in schools, or work places, although recently also in exercise
gyms and in churches. The Aurora,
Colorado attack in July 2012 was unusual (or the harbinger of new settings), in
a movie theatre; the Norway shooting attack of July 2011 was on a youth camp of
a political party. The number actually killed is misleading; the attack is an
effort to destroy an institution through the people who belong to it. In that
sense it is a symbolic attack-- a deadly symbolic attack. The motivation and
tactics of the mass killer are very different from most homicides; here it is
not a matter of a personal grudge coming from ongoing conflict with a
particular individual, as in the nearly half of all homicides which are among personal acquaintances; nor
the targeted killing between gangs; nor the instrumental or accidental killings
which take place in the course of another crime such as a robbery or rape. Most other types of homicides are
impulsive or emerge from escalated situations; mass rampage killings are
elaborately planned in advance.
Rampage
killers tend to attack not only a place but an event. The ritualized gathering
has a symbolic meaning-- it is where the group celebrates itself through
communion with its sacred objects.
Thus Holmes, the recently failed graduate student who shot 70 people (12
killed, 58 wounded) at a movie theatre in Aurora, chose the night of the
premiere of an eagerly awaited Batman movie. From a sociological point of view, being an entertainment
fan is a major identity in contemporary youth culture. Holmes, by imitating the costumes of
characters in the Batman series, was entering deeply into a popular cult. His
apartment was decorated with Batman paraphernalia. Without having the details
of Holmes' life experiences and personal thoughts, it can still be said that
the killer was simultaneously participating in a ritual of popular youth
culture, and attacking the members of that cult. (Of the 12 killed, 10 were in
the age range 18 to 32; 7 of them within 3 years of his own age, 24.) The movie-theatre mass rampage killing
resembles school shootings, where the killer is attacking his own institution
and its members-- the scenario of the rejected member.
Not very
usable clues are the patterns that rampage killers are low status isolates, or
recent academic or career failures, or introverts. Like availability of guns, here again the explanatory
variable is too common; there are
a tiny number of rampage killers, but incidents of career failures are
widespread; the number of introverts in the population is probably around 40
percent; victims of
school bullying comprise 5 - 15% of students; since there are about 13 million
secondary school students in the US, bully victims would total around 650,000 to
2 million. About two-thirds of school shooters are bully victims, but there are
other ways to be low status in the youth culture, so the number would be
higher. The
correlation of these predictors with rampage killings must be extremely low.
Better
clues come from considering the micro-sociology of this kind of violence. Any
kind of violent confrontation is emotionally difficult; the situation of facing
another person whom one wants to harm produces confrontational tension/fear (ct/f ); and its effect most of the time
is to make violence abort, or to become inaccurate and ineffective. The usual
micro-sociological patterns that allow violence to succeed are not present in a
rampage killing; group support does not exist, because one or two killers confront
a much larger crowd: in contrast,
most violence in riots takes place in little clumps where the attackers have an
advantage of around 6-to-1.
Another
major pathway around ct/f is attacking a weak victim. But in
almost all violence, the weakness is emotional rather than physical-- even an
armed attacker has to establish emotional dominance, before he can carry out
effective violence. One might
think this is simply a matter of using a gun or displaying a weapon, which
automatically puts the armed person in the position of strength, the others in
a position of weakness. Nevertheless, detailed analysis of incidents and photos
of armed confrontations show that
groups without guns can emotionally paralyze an armed opponent,
preventing him from using his weapon.
Guns
provide emotional dominance when an armed individual threatens a peaceful group
and they try to hide or run away.
This depends on the style of the victims. When rival street gangs clash,
they do not turn their backs; they are used to gesturing, with and without
guns, and most such face-to-face confrontations wind down. Running away has the
effect of confirming emotional dominance; it is easier to shoot a person in the
back than in the front; and turning away or attempting to hide one's face has
the effect of removing one's greatest deterrent-- eye-contact with the
opponent. Thus the hundreds who piled on the floor in the theatre at Aurora, or
who ran from the attacker on the Norwegian island, may have saved some
percentage of themselves; but they collectively could have saved more than
ended up being killed or wounded, if they had used their superior numbers to
confront the attacker. I don't
mean just the possibility of physically overcoming him, but taking advantage of
the fact that groups are always emotionally stronger than individuals, if they
can keep themselves together and put up an emotionally united front: they could
probably have made him stop shooting.
