Haven’t looked into it specifically but my pet theory on school shootings has to do with culture. American culture is extremely confused about violence and the proper place for it. I think most people have very unexamined and often contradictory views on violence, and it can be difficult to ask questions about it because people freak. For example, it’s widely accepted that the American revolution was justified in order to win representation and constitutional rights, but anyone can see that the government isn’t representative and that our rights are regularly trampled, but if you start to question that contradiction, you’re unlikely to find anyone who can help you understand and interpret that, and you’ll instead just get knee-jerk “violence bad” reactions. Meanwhile we have lots of stories about people solving problems through individual violence and we have no problem with depictions of extreme violence, while everyone loses their shit over a nipple which is weird as fuck.

The answer to a lot of these questions is to understand the difference between collective violence and individual violence. When a group comes together based around a common idea which they are willing to use violence to achieve, their hope is that they can win, establish a new order, and enforce that order through the mere threat of violence, futhermore, this violence can be done in hopes of creating a better world for them to live in, or for their children to live in. But an individual act of violence is often carried out with the expectation that the perpetrator will die, and thus be unable to enforce a change through the threat of violence, and furthermore, it is more likely to come from a place of suicidal destruction rather than actually being grounded in protecting the things and people you value. Furthermore, if you can’t convince people to join your fight, it’s probably not a fight that you can win or that’s worth fighting.

Young people to have more of this wild energy and eagerness towards drastic change and violent action and such. Because there is no mechanism for effecting change in the US right now, that energy cannot be directed anywhere, it can only be repressed. Tbh the riots seem like a healthy response because they’re a way to release that energy without murdering anyone, which is good. Ideally they ought to be more organized, but I understand the reasons why that’s not as viable in the current conditions. But yeah in any case, my view that random acts of individual violence are bad even if the cause you’re persuing is good, but that violence may become good as if by magic if you actually have other people backing you up. But that’s a conclusion I came to on my own after years of puzzling over it, it’s not something I was ever taught or ever read or saw in media. Tbh I kinda wonder if in the past this was just commonly understood to the point that nobody felt the need to say it or write it down.

But yeah in any case the issue of mass shootings is complex and has a lot of factors contributing to it. More standard critiques of toxic masculinity apply, and I wouldn’t write off the factor of the proliferation and easy access to firearms, along with the stigma attached to therapy and mental health issues along with the lack of access to mental health care. I don’t think we need to find a single solution, but rather to look at various ways of approaching the problem and creating a multi-layered approach to preventing shootings.

I’ve never thought to look into it, but there was the Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting that happened before the Columbine shooting and I never understood why Jonesboro didn’t get the same amount of attention that Columbine had.

Was it the “better off white kids” that made the difference?

Shock doctrine

They weren’t Nazis, per se. They were angsty misanthropic edgelords that liked the aesthetic. They said pro Nazi crap, and they said anti Nazi crap. At around the same time.

They were basically the proto incels, from what I can tell.

They’re still shitty, though, I don’t want to defend them, though, and I know it will start to sound like I am, but Dave Cullen’s book on it is a steaming pile of crap, and he twisted the facts to fit his pre formed narrative like they were cooked spaghetti.

Eric’s “girlfriend” never actually knew Eric. She was a weird posthumous online fan that made it all up. Nobody in their circles knew who the hell she was. She eventually admitted it was all a fabrication because she “had no life” to investigators. Her details also conflict.

Dylan’s prom girlfriend is the one that hounded him to go to the prom. He resisted. She kept hounding him. They were Platonic friends, and all the people in the packed limo were her friends, not his. She’s also the same person that bought them 3/4ths of their guns. Because contrary to Cullen’s narrative, they weren’t popular.

There’s so much more Cullen got wrong. There’s school bullies literally admitting that they bullied them for “acting like f*****s” when interviewed by the news. There’s other people talking about the toxic “jock culture” at the school and how harassment and assault were commonplace and Eric and Dylan weren’t an exception. There’s a literal video of one of them, forget which, getting elbowed by a jock while just walking the halls.

Again, not trying to defend them, but Cullen’s book is fucking dogshit and shouldn’t be relied on to paint a factually accurate narrative.

Edit: I added a detail to the wrong “girlfriend” making for some confusing reading. I’ve now fixed it.