It was 1998, and the school shootings began. This was before Columbine, and most of the world felt safe. I had moved to a new town, and the school just wasn’t for me. I tried to transfer out of it, but was denied. This is when I started to make the connection that I fit the description of the school shooters who had already shown up. The NEWS covered them as these outsiders who planned out attacks, and were angry at the world. I was 17 at the time, and angry. I was also smart, too smart really. I figured out that I fit the description perfectly, and I turned myself in. I was expelled from the school, and escorted out in handcuffs. To this day, I wish someone would have told me that everyone wants to blow up a school. It’s part of being a teenager. The question was more along the lines of actually doing it, which I wasn’t.
This led me to think about things in a different way from how most people have viewed school shootings. Columbine happened, and it was darker and more terrible for me than 9/11. It was partly because the town I had just moved away from two years ago looked and sounded just like Littleton. Middleton is a great place, but it has its problems like any other. So, when I first heard what had happened, I thought it was about my own beloved town, and that the people being shot, were my own friends.
The other reason why, was that I knew how the shooters had planned things out. I understood the motives, and ideas. When I heard the shooters had pipebombs, I knew they had placed some at the evacuation points where the students would stand during fire drills. I knew this because that is how I would plan it. Once again, I looked at myself, and wondered how it was I wasn’t one of them, these awful killers? This essay is my explanation on what is happening, and why I believe we have gotten it totally wrong.
The first thing I want to introduce to you is the idea of Outliers. They are statistical anomalies that are ignored by most researchers. As far as we are concerned they don’t exist, because they happen so infrequently.
Outliers are a very important part in our lives. Most stories are outliers. The hero who wins the big game, and the heart of the girl is very rare, yet it is also one of the most common movies. The man who was in right place to save the day is used as a description for all sorts of action movies. The stories we tell are about the people who did something amazing, even though the odds said it was a bad idea. We root for these characters, we empathize with them, and we want to be them.
We also use outliers to describe whole sections of people. When I went to middle school, a friend of mine was from Iran. It never occurred to me that this was big, or important. I knew him because we both liked computers. Then 9/11 happened, and a country that had very few middle eastern cultures within it, had an image of an entire people made out because of 7 men. So, I had my outlier of my friend, and many people I knew had their outlier of terrorists. Because of this, we all had an image of how the middle east worked. To me, everyone in Iran plays the violin, and enjoys computers. To many people in the US, the people of Iran are all waiting to blow up planes.
The outliers are completely false of course. My image of my friend is only of my friend. Iran has all sorts of people in it, from computer nerds to their own version of white trash rednecks. Likewise, the country has people who feel very strongly about how things should be, and others who are busy hitting on girls as I type this. In other words, Iran is just as boring, and common as the US. We are viewing an entire people because of a single example.
There is also another form of outlier. This happens when there are actually plenty of people that fit a description, but they are largely unnoticed. People who own guns, tend to think that everyone enjoys shooting guns. People who don’t own guns, believe that everyone agrees with them.
Within the highschool setting, there are more unpopular kids then there are popular kids. Yet, no one seems to notice the unpopular kids. Within a single highschool can be several groups of people that may completely disagree with each other. Some of these disagreements are completely dumb. I remember being in a class listening to someone who was against school dress code, unless it was polo shirts and slacks, because everyone liked dressing in those. Yes, this was the school I got expelled from.
Another example is being gifted. The vast majority of studies, and mental health workers, are based on those who have mental disabilities. There is a lack of studies, and recognition for being gifted. Imagine the world was graphed based on how many people had mental health disabilities, and those with giftedness. It would look something like a tall hill. The peak would be the average intelligent human being, because most people are hovering somewhere around it. The left would be people with mental health disabilities, and those with gifts would be on the right. There would be an equal amount going down this hill on either side. Yet, when we study, it looks like giftedness does not exist. It is a social outlier, or something that we don’t even consider. We don’t understand the mental state of humanity, because we tend to ignore understanding an entire section of it.
This is why it is so difficult to imagine a shooter. This is a perfectly good human being, who rationally, and sanely plans to kill people for his own personal glory. The idea does not make sense. A human being can not decide to begin murdering others unless there is something else happening. The shooter is an outlier in our mind, and we have no real ways to deal with it.