If this
sounds implausible, consider how rampage shootings usually end: in a 1997
school shooting at Paducah, Kentucky, the solo killer, a 14-year-old boy who
opened fire on a prayer group in the school hall, allowed a teacher and the
prayer leader to come up to him and take his gun away as soon as he had shot 8
girls and boys (who were facing away from him). I will discuss this case in
detail below. The Aurora theatre
killer gave himself up to the police without resistance after he left the
theatre. Even Breivik, the Norwegian killer, who stated a strong ideological
motive for his killings, gave himself up without a fight once armed authorities
arrived on the island, although he had plenty of ammunition left. The key point here is not simply that
the Norwegian police were armed, and the teenage campers were not; but rather
that the police confronted him, while the teens ran away and turned their
backs. Rampage killers almost always give themselves up peacefully, or else
commit suicide. A rare exception is the Columbine duo, who exchanged fire
several times with the police, at long distance and ineffectually, before
killing themselves in a lull in the action. This is another respect in which
rampage killers differ from other types of violent persons.
Why Rampage Killers are Not
Suicide Bombers
Rampage
killers do not approach their victims in an angry or threatening mode; they
give no warning until they start firing.
In this respect their pathway into violence are not at all like disputes
that escalate into violence; nor like confrontations among gangs or other
ostentatious tough guys, who often do more blustering than actual violence.
Rampage shooters are more similar to suicide bombers, whose tactical advantage
is pretending that the attacker is just an ordinary, innocuous person until the
last moment when the bomb is set off.
Political organizations that use suicide bombers do not select
belligerent persons, but the most mild-mannered, self-controlled individuals.
Rampage killers are even farther at the end of this continuum.
But
rampage killers differ from suicide bombers in ways that reveal what is central
to their motivation. The suicide bomber kills him/herself at the same moment as
the victims; this has the advantage of not seeing the carnage one has made.
Suicide bombers are usually idealistic individuals who believe in a cause, and
have never engaged in violence before; so the tactic is ideal for keeping any
notion of violence out of their mind-- the most successful pathway is to keep
one's mind focused on the normal details of routine activity, or on one's
ideological message (see Collins, Violence, for analysis of the last dialogue of
suicide bombers, including a recording in the cockpit of the airline downed on
9/11). But rampage killers are
obsessed with their attack; they want to see the token representations of the
hated institution die. A minority of rampage killers commit suicide, but only
after they have experienced the process of killing that they have fantasized
about for so long.
Motives
and rituals of confrontation also affect the weapons they use. A remote bombing attack-- where the
attacker places a bomb at the target and detonates it later from a safe
distance-- does not fit the psychological scenario the rampage killer seeks.
Disgruntled students often fantasize about blowing up the school, and this is perhaps
their most common form of rebellious rhetoric; but it is entirely verbal
ritualism (and circulation of a cultural cliché), since virtually all mass
killings in schools have been carried out by shooting rather than bombs. And
this is so even though many of the killers collect an arsenal which includes
bombs; for instance the two killers at Columbine High School in 1999 brought
nearly 100 explosive devices, and managed to explode 8-to-10 of them, but
caused all their casualties by shooting. It appears that bombing is not
sufficiently confrontational for the psychological scenario that a mass
institutional killer seeks.
Suicide
bombers belong to an organized group, a movement with a long-term goal that
they hope to advance, beyond the deaths of individual contributors; whereas
rampage killers engage in purely personal revenge. Why this should affect the scenarios they choose? Suicide bombers have an abstract agenda;
rampage killers are persons who have been personally humiliated. What they want is to reverse the
scenario that has dominated their lives-- being looked down upon by others in
that institution; the habitually dominated seek a moment of dominating others.
This fills their horizon; the rampage killer rarely plans what happens next. In
all his elaborate planning, he has made no plans for escape. The mass killing
is the final, overwhelming symbolic event of his life.
Insulating Oneself from Direct Face-to-Face
Contact with Victims
Even
when an armed individual threatens a large unarmed group, he needs to
circumvent ct/f -- the debilitating
tension that makes violence so hard. He needs a technique for insulating
himself from the persons he is going to kill. There are several ways to do
this, and recent massacres show some of the techniques.
The
Aurora killer wore an elaborate black costume, assembled from military and
police supply businesses, including helmet, gas mask, throat guard, assault
vest, leggings and gloves. This
somewhat resembled Batman-- also an ordinary person with a secret identity--
who goes into violent action transformed into a bulked-up dark costume and head
covering. Holmes's costume also
let him fit in with the crowd of fantasy fans, as the style of dressing as
comic-story characters has become popular at youth-culture gatherings (e.g.
