As a high school teacher who has to supervise kids through frequent lockdowns, I’ve had my fair share of frustrations with the process. It’s not that I blame them, but when kids don’t take lockdowns seriously, I have to react with a strict and firm hand.
Multiple times, I’ve had kids talking and laughing during lockdowns, or simply making way too much noise in the case of an actual emergency or immediate danger.
I teach at a predominantly Black, 100% free and reduced lunch, Title I school in the hood. My students are often desensitized to so many lockdowns throughout their education. Often, they feel disconnected from news of mass shootings across the country for a plethora of reasons, but some of my students believe mass shootings don’t happen at schools like ours.
“This is a Black school, Mr. Fan. No one is going to shoot up the school.”
I’m not Black, but I recall Dave Chappelle once joked in Netflix’s special Sticks and Stones with a similar sentiment about racial dynamics and mass shootings. I tried to remind my kids there was a mass shooting in the community 20 blocks away the day before where a gunman fired 60 shots with an assault rifle.
For all these reasons (as well as being immature teenagers), a lot of my kids treat mass shootings very trivially. I had a student who was very quiet, didn’t have many friends, and kept to himself at the beginning of the year. The other students called him “school shooter” and saw nothing wrong with it until I had to threaten to call their parents and reiterate how offensive such a nickname it is.
Besides problematically putting that label on someone based on stereotypes, it was just mean, harsh, and crossing a line. Now, the kid is friends with all those kids and has come out of his shell, but the fact that the label was tossed around so haphazardly says a lot about desensitization and just not believing it could happen at our school.
However, my kid had a point about mass shootings at predominantly white schools getting more attention, and how mass shootings at Black churches or supermarkets in recent events were motivated by hate and racial animus more than anything else.
Besides racial dynamics, there was one thing about these shooters recently I couldn’t shake. In many recent mass shootings, some of the shooters have been incredibly young — teenagers or barely adults.
Ethan Crumbley, the shooter at Oxford High School in Michigan, was 15-years-old. Payton Gendron, the white man who heinously killed ten Black people at a Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, was 18-years-old. The shooter behind yesterday’s Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde was also 18-years-old.
When we go back beyond this year, the infamous Columbine High School shooters were 17 and 18.
Regan DuCasse was the first to point out to me how Payton Gendron was so young and so impressionable to hateful views. To me, it was a very clear picture of evil — Payton Gendron was unapologetically evil and racist and deserved every punishment he could get. However, the fact that he was almost a child made me think twice.
This is incredibly jarring to me because all these shooters are the same age as some of my students. Although I teach ninth grade, I teach students who have been retained a year, several years, or just need to retake English I for whatever reason.
How can you be so young and have so much hate? How can you be so young and so angry? How can you be so young and have such a complete disregard for human life?
An 18-year-old who just graduated from high school isn’t even old enough to have a legal drink, yet we’re seeing time and time again they’re making the conscious decision to massacre dozens of children, Black people at supermarkets, and young people. An 18-year-old is barely old enough to make legal decisions for themselves — to me, if they’re still in school, they’re still teenagers.
To be clear, these mass shootings are about as heinous of crimes as you can imagine. And it’s very difficult to argue against throwing the book against mass shooters (if they live) and pursuing the strictest and harshest sentences possible. Most people will probably think it’s callous to focus so much on the perpetrators — who cares how young they are? They still massacred people in cold blood.
As a part of the education system, I wonder whether we failed these young people
As a teacher, maybe it’s taboo to ask the question about whether we failed young people who shoot up schools or shoot up supermarkets in racist hate crimes. A lot of my fellow teachers would say it’s the parents who failed them.
But there are a lot of people a kid can turn to if they’re having mental health challenges or struggles at home in a school — psychologists, social workers, counselors, teachers, and administrators.
To me, a senior in high school does not decide to buy an assault rifle and massacre dozens of people overnight. The path to being a mass shooter is a gradual process where there are almost always tons of red flags.
This is a gun control issue too, of course. An 18-year-old who previously threatened to shoot up a school should not be able to legally buy an assault rifle, no questions. I don’t think many people question that, but no matter how many mass shootings or school shootings there are, it always seems like it remains a conversation without meaningful policy changes, which we can attribute to the political power of the National Rifle Association, but if this series of shootings don’t change anything, I don’t know what will.
According to Glenn Thrush at the New York Times, most mass shooters buy their guns legally. One survey found that 77% of mass shooters between 1966 and 2019 bought their guns legally. Payton Gendron did not trigger New York state’s “red flag” law stopping mentally ill people from buying guns.
There needs to be action behind the outrage. Yes, limiting access to young men intent on committing hate crimes and mass shootings is one step.
But we also have to examine why so many young men and young teenagers are so intent on mass shootings in the first place, and how they grow to disregard human life the way they do. How does an 18-year-old become a white supremacist? How does a recent high school graduate decide to shoot up an elementary school?
A lot of factors go into someone’s decision to senselessly murder people, commit a hate crime, and disregard human life. I’ve heard the narrative that many mass shooters report a history of bullying — and from the data, almost half of people who perpetrate K-12 shootings report histories of bullying. Salvador Ramos, who just killed 21 people in a Robb Elementary School shooting, was often bullied over his speech impediment. He was also bullied frequently with homophobic slurs.