For every law, or idea proposed, it becomes obvious that we can not face this idea. Every statement I have read by friends, and the press has not covered this understanding because the outlier seems so impossible. This is the point though, it is an outlier. Literally something impossible and awful has killed children.
The act of a shooter is not the way we imagine it. We propose more laws, even when there are laws banning the guns being used. We propose mental health checks, when the majority of the shooters are completely sane. We say they were not raised properly, and yet these same people have perfectly functioning adult siblings. We want more guards at schools, not realizing that the amount of guards to stop a shooter would need to be very high, and still not work. Then we propose arming the teachers, even though this is the opposite of what any teacher wants to do with their life. We say he was bullied, or wore dark clothing. The Columbine shooters had friends, hung out, and did not do drugs. We say it is videogames, or a society filled with violence. Violent crimes have been dropping since the 80’s, and videogames have not been found to link to violent crime by psychological testing. In other words, we seem to be proposing all of the wrong things.
Taking care of people with mental health problems is a good and noble cause. Talking about violence in videogames is something that needs to be talked about. Placing them as the reasons for an awful event is not working, and placing a stigma on the breaching of the subject. It is now harder to talk to videogamers about the violence in their games. Many people with disabilities are being shunned because they are now being viewed as killers.
I want to point something out as well, I am a videogame playing, dark clothes wearing, quiet kid who grew up moving around all the time, and has ADHD. Not only that, I have the mental faculties to understand, and plan out an attack. Oh, and I lived in places where guns were all over the place, so I know how to aim and shoot one. You are making laws that outlaw me, and yet, it is not me who is doing it. This was why I turned myself in, as far as public evidence showed, I was a shooter waiting to happen. It frightened me. I have heard similar stories among friends, of them being kicked out of a school, or taken out in handcuffs because of the percieved threat. It doesn’t matter what side you are on, both ideas are proposing a police state. This is incredibly bad, and it is time we talked about it.
Researchers have been looking at the details of the shootings, and have found very little that commonly connect them all. The reality is, the people who decided to become a shooter were average. We could be describing anybody when giving the details in common with various shooters.
This is not a rage attack, nor is it a sudden snap of sanity. The people involved planned it out, and waited for the perfect time. There were plenty of people with guns at many of the shootings in recent time, they had to be in an exact spot to be able to do anything. Most shootings are fast, and last only a few minutes, being in another room would mean you are too late. A mall is not a warzone, nor is a school. Treating them as such destroys the reason why they exist.
So why are so many proposing ideas that will not work? There is an answer to this, and it is common. When something happens to someone you care about, you want to be able to do something. The feeling of uselessness is overwhelming. Each person tries to imagine a way that saves the day, from a well placed law, to a revenge fantasy. Grieving people are the most difficult to talk to about anything.
The fantasy of organizing, and leading a group to save the day is how one side is viewing it. They see the idea of creating a law, or awareness will save the lives of those in danger. We know laws only work if everyone agrees to them. There are plenty of people who specifically work against laws so that everyone can enjoy their favorite videogame, ipod, or movie for free. It gets even more basic since almost everyone goes faster than the speed limit, and then demands that laws be made.
The second group has a hero fantasy. The person is able to stop the horrible evil, by their quick wits, and cunning. Right after Columbine, I think everyone I knew had these fantasies. But there was always hundreds of shooters, and somehow they were not match for the hero.
Neither of these are real enough to stop the problems that are happening now. They are helping people grieve, and because of this, I tend to not point it out. Right now, I am seeing people trying to make these fantasies into reality.
The average mind of a shooter is very similar to that of a terrorist. It does not start that way, but the end result is the same. Law enforcement has done an incredible amount of research on how terrorists are recruited, and we can use that to help us in making decisions. The first thing to understand is that once an attack begins, it is too late. There may be someone who is at the right place, and has the ability to stop it, but he will not be common. The fantasy of simply stopping the enemy with bullets will not work. It does not matter if it is a teacher, a guard, or a common citizen, it is too late.