Comic-Con in San Diego-- his home town-- which took place just a week before
the Aurora shooting). Before donning his helmet and gas mask, Holmes displayed
his flamboyant shock of hair dyed bright red; this attracted attention but
eased him into the role, as he told people he was the Joker-- thus imitating
both the arch-villain and the super-hero. He waited until the action of the
film was under way before tossing smoke bombs into the theatre and starting to
shoot. A witness described the atmosphere: "smoke, explosions-- bats
flying across the screen because the movie's still playing-- it's dark."
When the lights came on, Holmes stopped firing and left the theatre.
Psychologically,
his bulky costume put a layer of insulation between himself and the world, and
his bizarre-looking gas mask gave him an artificial face. The normal tendency
of a focused interaction between persons is to reflect emotional signals back
and forth, so each becomes entrained in the other person's emotions; mutual eye
contact and full face-to-face concentration brings a strong sense of the other
person's humanity, and makes it difficult to carry out violence. The would-be
rampage killer needs to distance his
social emotions from his own awareness; masking or disguising one's own
face is one way to do this. In
general, masks or hoods either on the faces of the aggressor or the victims
increase the amount of violence, by destroying the normal human link in
face-to-face eye contact. Later I
will describe a case where the killer, just before opening fire in a school,
puts on shooting-range ear-plugs; these have no practical value but insulate
him from the sounds and sensations of normal social interaction.
Breivik,
the Oslo killer, followed an even more sophisticated pathway. He likewise took
on an alien role, wearing a police uniform with a helmet and face shield that
obscured his face. In preparation, he practiced meditation techniques, to keep
himself detached from the human reactions of the persons he was preparing to shoot.
He also extensively practiced violent video games; of course, tens of millions
of other youth did too. But Breivik incorporated it as preparation for a
real-world attack; unlike the usual frame in which game-players recognize what
they are doing as unreal, he consciously connected it with the need to steel
himself from any pangs of human sympathy; in effect, he recognized ct/f as an obstacle he would train himself to overcome.
Deep Backstage
Almost
everyone has a backstage, a region of privacy (the bathroom, your own bedroom
etc.) where you prepare for and recuperate from the frontstage social
interaction that is typically the center of your life. Some individuals--
introverts, isolates, the socially excluded-- spend much of their time in the
backstage. Many persons build
elaborate fantasy backstage lives that becomes a substitute for successful
interaction rituals on the frontstage, especially in today's world of the
Internet and electronic games.
This is particularly common among young males, the upper age rising from
teens through 30s in recent decades with the postponement of adult careers,
inflation of educational requirements, and underemployment. The demographic is
the same as most rampage killers, although only a tiny proportion becomes violent.
Information-technology-obsessed "gamers" have become a recognized
category among teenagers-- a low status at the far end of the spectrum from the
extroverts and athletes who dominate school and leisure activities.
Mass
rampage killers-- and an unknown penumbra of wannabes-- go even further. Their
obsessive backstages have two distinctive features. First, their private
obsessions concentrate on their vision of a personally inimical world: not the
standardized war and fighting fantasies of mass-marketed games, but their own
real-world hatreds and institutions.
They become increasingly drawn into preparing their counter-attack.
A second
feature is that a rampage killer makes his backstage into a super-successful
ritual, while also keeping it ultra-private. It resembles a personal religious cult, with its own
ceremonies, sacred objects, and moral standards. Of course, many innocuous
pursuits can also be built up in private into a quasi-religious obsession. The would-be rampager's success, in
building an emotionally compelling world that is completely antagonistic to
other people's, is so extreme
because he has found a unique source of emotional energy: clandestine excitement.
Ordinarily,
motivations are generated socially, by successful interaction rituals; mutual
focus and emotional entrainment with other people build up collective
effervescence; an individual's emotional energy (EE) is tied to an arena of
successful social membership, and to its collective symbols and moral standards
which guide action. Spin-off rituals exist, such as solitary prayer or artistic
creation, but such practices are first learned in a group that fills them with
sacred significance, so that individuals can take them further in privacy. But clandestine solitary rituals are
not like this; they are never shared with a group, and collective ritual can't
give them a jump-start. So
how can a totally solo ritual generate enough emotional energy to outshine
every other motivation?
