My friend asked a good question after the Santa Fe High School Shooting: what are the sociological phenomena that are causing these school shootings? She was not looking for a political/legal solution nor a technical explanation like bump stocks or magazine capacity of firearms, but rather asking for the sociological factors involved in this insane trend.
In this blog I have never really tried to understand the question of why mass violence occurs, because I have always started from the belief that it is irrelevant why it happens, it simply does happen. My initial answer to my friend's debate was not really an answer to the question, but an admonishment that such questions were foolish because, as I put it: "Violence Is." Professionally, that is all that matters to me. I survived violence, I teach others how to survive violence when it--God Forbid--finds them, to be prepared to confront the violence. That's not a good answer to the question, but from the perspective of my profession and background in the protection industry, I concluded that these mass shootings continue to happen because the innocent people in our society are unwilling to accept personal responsibility for their personal protection. We want to live in a bubble of delusion that we are protected by the military and our first responders and that violence can't find us, but it continues to find us over and over again. Violence always finds the soft targets and debating why that is does not help. That was my basic response.
But then I actually got curious. Why do these things keep happening, and at an increasing rate? What are the sociological factors driving this heinous trend of mass murder among school kids? What has changed in our society that is causing such mass violence?
The day after the Santa Fe High School Shooting, I was at a bar and met another Army Veteran who was an Infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was now a high school teacher. He had a unique perspective in that he had been in the violence business and was now in the education business. His perspective is that the problem does not stem from the students, but rather the adults. The parents of these kids are to blame as are the adults in the educational system. All sociological problems are basically parenting problems. The Columbine High School Shooters were not raised by evil neo-Nazi parents; they were raised by uninvolved parents who were too busy focusing on their own lives to know what was going on in the demented minds of their emotionally broken children. While focusing on their careers, they failed in their most important job: raising productive, law-abiding members of society. Much has been made of the failure of law enforcement at the Columbine High School Shooting, so I will not rehash that aspect of failure too much here, except to say as a result of that incident, most law enforcement agencies have changed how they respond to mass shootings. But it is not just the responsibility of the cops and parents to protect kids. In this conversation with this other veteran, I said that these kinds of things did not happen in the 1950s, even though access to firearms for teenagers was much easier in most of America back then, because every adult in the schools felt responsible for the safety of their students. The adults of the Greatest Generation had just fought and won a World War and they were brave enough to confront evil when it found them, at the cost of their own lives if necessary. This is no longer the case in our society.
That is the other thing that has changed sociologically in modern America: bravery. Violence was ended more quickly in the past because bystanders were more willing to fight back in the face of evil. When was America Great? When our grand parents defeated Fascism, liberated a continent and went on to rebuild a destroyed world. America was great when we were brave. Now, unfortunately, most American adults believe it is the job of somebody else to keep them safe. Certainly most educators believe it is the job of somebody else to keep their students safe. Parents believe it is the job of cops to keep their children safe.
When did it change? In the conversation I had with the teacher and former soldier, I said I think what caused the change is 9/11. Recognizing that there were school shootings before 9/11, I nonetheless believe that 9/11 caused dramatic changes in our society, some good, most bad. One of the more frightening effects of 9/11 was that it demonstrated to evil people just how easy it is to commit mass murder and terrorism. Nineteen lunatics killed three thousand people in three hours with only box cutters and pepper spray. This is a chilling example to the violent religious fanatics, psychopathic killers and these emotionally broken kid shooters unable to rationally process their feelings of loss, jealousy, anger or fear. Such people were instructed as a result of 9/11 that it does not take a great deal of training or resources to cause mass casualties. So, evil people were inspired by 9/11.
For the good people in our society, it had two different effects. For some people, 9/11 burst our bubble of illusionary safety brought on by the belief that terrorism would not find a free and liberal accepting society a target worth attacking. The World Trade Center bombing of 1993 could no longer be looked on as a freak occurrence that could never happen again. In that regard, it taught many of us resilience like that of the Israelis. But, while some people took off their blinders to the violent nature of the world, many other people reacted to 9/11 by abandoning the blinders in favor of a full blindfold. Most people unaccustomed to that level of violence react in denial that such evil can exist and do such horrific things. It is a psychological defense mechanism designed to protect our sense of reality, which was shattered on 9/11. It is also designed to allow us to live the lie that we are safe, and thus able to go about our day in blissful ignorance of the Saber-tooth Tigers outside our caves. These people cannot deal with the thought that such violence exists and can find them. They want to believe that our protectors are out there on the walls guarding them and that nothing will get through. The problem is the violence keeps getting to us regardless of our protectors.