For terrorists, there is a training time. Someone helps the proto terrorist get over the idea that what he is doing is wrong. There are tapes of people performing acts of terror asking their friend if what they are doing is ok. Their more experienced friend assures them it is ok, and needs to be done. Eventually, the terrorist learns to separate themselves from those they kill, and those they care about. It does not happen overnight.
This is not happening with a shooter. They do not have trainers, or someone telling them it is alright. Entirely how this works out is completely unknown.
I believe this is the reason why so many are jumping to false conclusions. Even though there have been shooters for decades, we do not know why they do it. Because of this, we place other ideas, or try to mold the shooter into something we can understand.
We do not know why the shooter did it, so we assume they must have a mental health problem. This does not work out, because it is not a sudden crime, nor have many of the shooters had mental health issues that would lead to being a shooter. We are doing damage to people with mental health problems by labelling them as killers.
The same can be said for any of the other proposed ideas given. In fact there is a common pattern to it. The people proposing the idea either already believed a certain group was violent, or they were trying to push the idea away from themselves. People who dislike guns, are now proposing gun bans, even though the shooters did not use the guns being banned. Videogames are played as being the cause of violence by people who don’t play games.
We demand that the shooter not be us, not be average, not be normal, because then the shooter could be any one of us. It is a traumatizing thought, and the reaction by everyone involved has been to state that they are not the shooter. This is also part of the grieving, the dealing with the sense of guilt over the tragedy. The idea that nothing could be done, or something should have been done play back into the minds of the people.
Once again outliers happen, a single person becomes the explanation for an entire people. Someone who did something that is used by many as a form of relaxation, only in a horrible and awful form.
And now I have to tell you the truth, at this point there is no real answer. The people who research these ideas do not know why it is happening, or how to stop it. The understanding is very vague at this point, and no real conclusions can be made. In my previous paper, I tried to explain things using social equations, and thought patterns, but that does not mean I have a complete answer.
This is why we need to learn a very important thing, it is ok to not know. Something awful happened, and we do not know why. It will take a long time to understand, and work to stop it. This is why so many researchers have been writing articles, and telling people that they are being tricked. The details are proving that the knee jerk reactions to the tragedy are merely people trying to respond to their feelings of grief.
There is always talk about how much scientists know, and how they can do things. What people are having a hard time understanding is that science is an art of trying to understand the unknown. Scientists do not do tests on known things, they do tests on unknown things. The entire idea of science is that of finding out. The reason why scientists are excited is because they get to study the unknown, and how it works. Whenever I hear someone say they are a scientist, and that they know all sorts of stuff, I sort of laugh. A real scientist wants to know, and does everything they can to find out. It leads to long conversations on how things work, and what evidence there is to hold it. Most amazing tests hold high error rates, because of the knowledge that what is being done is dealing with unknown things. Electricity was being used before anyone knew how it worked.
Plato once said that he had learned that he knew nothing. What most do not understand, is that he was also saying, that he wanted to understand everything. The only way for him to do that was to admit how much he did not know.
In other words, I don’t know why there are school shootings. I do not understand how a perfectly sane human being would want to be a villain. There are questions I have that go back to things I enjoy doing, and I want to know how it may have affected the shooter. What was telling the shooter that it was ok, and that those being shot were not something to be sympathised with? I don’t know, I only know that I am not one of them. For me, that is a wonderful conclusion to make.
I also want to emphasize that the answer may happen without anyone noticing it. While people were worrying about the baby boom, and how it would make the population skyrocket. Women stopped having as many babies. It was happening before anyone noticed it in fact.
Some of the greatest things in the world have happened, before anyone ever realized it. In fact, a common thing is that the problem had become such a non thing for so long, that when the answer did happen, it wasn’t even considered big. Right now the proposals and the ideas are very big, and wrong. The reality is that the answers will be very slight, and personal. You will likely forget that shootings were even a thing unless someone reminded you.
This led me to think about things in a different way from how most people have viewed school shootings. Columbine happened, and it was darker and more terrible for me than 9/11. It was partly because the town I had just moved away from two years ago looked and sounded just like Littleton. Middleton is a great place, but it has its problems like any other. So, when I first heard what had happened, I thought it was about my own beloved town, and that the people being shot, were my own friends.