The
answer is clandestine excitement: the energy that comes from successfully
keeping other people out of one's backstage. The backstage of the would-be mass killer is illicit; he
knows it cannot be revealed to others without provoking severe condemnation. This distinguishes it from other kinds
of obsessive backstages; boys caught up in video games and electronic
cults do not generally hide what
they are interested in, and multi-player games and on-line contacts subject
them to a degree of social control, reinforcing a standardized construction of
social reality. The would-be rampager is playing a much more exciting game,
hiding from others his horrendous plans; and this excitement feeds the
emotional input that drive his private ritual. His backstage ritual is in a
deepening spiral, a unique source of emotional excitement: as the prospective
rampager gets into increasingly serious preparations, the excitement level
rises. It is not just the
excitement of what he is going to do, in the great showdown event-- this may
actually be frightening to contemplate. The positive energy comes from the
ongoing adventure of doing something illicit, collecting weapons and hiding
them, making specific plans-- the excitement is that of carrying out a secret
mission. From an alienated life,
the future rampager now has many moments of excitement, every time he has to
fool someone who might notice what he is doing. On the whole, these are easy tasks, risks that he can
handle. His daily life of clandestine planning now gives a feeling of
confidence, initiative, enthusiasm-- the very definition of EE. The preparing rampager gets a buzz from
successfully duping persons around him while going through the motions of
everyday life. He is playing a higher-order game of social attunement--
pretending to be attuned to them so he can control their perceptions of what he
is really doing.
The Backstage of a Young Teen
Killer
We can
follow the construction of a deep backstage in a high school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky in December
1997 (investigated in detail by Katherine Newman, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shooting; quotes from pp.
25-6). A 14-year old boy, Michael
Carneal, opened fire in the school lobby on a Christian prayer circle just at
the beginning of the school day, killing 3 and wounding 5.
The
sequence of events begins with struggle over low rank in the social hierarchy
of the school. In all known school
shootings, the perpetrators were outside the popular group; many of them had
been manhandled, punched, trapped in a locker or thrown in a garbage can, taunted
and jeered at. For Michael, the worst
was when a gossip column in the school paper implied that he was homosexual,
precipitating a further barrage of taunts. Like most school shooters, Michael
was unathletic, unattractive, and easily dominated: a clear counter-ideal by
which the teenage status hierarchy could remind itself of what is and is not,
and an easy target for attacking the weak. He did not fight back when attacked.
Rampage
shooters are not only humiliated by the school hierarchy, they hide their
humiliation. They try to go on
faking it on the outside, not admitting that the bullying and put-downs are
getting to them. This gives an additional significance to the pattern that they
rarely confide in teachers or parents, much less their compatriots, about their
feelings of humiliation. This is not just an instrumental issue of failing to
get help; being unwilling to confide
is in fact a realistic assessment, if the problem is regaining status in
the student hierarchy, which is lost by enlisting adults as allies against
students. But this cuts off an
avenue of expressing shame which could have turned the emotional dynamics away
from the cycle of bypassed shame and humiliated rage (emphasized by Scheff
1991).
Bullied
rampage shooters are not entirely passive nor entirely isolated; generally they
have some friends, rather outside of school than in it. Although they do not fight back against
being attacked, or meet taunts with counter-taunts, they may attempt of their
own. Michael, who was repeatedly hazed by the school band members -- the one
organization he did belong to -- also carried out pranks to annoy the teachers
and other students, episodes of clowning, ostentatious noise-making and mild
physical intrusions like slapping other’s heads as he walked by their
seats. He responds to victimhood
by taking on the role of the clown, simultaneously staging the impression that
they are not humiliated but take it all in fun, while also attempting to get
the group’s attention. This is Goffmanian frontstaging, leaving the humiliation
hidden on the backstage. And it is
a strategy that fails; higher-status students find it annoying, and retaliate
by increasing their level of harassment.
Hence a build-up of taunting, physical attacks, and character assassination,
as the dominants defend what they feel is their legitimate status
hierarchy.
A deep
backstage gets constructed from a spiral of backstage activities. In middle school, Michael was already
involved in a number of personal backstages: the fact that he did not fight back against bullying nor
express his feelings about it, kept these feelings reserved for a private
backstage. He was also adept at
presenting himself to adults as normal and well-adjusted, including covering up
for his own pranks.
His
backstage manipulation of frontstage impressions took a further turn when he
moved to high school, and tried to gain admission to an alternative
counter-culture group. These were
the Goths, ostentatiously dressing in black, displaying pagan religious
symbols, and rhetorically challenging the dominant school status hierarchy.
Michael as an awkward freshman received little status in the Goth circle
either. He tried to bribe his way into the circle, stealing money and a fax
machine to give to them. So far he was stepping into the criminal pathway. But
in fact he did not go far in this direction; his backstaging took another twist
when he began to pretend to steal CDs (alternative music being the central
interest of the Goth subculture) to give to them, but in fact taking them from
his own collection. Michael was
now trying to impress the Goths with his criminality, itself a pretence; he was
not even a straightforward thief.