Of course, being bullied is not a justification for a mass shooting, but where do we stop mass shooters before they become mass shooters?
It’s easy to blame parents, but it seems like the family members of Salvador Ramos really couldn’t do much once his mind was set — Ramos posted an Instagram video of calling his mother a bitch while she tried to kick him out of the house, and he shot his grandmother before the mass shooting. And we go down a very slippery slope as a society when we blame parents for every reprehensible decision their adult child makes.
No one factor makes a mass shooter
I taught a kid who is being charged with murder. He was 14 years old when he was charged as an adult. He didn’t commit a mass shooting, but I do recall teachers who cared about him and family members who cared about him in school — he simply needed a lot more support than any of us were able to give. He was in a lot more pain than we were able to support.
So it’s hard to blame a single person for the heinous crimes of a young person besides themselves, no matter how old they are. You never know what role you might play in stopping a mass shooter in the making — because they’ll just never engage in a mass shooting.
It is a very insensitive time to be saying this, but I recall an episode of Six Feet Under, a series about a family that runs a funeral home. In the episode, a disgruntled man fired from his job shoots up and kills several people in his office. The protagonist’s family is asked to give a funeral for the mass shooter, and a worker at the funeral home contests the decision, treating the family of the mass shooter horribly, but at the end of the day, the mass shooter gets a funeral where only his family attends.
It’s a sobering reminder that mass shooters were, once upon a time, still human beings. And I do wonder how they lost their humanity somewhere down the line.
At some point, could anyone have made a difference to stop a mass shooting from happening?
I ask more questions than have answers because I don’t know.
What the research says
Adam Lankford and Kaitlyn Hoover at Violence and Gender study the differences between younger and older offenders. They examined 88 mass shooters between January 1982 and March 2018, and found younger mass shooters are “ more likely than older mass shooters to obtain their weapons illegally, attack at schools, have a reported history of animal abuse, and admit copying or being inspired by previous attackers.”
These are significant findings because younger offenders are more likely than older ones to steal firearms from family members, especially if they still live at home. In many cases, the authors say family members were “reckless or negligent in allowing troubled young people easy access to firearms” and can sometimes become the first victim of a shooter.
As a result, Lankford and Hoover suggest passing child access prevention laws to firearms at the federal level, which is feasible right now because Democrats have a majority in the House and the Senate, and not every state has these child access prevention laws.
Younger mass shooters, especially mass shooters younger than 18, are significantly significantly more likely to attack schools than other mass shooters, who often attack workplaces and other areas. Their explanation for this is the following:
“Juveniles may be more likely to narrowly blame their grievances and suffering on their school experiences, whereas older offenders seem to have broader sources of anger, including their work, the government, the military, religious institutions, and other perceived enemies throughout society.”
I did not know about the abusing animals part prior to reading this study, but Payton Gendron described stabbing and decapitating a feral cat. The Oxford High School mass shooter also abused animals. Information is still developing about Ramos, but the authors hypothesize animals are easy to control and exert power over minors compared to other people, especially for minors who are controlled by parents and school.
Lastly, young people are more likely to seek fame and be influenced by the copycat effect than older mass shooters. Younger shooters are more likely to seek fame or “worship celebrity models” or imitate trends.
Takeaways
I realize mentioning the names of these shooters might be contributing to the problem of the “contagion effect” and notoriety of the offenders. But we do have to ask, as a society, how we can stop young men who commit these terrible killings before they happen.
98% of mass shooters are men, and a lot of them are very young. There are plenty of red flags in every case before they kill a lot of people, which is one shortcoming we have to shore up as a society.
I don’t want to play into the conservative angle of pinning these horrible shootings on mental health — because a lot of mentally ill, lonely, and bullied people don’t shoot up schools or Black people at grocery stores.
But I do think there is a crisis in misguided and lost young men in this country who seek to do as much damage as possible, seeking to kill and harm as many people as possible. Allie Beth Stuckey, a conservative commentator, says we are doing everything wrong for young men by denying innate gender differences and demonizing masculine strength, and contributing to the moral deficit. I think this is a terrible argument, but I do agree we need to teach our young men better.
And we should and can do something about that, and it’s important to note we won’t catch every potential mass shooter overnight. It takes day in, day out efforts to ameliorate the isolation and emotional hollowness so many of these young men feel.
Since 1999, over two-thirds of mass shootings were committed by shooters under 18. The median age of school shooters was 16.
As a teacher, I see the effect of the pandemic on student mental health. This might seem tangential, but I see how the isolation and quarantine have affected kids’ ability to resolve conflicts in a peaceful manner and simply be nice and kind to each other. It’s not a pleasant reality to deal with on a daily basis, but I fear how these mental health challenges may be a factor in mass shootings, even if they don’t explain them.
We need to pay attention to red flags among our young people, particularly teenagers. And we need to start paying more attention now, as school personnel, parents, friends, and everyone.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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