The other reason why, was that I knew how the shooters had planned things out. I understood the motives, and ideas. When I heard the shooters had pipebombs, I knew they had placed some at the evacuation points where the students would stand during fire drills. I knew this because that is how I would plan it. Once again, I looked at myself, and wondered how it was I wasn’t one of them, these awful killers? This essay is my explanation on what is happening, and why I believe we have gotten it totally wrong.
The first thing I want to introduce to you is the idea of Outliers. They are statistical anomalies that are ignored by most researchers. As far as we are concerned they don’t exist, because they happen so infrequently.
Outliers are a very important part in our lives. Most stories are outliers. The hero who wins the big game, and the heart of the girl is very rare, yet it is also one of the most common movies. The man who was in right place to save the day is used as a description for all sorts of action movies. The stories we tell are about the people who did something amazing, even though the odds said it was a bad idea. We root for these characters, we empathize with them, and we want to be them.
We also use outliers to describe whole sections of people. When I went to middle school, a friend of mine was from Iran. It never occurred to me that this was big, or important. I knew him because we both liked computers. Then 9/11 happened, and a country that had very few middle eastern cultures within it, had an image of an entire people made out because of 7 men. So, I had my outlier of my friend, and many people I knew had their outlier of terrorists. Because of this, we all had an image of how the middle east worked. To me, everyone in Iran plays the violin, and enjoys computers. To many people in the US, the people of Iran are all waiting to blow up planes.
The outliers are completely false of course. My image of my friend is only of my friend. Iran has all sorts of people in it, from computer nerds to their own version of white trash rednecks. Likewise, the country has people who feel very strongly about how things should be, and others who are busy hitting on girls as I type this. In other words, Iran is just as boring, and common as the US. We are viewing an entire people because of a single example.
There is also another form of outlier. This happens when there are actually plenty of people that fit a description, but they are largely unnoticed. People who own guns, tend to think that everyone enjoys shooting guns. People who don’t own guns, believe that everyone agrees with them.
Within the highschool setting, there are more unpopular kids then there are popular kids. Yet, no one seems to notice the unpopular kids. Within a single highschool can be several groups of people that may completely disagree with each other. Some of these disagreements are completely dumb. I remember being in a class listening to someone who was against school dress code, unless it was polo shirts and slacks, because everyone liked dressing in those. Yes, this was the school I got expelled from.
Another example is being gifted. The vast majority of studies, and mental health workers, are based on those who have mental disabilities. There is a lack of studies, and recognition for being gifted. Imagine the world was graphed based on how many people had mental health disabilities, and those with giftedness. It would look something like a tall hill. The peak would be the average intelligent human being, because most people are hovering somewhere around it. The left would be people with mental health disabilities, and those with gifts would be on the right. There would be an equal amount going down this hill on either side. Yet, when we study, it looks like giftedness does not exist. It is a social outlier, or something that we don’t even consider. We don’t understand the mental state of humanity, because we tend to ignore understanding an entire section of it.
This is why it is so difficult to imagine a shooter. This is a perfectly good human being, who rationally, and sanely plans to kill people for his own personal glory. The idea does not make sense. A human being can not decide to begin murdering others unless there is something else happening. The shooter is an outlier in our mind, and we have no real ways to deal with it.
For every law, or idea proposed, it becomes obvious that we can not face this idea. Every statement I have read by friends, and the press has not covered this understanding because the outlier seems so impossible. This is the point though, it is an outlier. Literally something impossible and awful has killed children.
The act of a shooter is not the way we imagine it. We propose more laws, even when there are laws banning the guns being used. We propose mental health checks, when the majority of the shooters are completely sane. We say they were not raised properly, and yet these same people have perfectly functioning adult siblings. We want more guards at schools, not realizing that the amount of guards to stop a shooter would need to be very high, and still not work. Then we propose arming the teachers, even though this is the opposite of what any teacher wants to do with their life. We say he was bullied, or wore dark clothing. The Columbine shooters had friends, hung out, and did not do drugs. We say it is videogames, or a society filled with violence. Violent crimes have been dropping since the 80’s, and videogames have not been found to link to violent crime by psychological testing. In other words, we seem to be proposing all of the wrong things.