Around
this time Michael became acutely conscious that other people had hidden
backstages. He was impressed with the Goths’ charges that the Christian prayer
group which met in the school lobby every morning was itself just a show. Behind the facade of pious purity, the
Goths said, they were just as sexually dissolute as anyone else. This was just
the most obvious form of hypocrisy.
The ostensibly altruistic Christians upheld the school status hierarchy
of athletes and popular sociables which mercilessly put down nerdy kids like
Michael. Around the same time, Michael wrote a short story in which he declared
“there is a secret in my family that my parents and my sister know... I am
always excluded from things... I overheard my parents debating whether they
should tell me or not.” His perception
was not entirely fantasy. The school status hierarchy is omnipotent in its time
and place; children who have friends in their neighbourhood or through family
networks nevertheless may be ignored by the same friends at school because of
their different ranks in the school status hierarchy (Milner, Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids). Michael’s
older sister, who belonged to one of the popular groups, treated him very
differently at home and at school.
Michael
was becoming obsessed with backstages, recognizing that others had a backstage
just as he did. Now he was formulating layers of his own backstages, deep
backstages on which he contrived to pretend to belong on more conventionally
alienated backstages like the Goths; he was descending into an inner world in
which he was suspicious of the layers of staging everywhere.
His
final round of backstage activity was to develop a plot around guns. During Thanksgiving holiday, after
taking part in the ritual dinner with his family, he visited the home of a
neighbourhood buddy at a time when he knew the family would be away having
dinner with their relatives, using his insider knowledge of their doings to
find an opportune time to break in. He must have been secretly observing
details of the layout for some time beforehand, since he was able to find the hidden
key to the gun case, and take several weapons, which he hid in a duffle bag and
carried home on his bike.
“Affecting
a nonchalant air when he arrived at home, Michael parked the duffle bag by some
pine trees outside his bedroom window, and went in to greet his parents. ‘I’m
fine,’ he said, when they asked about his day. Once upstairs, he locked his door, climbed out the window,
and retrieved the bag, stashing it under his bed. Michael carefully screened the weapons from view by
moving Lego boxes in front of the bag. He went downstairs to watch TV for a
while but was too excited to sit still for long." He returned to lie on
his bed.
This is
a significant detail. In previous months, Michael had developed a phobia about
sleeping in his bedroom, believing that a monster was under his bed who would
drag him under while he was alone; instead he slept on the living room
couch. But he used his bedroom to
store his possessions, and now it hid his cache of guns. The monster no longer
threatens him; it has merged with himself, or rather with his weapons, which
are stored in just the place where he imagined the monster to be.
"Lying
awake on his bed later that evening, Michael felt a satisfaction that had
eluded him for a long time.
'I was
feeling proud, strong, good, and more respected. I had accomplished something.
I’m not the kind of kid who accomplishes anything. This was the only adventure I’ve ever had,’” Michael later
told a psychiatrist.
This is
an extension of his earlier backstage activity of stealing, or pretending to
steal, gifts for the Goths. The plotting, breaking and entering, disguising the
guns to transport them on the street, sneaking them into a hiding place in his
room, interspersing these moves with normal appearances before his parents to
avoid suspicion -- all this was an antinomian adventure. He is excited by the backstage action;
it is the same kind of appeal that exists whenever someone has a clandestine
backstage and a secret hiding place, whether it is drugs, pornography, stolen
property, or weapons; Jack Katz (Seductions
of Crime) shows that the allure of shop-lifting is chiefly in the staging
excitement, not in the intrinsic value of the items stolen. Carrying out
backstage activity in front of unsuspecting audiences is itself a thrill.
Michael seems to have deliberately repeated the thrill during the weekend,
sneaking the guns out of his house again, carrying them hidden in the duffle
bag on his bike to another friend’s house, where he displayed them, and even
took turns shooting in their backyard. On Sunday afternoon of the vacation
weekend (the night before school would begin Monday morning), Michael displayed
his cool by playing chess with his father; at night he took two more guns from
his father’s closet and added them to his cache under the bed.
Monday
morning there was more clandestine action. “Michael came downstairs with the
rifles bound together with duct tape, covered by blankets. On top of the
blankets he piled the sheets from his bed and, when asked, told his mother that
the cat had thrown up on them and that he taking them to the laundry room. Michael went into the laundry room and
deposited the sheets, but then went directly outside and put the bundle of guns
in the trunk of [his sister’s] car.
