> The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.
Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.
Well, that's the opposite of what the article is arguing: everyone assumed LaDue was "disturbed", but struggled to find any evidence of it.
The article is arguing that school shootings have become "normalised" or even "traditional"; there's a template to follow and kids are adopting that role, assembling a collection of grievances and weapons. It's a sort of self-radicalisation, like the Unabomber.
There's pretty obvious evidence that anyone who commits a mass murder is disturbed. Our society is too "stupid" to understand what that disturbance is, but that is orthogonal to the disturbance existing.
All we really have in response, at the moment, is punishment, hand-wringing, and band-aids over symptoms. Clearly this is ineffectual.
One need not be "disturbed" to carry out horrific acts of violence. Would you describe a fanatical terrorist (ISIS, Skinhead, whatever) as disturbed? Writing off anyone who decides to murder as "disturbed" is ignoring a whole swathe of folks. The US has easy access to firearms, and we glorify violence. There are many reasons why one will kill, and just saying "Oh, he's fucked in the head" is just another way of shifting focus from other problems.
Or a drone pilot, for that matter. Desensitisation to violence, or writing off the victims as something less than human, allows anyone to be a mass killer without being conventionally disturbed.
That would depend on what your definition of "conventionally disturbed" is. Most modern diagnostic psychology is based upon deviations from some kind of norm (it's greatest weakness, because then you have to define the "norm", not easy to do objectively)
..but it doesn't change the fact that most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent. Given that definition, yes, I could see how "disturbed" or "mentally ill" fits. Having the mindset that committing mass murder is okay or justifiable is an aberrant thought pattern. Full stop, end of story.
Address that pattern, and you address the root of the problem.
I find the idea that "desensitiation to violence" is at all meaningful to be spurious at best. More tractable types believe the media narrative about, say, Columbine being caused by the shooters being avid fans of the FPS game Doom, but study after study can't find a link between games and real life violence.
There's also proof by inversion - the USA is famously inverse of the rest of the world, puritanical when it comes to sex, okay with violence. Therefore, you'd expect if the desensitization idea held any water, that the rest of the civilized world has a bigger problem than the USA with sexually-based crimes. I haven't seen evidence to that effect.
> most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent.
Killing random guilty people, on the other hand, is completely legitimised in the USA. Self-defence advocates talk about it all the time. So all that has to happen is for someone to manufacture a justification for the victim(s) deserving it and it becomes legitimate in their eyes.
That's how lynching used to happen; entire communities would turn out to murder some people simply because they were black.
I wasn't talking about games being the desensitising factor. I'm an avid player of games myself, many of them very violent. More about a climate where mass killing is more visible and has less repercussions or damnation - e.g. war.
US has been in more wars as the aggressor than any other country I'd guess, over the past couple of generations. Perhaps that mass death and resulting inpunity for people at the top contributes to these teenagers' lack of appreciation of the horror in their actions?
I agree 'conventionally disturbed' is a silly term. Hard to find one better; maybe, 'absent of any identifiable mental disorder that would likely explain their murderous actions'?
you've got the wrong idea about drone pilots. people who do it do NOT see it as a video game. they follow orders, some they'd rather not, but if not for duty.
So what is the problem? You don't think if we had a culture more averse to violence and less access to firearms shootings would drop? I'm a firearm owner, but I'm not so blinded by politics to make the connection that little Johnny isn't gonna shoot up his class if he can't sneak the gun out of his dad's closet. I'm also not making the case that violent video games cause violence, but that we're so casual about it in our society that folks become a bit more willing to do harm. Some folks hear voices in their head, some folks are just filled with hatred for their fellow man. Writing everyone who has committed a crime of that degree off as crazy does neither the mentally ill nor our ability to understand them any good.
Brilliant reasoning. Let's forget about drivers licenses and car registration, too. Any why bother securing our homes? Anyone intent on breaking in can just pick the locks.
Exactly. This seems like a definitional issue as much as anything--but any definition of "disturbed" that doesn't include a kid who's about to shoot up his school isn't a very good definition.
Not to say that you're wrong and Gladwell is right, but you're ignoring most of his argument! The core, to me, is that a lot of these young men are just highly obsessive kids on the autism spectrum. They develop a fascination with the lore of school shootings (not hard to understand - I've read about too many of these kids myself) and are just missing a few emotional checks and balances that would stop a neurotypical person from obsessing over the methods of past shooters and planning an attack of their own.
Then there's the "threshold effect", which suggests that each shooter may require less emotional disturbance/aggression than the last - for just the right obsessive mind missing a few internal checks and balances, planning and executing an attack seems more and more perversely "normal".
I don't think he makes the case that "many" are on the autism spectrum -- his article describes just one case. What resonated with me is the case that public violence has become so normalized that you don't need a violent nature to nurture violence yourself.
Obsession and lack of empathy are still required though, for now. As such, ASD people are probably more at risk from the "normalization" of deviant behaviour than others. But there are many ways to de-humanize other people, and ASD is just one of them (radicalization is another one).
To me, that's the real risk of today's media landscape. I don't mean just the Internet, even mainstream media does not back away from publishing the "manifestos" of these deviants. As such, the behaviour becomes more normalized and it's worrying that the threshold lowers with each publication.
This isn't just an American thing even. We've had the shootings in Norway, stabbing of an army sergeant in England, hostage taking at the Dutch public news channel. In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims, which disturbs me. That's also why I won't provide links or names for the above, I don't want to feel complicit.
> We've had the shootings in Norway, ... In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims
Only outside Norway. Here the focus was on NOT treating him as someone special and on providing for the victims and the future. I see Breivik's name far more often in English language media than in Norwegian.
Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.