It seems as though we have gone beyond the copycat effect. Mass shootings have become part of our DNA.
Adults have learned a murderous lesson from children.
And today's mass shooter in Connecticut chose a perfectly ugly and apt location to prove that point.
A 20-year-old gunman opened fire on the Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 26, according to news reports. Twenty of them are said to be children. The gunman himself was found dead in the school.
In 1999, I was one of the first reporters on scene at the Columbine High School shootings, which left 15 dead, including the two killers. As the worldwide media parachuted in then out of the Denver suburb, I felt no one had figured out why school shootings were suddenly a trend. There was Paducah, Ky., Springfield, Ore., and Pearl, Miss., to name a few.
I spent the next 10 years after Columbine researching a book on school shootings. I literally connected the dots on the map and saw that the incidents were occurring in suburbs and small towns. The juveniles — mostly teenage boys — were outcasts, or at least saw themselves as that. Or they had suffered some setback — maybe girl trouble.
Their situation was exacerbated in suburbs and small towns because in those locales, high school is the only game in town. A loser there feels like a loser through and through and takes revenge on the source of his angst and the most immediate symbol of society: the schoolyard and its social hierarchies.
The "traditional" map of school shootings showed us something else: They overwhelmingly occurred in the South and West of the United States. Here, psychologists had long identified a "culture of honor" before mass shootings took hold of our national consciousness. The culture of honor infused people in these regions — namely males — with the idea that if their honor had been violated, it was appropriate to respond with violence. Student outcasts translated this into a school shooting when they felt their mates had not given them proper recognition.
More than 13 years after Columbine, I now see that my ideas — since borne out in at least one academic study — were sadly quaint and only relatively ugly.
Now adults everywhere have taken up the mantle of the mass shooting. And instead of surveying the 10 or so years surrounding Columbine, we need only look at the past five months. In July the Aurora, Colo., shootings left 12 dead and 58 injured. A 24-year-old University of Colorado graduate student stands accused of what has been called the largest mass shooting in U.S. history when the number of injured is factored in. Just Tuesday, a 22-year-old gunman opened fire on a mall in Oregon, killing two and wounding one.
We are still unclear on the Connecticut shooter's motives. Was he mentally ill? Was he trying to take revenge on the school for some perceived snub? Did he have relationship problems in his home?
Whatever reasons we may find, it seems as though we have gone beyond the copycat effect. Mass shootings have become part of our DNA. No matter our age, hometown or issue, they have become a catch-all solution.
But while we are all at-risk, we are not helpless. Violent threats, writings, and extreme changes in behavior are all warning signs we should be on the lookout for, because we are all now in the front lines of preventing mass shootings.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.
Source: http://www.news.theusalinks.com/2012/12/15/column-what-have-we-learned-since-columbine/
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