The pistol and ammunition were stuffed into his backpack. He got into the car with his sister and
rode off to Heath High, eager with anticipation.”
Michael
is full of clandestine excitement.
This is no ordinary backstage.
He is evading detection while under the gaze of those who might detect
him; he is taking advantage of his usual condition of low status and remoteness
from the center of attention to build a threat that only he knows about. He is enjoying his backstage, no longer
furtively withdrawn into it, but purposively and agentfully. More emotional than the ordinary
backstage, we might call it a deep backstage; it is the thrill of carrying off
on the backstage what would be a difficult confrontation on the frontstage. Michael’s confrontational tension and
fear is ordinarily so high that he cannot respond to ordinary bullying and
taunting; now he has turned that tension into a clandestine energy. His months of activity on various
fronts have made him an expert at backstages. In this arena at least, he has some emotional energy: the
confidence to carry out his
fantasy of overcoming confrontational
tension/fear.
Is there
a precipitating moment? Michael has planned and fantasized about guns for
months. But it is not clear when he is riding in the car to school that he will
shoot anybody. Even if he has
fantasized about it, there is still the barrier of ct/f to overcome. Many violent confrontations abort at
the last minute; it may well happen that he will change his mind.
Michael
arrives at the school and carries his bundle of guns into the lobby. To a
teacher, he says that it contains his English project. He is not yet ready to confront. He heads for the group of Goths, 5 or 6
boys standing in a circle on one side of the lobby. Nearby the Christian prayer group is forming. Michael is between the two groups: both of them ritual groups, indeed
performing counter-rituals to each other.
After a contingent moment he will turn from the first to the second and
fire at them. He is making a choice between ritual loyalties. As he drops his guns to the floor,
making a metallic clank, the Goths pay him scant attention. The leader of the
group says, apparently sardonically, “Sounds like guns to me.” Do they actually know Michael has
guns? In the past they have engaged
in plenty of violent talk, which Michael has attempted, without much success,
to join. They are primed to
interpret more talk about guns from Michael as a ritual; even bringing guns
into the school, in itself a serious violation, an antinomian act of rebellion,
is probably perceived by them as an act of bluster, an attempt to raise his
status in the counterculture group. Two sides of the Goths’ perceptions
converge here: on one side they might well interpret Michael’s presentation as
indeed bringing guns into their presence, since they fantasize about it rather
openly themselves; on the other side are a series of reasons not to treat him
seriously: that he is a young nerd trying once against to raise his status in
their group; that their own talk about guns is bluster and no more; that to go
any farther with the guns would get themselves in trouble, whereas their
bluster is end enough in itself. They turn their backs on Michael and proceed
to talk about punk music CDs.
This is
the situational turning point.
Michael has now been doubly humiliated: by the mainstream status system
of the school, epitomized before his eyes by the prayer group a few yards away;
by the counter-culture group, who put him at the bottom of their own status
hierarchy, reject his best efforts to live up to their antinomian standards,
and now literally turn their backs on him at what he had intended as his moment
of greatest impressiveness. No one
looks at him as he reaches into his backpack and puts on a pair of bright
orange ear plugs which he has pilfered along with the guns and ammunition. This
is the paraphernalia shooters wear on firing ranges to protect their ears from
the blast of the shot. No one in
either group looks at him as he takes out the pistol, loads a clip, and raises
it into firing position, following the posture of the shooting range. Probably
all these moments are on the cusp of the turning point; but still no one gives
him any attention. He waits until
the last words of the prayer are finished, and pulls the trigger, first in a
quick burst of three, then deliberately finishing the rest of the clip.
Why does
he stop shooting? Students
watching the scene describe it as a mixture of shock and unreality as the
bodies fall. The pistol in the enclosed space sounds to one of them like little
popping noises of firecrackers.
This is in keeping with the experience of soldiers and police, for whom
the situation of firing, the apex of confrontation, is dissociated from their
normal senses; a large majority of these shooters report the sound of their own
guns, or of guns fired at them, sound tiny and far away, perhaps not even heard
at all (Artwohl 1977). The earplugs are not really necessary, since Michael
probably would not hear the shots anyway.
The chief effect of the earplugs is to heighten the sense of unreality,
cutting out normal sounds that make other bodies in the vicinity seem active
and real, not just pictures on a screen.
He has reached the point of isolation from all social feedback. Of course he had been heading that way
for months, with his succession of backstages; now he has reached the bottom of
the tunnel.
As soon
as he finishes his clip, he starts to come back into the social world. Although he has plenty of guns and
ammunition, he makes no effort to reload.