Taking care of people with mental health problems is a good and noble cause. Talking about violence in videogames is something that needs to be talked about. Placing them as the reasons for an awful event is not working, and placing a stigma on the breaching of the subject. It is now harder to talk to videogamers about the violence in their games. Many people with disabilities are being shunned because they are now being viewed as killers.
I want to point something out as well, I am a videogame playing, dark clothes wearing, quiet kid who grew up moving around all the time, and has ADHD. Not only that, I have the mental faculties to understand, and plan out an attack. Oh, and I lived in places where guns were all over the place, so I know how to aim and shoot one. You are making laws that outlaw me, and yet, it is not me who is doing it. This was why I turned myself in, as far as public evidence showed, I was a shooter waiting to happen. It frightened me. I have heard similar stories among friends, of them being kicked out of a school, or taken out in handcuffs because of the percieved threat. It doesn’t matter what side you are on, both ideas are proposing a police state. This is incredibly bad, and it is time we talked about it.
Researchers have been looking at the details of the shootings, and have found very little that commonly connect them all. The reality is, the people who decided to become a shooter were average. We could be describing anybody when giving the details in common with various shooters.
This is not a rage attack, nor is it a sudden snap of sanity. The people involved planned it out, and waited for the perfect time. There were plenty of people with guns at many of the shootings in recent time, they had to be in an exact spot to be able to do anything. Most shootings are fast, and last only a few minutes, being in another room would mean you are too late. A mall is not a warzone, nor is a school. Treating them as such destroys the reason why they exist.
So why are so many proposing ideas that will not work? There is an answer to this, and it is common. When something happens to someone you care about, you want to be able to do something. The feeling of uselessness is overwhelming. Each person tries to imagine a way that saves the day, from a well placed law, to a revenge fantasy. Grieving people are the most difficult to talk to about anything.
The fantasy of organizing, and leading a group to save the day is how one side is viewing it. They see the idea of creating a law, or awareness will save the lives of those in danger. We know laws only work if everyone agrees to them. There are plenty of people who specifically work against laws so that everyone can enjoy their favorite videogame, ipod, or movie for free. It gets even more basic since almost everyone goes faster than the speed limit, and then demands that laws be made.
The second group has a hero fantasy. The person is able to stop the horrible evil, by their quick wits, and cunning. Right after Columbine, I think everyone I knew had these fantasies. But there was always hundreds of shooters, and somehow they were not match for the hero.
Neither of these are real enough to stop the problems that are happening now. They are helping people grieve, and because of this, I tend to not point it out. Right now, I am seeing people trying to make these fantasies into reality.
The average mind of a shooter is very similar to that of a terrorist. It does not start that way, but the end result is the same. Law enforcement has done an incredible amount of research on how terrorists are recruited, and we can use that to help us in making decisions. The first thing to understand is that once an attack begins, it is too late. There may be someone who is at the right place, and has the ability to stop it, but he will not be common. The fantasy of simply stopping the enemy with bullets will not work. It does not matter if it is a teacher, a guard, or a common citizen, it is too late.
For terrorists, there is a training time. Someone helps the proto terrorist get over the idea that what he is doing is wrong. There are tapes of people performing acts of terror asking their friend if what they are doing is ok. Their more experienced friend assures them it is ok, and needs to be done. Eventually, the terrorist learns to separate themselves from those they kill, and those they care about. It does not happen overnight.
This is not happening with a shooter. They do not have trainers, or someone telling them it is alright. Entirely how this works out is completely unknown.
I believe this is the reason why so many are jumping to false conclusions. Even though there have been shooters for decades, we do not know why they do it. Because of this, we place other ideas, or try to mold the shooter into something we can understand.
We do not know why the shooter did it, so we assume they must have a mental health problem. This does not work out, because it is not a sudden crime, nor have many of the shooters had mental health issues that would lead to being a shooter. We are doing damage to people with mental health problems by labelling them as killers.
The same can be said for any of the other proposed ideas given. In fact there is a common pattern to it. The people proposing the idea either already believed a certain group was violent, or they were trying to push the idea away from themselves. People who dislike guns, are now proposing gun bans, even though the shooters did not use the guns being banned. Videogames are played as being the cause of violence by people who don’t play games.