Violence is a fact of life, and now mass violence is a part of our existence. So, what is the solution? Politicians have gone after the tools (guns), or attacked the entertainment industry, or talked about fixing mental illness. As I wrote last time about Great Britain, the argument that eliminating one kind of tool will prevent violent crime, has been completely debunked. Terrorists are wandering around London stabbing people to death with kitchen knives or driving over them with delivery trucks. The tools are not the problem. A frying pan is made for cooking, but it works as a pretty good weapon. You can't ban all the tools of violence, because they are the tools of everyday life. Baseball bats are made to hit baseballs, but they can hit other things. Cars are made to transport people, but they are steel, glass and petroleum bombs. The Columbine Shooters rigged homemade detonators to propane tanks to level the school. Focusing on the tools does not solve the problem.
Focusing on the mental health issues of these people, while valid, does not PREVENT these attacks beforehand. A crazy person can go shoot up a place and kill dozens of people before they ever interact with a mental health provider. The shooter at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs was very mentally disturbed, but no mental health providers could prevent a deranged man who never had contact with the mental health system from committing an atrocity. So that does not solve the problem either.
I think the answer to the question is that there is not an answer, which is what's so scary and frustrating. There is no solution to the sociological problem that can be enforced on the potential perpetrators of these attacks before hand. All sociological problems are fundamentally parenting problems, and you can't effectively legislate parenting. There have always been good and bad parents. Maybe there are more bad parents now because they want to be the friends of their kids rather than their disciplinarians and standard-enforcers and that is why there's this increase? But what is the solution to that problem? Write more parenting books? Bad parents are not reading parenting books anyway, nor are they willing to admit that their lack of discipline is what is causing their kids to snap and shoot-up schools. You can't politically change how uninterested parents raise their future psychopaths.
So is there a way to prevent these attacks? Is there a way to alter the sociological conditions that are causing these things to happen? Is there a law that can be passed to make parents be parents? I doubt it, unless we want to start holding parents criminally accountable for the actions of their children? I hope smarter people than me in the fields of human behavior are working on this problem, but other than saying sociological problems are all generally parenting problems, I don't see a preventative solution. Which, tragically, means we come back to the reactive or "responsive" solution to violence.
The Responsive Solution to Violence is that we are prepared, through repetitive training to overcome the confusion of an ambush, to deal with violence when it finds us. I think it's tragic that there is not a better answer than that. But, ultimately, after much discussion and rational debate, I come full circle: Violence Is. Therefore, we must take personal responsibility for our personal protection and the protection of the children entrusted to our care. To be successful, we must not only be trained and skilled, but also brave enough to confront evil when it does find us. We had more courage in the 1940s and 1950s than we do now; back then if somebody came into a school with a gun to do violence, every adult would have bashed their chairs into his skull. We cannot rely on the professional protectors, the legionnaires, who go forth and do our violence for us anymore. In the age of mass violence and terrorism, the barbarians are not at the gates, they are inside the gates. If we want to avoid what happened to the Roman Empire, we have to accept personal responsibility for defending the public space. Predators will always find the soft targets, so it us up to each of us to not be soft targets. Rome fell because it was decadent, spoiled and soft; they lost their courage and the fell to those who had more courage.
So, until the smarter social scientists find a way to prevent these heinous acts of evil against our children, we have to confront evil when we encounter it. Psychiatrist Paul Dobransky says, "Courage is nothing more than doing the right thing regardless of the circumstances." Bravery may only be necessary two or three times in your life, but when violence finds you or the children around you, at that moment no other solution will work.
Violence Is. Train for it, be ready for it if it finds you, have the courage to defeat it!
Thanks,
Soule
www.Easy6Training.com