He takes off the earplugs and turns passive as authority figures -- the
big senior male who leads the prayer group, the school principal -- confront
him. Now his backstage has turned into frontstage, his emotional energy has
disappeared; the confrontational barrier becomes real again, and he freezes,
unable to shoot any more.
The Strongest Clue: a Ritualized
Hidden Arsenal
Most of
the characteristics of mass killers-- low status isolates, bully victims,
school failures, gun owners, players of violent games, even persons who talk or
write about fantasies of revenge-- are far too widespread in the population to
accurately predict who will actually perpetrate a massacre. A much stronger
clue, I suggest, is amassing an arsenal of weapons, which become the center of
an obsessive ritual; the arsenal is not just a practical step towards the
massacre, but has a motivating effect that deepens the spiral of clandestine
plotting into a private world impervious to normal social restraints and moral
feelings.
School
shooters and other rampage killers generally amass an arsenal of weapons,
bringing far more to the shooting site than they actually use or need. Michael Carneal brought a total of 8
guns, wrapped up in a unwieldy bundle as well as in his backpack: a 30-30
rifle, four .22 caliber rifles, 2 shotguns, and a pistol, and a many boxes of
ammunition; but he used only the pistol. The pair of 11- and 13-year old
boys who killed 5 and wounded 10
on a school playground in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998 carried 7 pistols, 3 rifles, and a large amount of ammunition, of
which they fired 30 shots.
The two
shooters at Columbine HS carried a semi-automatic handgun, a carbine, two
sawed-off shotguns, and almost 100 home-made bombs; they fired 96 shots from
the carbine, 55 from the handgun, and 25 from one of the shotguns; their
magazines held 240 rounds, of which they still had about 100 rounds, plus 90 of
the bombs, when they committed suicide. In the first 20 minutes of their
rampage, they killed 13 students and teachers and wounded 21. Then their
emotional energy seemed to run out-- they even laughed sardonically that the
thrill of killing was gone. They left 34 students unharmed out of 56 who were
hiding under desks in the school library, and merely taunted other students
while they wandered the halls firing aimless shots, before shooting themselves
25 minutes later, synchronizing their last action with a chant: "One, two,
three!"
Holmes,
the Aurora killer, carried a shotgun, an automated assault rifle, and 2 handguns;
previously he spent 4 months amassing equipment in his apartment, including
multiple ammunition magazines and 6000 rounds, of which he used only a small
part. He also constructed 30 explosives out of aerial fireworks, refilling them
with chemicals, a task that must have taken many days.
Brievik
had 4 guns, 2 of which he took to the island. He spent two years acquiring the weapons, since guns are
hard to get in Europe, and Norwegian regulations are strict. Nevertheless he
persevered through the official steps for a hunting license and undergoing
training at a police-approved shooting club to get a pistol permit. To create a massive car bomb (which he
used in the first phase of his attack, at a government building in Oslo), he
spent several years acquiring a remote farm as a front for buying fertilizer
and chemicals. He was busy in his
hidden backstage, video-game training, writing propaganda, and making a fake
police uniform and identification.
On the island, he used his police persona to assemble the youths,
ostensibly to announce precautions, before starting to shoot them at close
range. He brought over 400 rounds with him, fired 186, and still had over half
remaining after fatally shooting 67 persons and wounding 33. He too seemed to
waver towards the end of his 70-minute shooting spree, making several phone
calls offering to give himself up (at 40 minutes and 60 minutes), but then
resuming shooting until the police finally arrived.
The
stockpile of weapons is symbolic overkill. These guns are for showing off --
both to intimidate others, but mainly to impress oneself. They are the sacred
objects of the private backstage cult that builds up the rampager's obsessive
motivation to the massacre. Once
at the sticking point their emotional energy never seems to carry them far
enough to use all their weapons. Whether they bring all their weapons to the
massacre or not, their primary significance has been during the build-up; i.e.
the guns they bring are from the focus of their cult activities-- they are a
kind of security blanket.
To be
clear about the diagnosis: I am not saying that anyone who collects guns is a
potential mass killer. The crucial signs are: first, the guns are kept secret, part of a deep backstage. In contrast,
most gun owners are quite open about them; they may be involved in a cult of
guns but it is a public cult, visible as a political stance, or a
well-advertized pastime such as hunting or target shooting. (Abigail Kohn, Shooters. Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures.) It is the hidden arsenal that is dangerous-- psychologically dangerous. Second, the
rampage killer amasses a large, unrealistic collection of weapons as far as
their actual use is concerned. This symbolic aspect sets them off from other
kinds of criminal users of guns.