We demand that the shooter not be us, not be average, not be normal, because then the shooter could be any one of us. It is a traumatizing thought, and the reaction by everyone involved has been to state that they are not the shooter. This is also part of the grieving, the dealing with the sense of guilt over the tragedy. The idea that nothing could be done, or something should have been done play back into the minds of the people.
Once again outliers happen, a single person becomes the explanation for an entire people. Someone who did something that is used by many as a form of relaxation, only in a horrible and awful form.
And now I have to tell you the truth, at this point there is no real answer. The people who research these ideas do not know why it is happening, or how to stop it. The understanding is very vague at this point, and no real conclusions can be made. In my previous paper, I tried to explain things using social equations, and thought patterns, but that does not mean I have a complete answer.
This is why we need to learn a very important thing, it is ok to not know. Something awful happened, and we do not know why. It will take a long time to understand, and work to stop it. This is why so many researchers have been writing articles, and telling people that they are being tricked. The details are proving that the knee jerk reactions to the tragedy are merely people trying to respond to their feelings of grief.
There is always talk about how much scientists know, and how they can do things. What people are having a hard time understanding is that science is an art of trying to understand the unknown. Scientists do not do tests on known things, they do tests on unknown things. The entire idea of science is that of finding out. The reason why scientists are excited is because they get to study the unknown, and how it works. Whenever I hear someone say they are a scientist, and that they know all sorts of stuff, I sort of laugh. A real scientist wants to know, and does everything they can to find out. It leads to long conversations on how things work, and what evidence there is to hold it. Most amazing tests hold high error rates, because of the knowledge that what is being done is dealing with unknown things. Electricity was being used before anyone knew how it worked.
Plato once said that he had learned that he knew nothing. What most do not understand, is that he was also saying, that he wanted to understand everything. The only way for him to do that was to admit how much he did not know.
In other words, I don’t know why there are school shootings. I do not understand how a perfectly sane human being would want to be a villain. There are questions I have that go back to things I enjoy doing, and I want to know how it may have affected the shooter. What was telling the shooter that it was ok, and that those being shot were not something to be sympathised with? I don’t know, I only know that I am not one of them. For me, that is a wonderful conclusion to make.
I also want to emphasize that the answer may happen without anyone noticing it. While people were worrying about the baby boom, and how it would make the population skyrocket. Women stopped having as many babies. It was happening before anyone noticed it in fact.
Some of the greatest things in the world have happened, before anyone ever realized it. In fact, a common thing is that the problem had become such a non thing for so long, that when the answer did happen, it wasn’t even considered big. Right now the proposals and the ideas are very big, and wrong. The reality is that the answers will be very slight, and personal. You will likely forget that shootings were even a thing unless someone reminded you.
In closing, I want everyone to understand that they are proposing ideas out of fear, and grieving. This grief is causing a large argument, over things that will not stop the next shooting at all. In fact, it is time to stop this bickering, because it is getting just as dangerous. I assure you, I fully know how you feel, how much you wish you could do something. You are reading the words of someone who turned himself in, because he was scared he was a monster. You are proposing that more people like me should be locked up, and the entire reason why, is because at this moment we do not have an answer.
Fred Rogers said to look for the helpers in tragedy. I want you to know of something similar. Every medical miracle we have today, came from someone else’s suffering. A doctor or nurse saw the suffering, and spent their lives trying to find answers. During the late 19th century, a woman saw men in the field of war dying, and she ran out, and dragged those men to a place where they could rest. The vast majority of these men survived. The woman inspired others to go out, and women began to volunteer to do this. They would be fired at, ripped to shreds, and yet they saved lives. Medicine owes these women a great deal of thanks. Not only did they inspire others around them, they began the modern thoughts and processes of medicine as we know it. That same compassion is felt today by doctors and nurses worldwide. So yes, we do not know why the shootings are happening, but that does not mean wonderfully caring people are sitting, and doing nothing. These people are working to find out what is really happening, and how it will be fixed.
If you see the horrors in front of you, and something inside wishes it could do something, then admit the truth. You don’t know why it happened. Only by admitting this, can you truly research the topic, and find the answer.
