Researchers are still diligently working to find reason in the unreasonable when understanding the mind of the school shooter.

“While studies differ, what many researchers seem to agree on is that there is no single profile of a school shooter.”

Peter Langman, a psychologist who studied ten school gunmen and is the author of “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters,” stated

“You can’t assume that a school shooter is going to look like a kid in a trench coat, who has no friends, and is skulking down the halls silently. These are diverse kids with diverse personalities. If you get stuck thinking that there’s a certain kind of kid that we can identify, then we’re going to be missing kids who are potential dangers.”

Although many of the students Langman studied had psychological disorders or had been emotionally or physically abused, Katherine S. Newman, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University takes a broader view noting that psychological issues are one of the five “necessary but not sufficient” conditions that give rise to school shootings. “The other four predisposing factors are:

• The shooter sees himself as extremely marginal in the social worlds that matter to him.
• He has cultural scripts that suggest an armed attack may be a way to solve problems and elevate his status from that of a loser to a notorious antihero.
• Parents, schools, mental health services, and other ’surveillance systems’ have failed to identify the troubled teenagers.
• One common thread among the school shootings studied was what federal law enforcement experts refer to as “leakage.” Although not as much the case at the college level, at the high school level, school shooters have been found to have a tendency to “leak” their intentions. Experts believe that once students were taught to report threats, this became the “main reason that pre-collegiate school shootings dropped off after the peak years for rampage-style attacks of 1997 to 1999 . . . .”

Click here to read the full article “Lessons Sifted from Tragedy at Columbine” from Education Week.