The
symbolic aspects of weapons go beyond their sheer physical availability. Hand-guns are widely available through
illegal channels in lower-class urban areas; but they are not used for mass school shootings, but typically
in street crime or gang vendettas.
Up to 22% of inner-city students say they could get their hands on a
gun; and between 4 and 12% report they have brought them to school;
overwhelmingly their stated reason is protection against other students -- i.e.
in the gang milieu of these communities (Klewin 2003). Many of these claims
may be exaggeration and bluster
for the sake of the local status system; and some of the gun-carrying students use them not for defense
but to intimidate or retaliate against others; but in fact they rarely use them in the school itself, and virtually never in mass institutional shootings but
only in targeting specific individuals. (From 1992 through 2000, 234 students
were killed at US schools and 24,406 away from school, a ratio of less than 1
percent (DeVoe 2004). The school
is not their turf; their violence has a different symbolic focus and ritual
location: their rival streets. In
contrast, virtually all the institutional mass murderers have been middle-class
whites, and recently, high-achieving Asians.
Guns in
the hands of gang members and their youth cohort counterparts are potential
murder weapons. But these young men are not potential mass murderers, nor
institutional rampage killers. They do not stockpile weapons in hidden caches,
secretively protecting them with fake-normal behavior; on the contrary, they
show them off to each other at every occasion. They don't have a clandestine backstage the way a nerdy
rampager does. They don't need it, because their emotional attractions to violence,
or at least ritualized bluster, are part of their public interaction rituals.
By the same token, their interaction rituals push them towards intermittent
individually-targeted killings, but not impersonal mass rampages against
unarmed members of hated institutions.
Why
split hairs? Why not say, all guns
are potentially dangerous; the solution is to get rid of all of them. I will not repeat the practical
arguments made at the outset; and Breivik shows that even very strict
regulations can be evaded by a sufficiently obsessed perpetrator. If we are
looking for ways to actually prevent violence, in the sequence of events and
emotions that make up people's lives, we need to be aware of the pathways
leading to particular kinds of violence.
What We Can Do About Mass
Killings
There is
a very strong clue that a massacre is being prepared: an isolated individual
(or possibly a duo) engaged in an obsessive clandestine ritual around a hidden
arsenal of weapons.
To avoid
misunderstanding, let me repeat: It is not the possession of guns that is the
warning sign; it is hiding an arsenal, and clandestine obsession with scenarios
of violence. When clues like this appear in one’s own home, the gun-owning
parent should be in the best position to recognize it.
What is
needed, above all, is a commitment by gun-owners to keep their own guns
completely secure, and not to let them fall into the hands of alienated young
people, including one’s own children or their friends.
My
recommendation is to gun-owners themselves. The issue of gun control in the
United States has been mainly treated as a matter of government legislation.
That pathway has led to political gridlock. That does not mean that we can do
nothing about heading off school shootings. Simply put: keep alienated youths
from building a clandestine arsenal where they nurture fantasies of revenge on
the school status system, or whatever problems they have with their personal
world. Gun-owning parents are closest to where this is most likely to happen.
We need a movement of gun-owning parents who will encourage each other to make
sure it doesn’t start in their own home.
Enter Giveaway
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Civil War Two, Part 1
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See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy
Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
----------
Sources: news reports; Wikipedia; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics;
Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction
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Press.
Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence:
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Princeton Univ. Press.
Kohn,
Abigail. 2004. Shooters. Myths and
Realities of America's Gun Cultures. Oxford Univ. Press.
Lankford,
Adam. 2015. “Mass Shooters, Firearms, and Social Strains: A Global
Analysis of an Exceptionally American Problem.” paper delivered at Annual Meeting of American Sociological
Association.
Newman, Katherine S., Cybelle Fox,
David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth.
2004. Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. NY: Basic Books.
Artwohl, Alexis, and Loren W.
Christensen. 1997. Deadly Force Encounters. Boulder CO: Paladin Press.
DeVoe, Jill, et al. 2004.
“Indicators of School Crime
and Safety.” U.S. Dept. of Education.
Experian Simmons. 2012. "Top TV Programs Among Voter
Segments." Reported in Los
Angeles Times, August 30, B3.
Katz, Jack. 1988. Seductions of Crime.
Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. NY: Basic Books.
Klewin, Gabriele, et al. 2003. "Violence in school." in Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research. London: Kluwer.
Milner, Murray, Jr. 2004. Freaks,
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NY: Routledge.
Sageman, Marc. 2004. Understanding Terror Networks. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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