School-shooting expert answers tough questions
Ben Agger, University of Texas at Arlington sociology professor and co-author of the upcoming book There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech, said the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois shootings are similar in several respects.
Both shooters, Cho Seung-Hui at Virginia Tech and Stephen Kazmierczak at the University of Northern Illinois, dressed in dark attire, burst into classrooms with multiple weapons and opened fire on students, killing several before killing themselves. Both were apparently plagued by mental illness, Agger said.
"There's a thin boundary between the people who go postal and the rest of us -- a thin boundary between acting on impulses and not acting them out," Agger said. "You can't ignore the impact of mental illness, but you cannot necessarily say that mental illness plays the largest part of what is happening here. Societal factors also play a role. It helps if we refocus the issue and look at these shootings as suicides with catastrophic collateral damage. Could these shooters have been reclaimed by community? My guess is that they could have been and we all need to take responsibility for doing that."
Why have there been so many recent school shootings?
Almost 10 months to the day, we see striking similarities in these two different events. I'm not saying that Virginia Tech caused Northern Illinois, but Virginia Tech may have provided a template for Northern Illinois. These incidents seem to be feeding upon each other.
What can we as a society do to identify potentially troubled students and prevent these acts of violence from occurring?
We all need to take responsibility for identifying and redirecting the energies of problematic people. We all need social ties, sheltering community, a shoulder to cry on and mentorship. I tend to think that we don’t get a lot of that. Especially in large colleges and high schools, where it’s a challenge to learn the names of all the students, much less try to help them through their difficulties.
Is there a culture of male violence that predisposes troubled young people from enacting their rage in murderous ways?
We tend to oversimplify this phenomenon. If you look at the Columbine shooters and Cho, you see kids who were fairly socially isolated, and that is layered onto a male gun culture. Women don’t, for the most part, commit mass murder. We need to try to check bullying. These shooters were all young men in the process of maturing. Arming the students is not the answer and neither is armoring the campus. We have to look for the humanity in people, even those who might strike us as troubled or mean. The price of insensitivity is pretty high, as we are learning. The way to turn that around is to evolve a culture of community and care.
