April 26, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Eugene Volokh has this post
Eugene Volokh has this post on the root causes of school shootings. It's (of course) well thought out, but there are a couple of things that might bear further examination:
It's true that if teenagers couldn't get their hands on guns, it would be harder for them (though not impossible) to do such massive damage. I don't think that it's possible to stop someone who is bent on planning mass murder and suicide from getting guns, especially in a nation where there are 200-250 million guns. But it's true that if somehow this miracle could be worked, the problem of mass school shootings would diminish (though other problems might increase). Still, the availability of guns doesn't tell us why we've had mass school shootings in recent years, but not in the years before.
An acquaintance who should know informs me that the backup plan for the Columbine shooters was to blow up the school during assembly -- and that the evidence is that there's a high probability that they would have pulled it off. Killing everyone, instead of the tragic few who died. But I can't vouch for this.
I know of only one conjecture that is even slightly plausibly, and I stress that it is only a conjecture: What changed since the time of the first school shooting is that there's been a lot of media coverage of school shootings. Teenagers keenly resent their own insignificance; when they see someone being in the news -- even for committing an atrocity -- some of them begin to envy this person's fame. And some tiny fraction of those may even decide, against all reason, self-preservation, and decency to take the same path. The first mass school shooting was an essentially random event, but the media coverage that it triggered dramatically increased the probability of subsequent events of the same variety.I am certainly not arguing that the media should be barred from covering school shootings. I am not even sure that as an ethical matter, the media should moderate their coverage.
But I think that if we're looking for a causal explanation for the advent of mass school shootings, the one that so far best fits the evidence -- the only one that shows a correlation, which is surely not sufficient for showing causation but is largely necessary to show it -- is this one.
I think that this is a huge factor. And while I too do not think that we should try to legislate coverage, I think that there is one thing that usefully could be done, without degrading the quality of coverage (IMHO) in the least: a voluntary media ban on reporting their names. Would it stop the killings? I have no idea. But I don't see how it could hurt -- and it ought to stop cold any little pipsqueak who thinks he'll go down in history in a blaze of glory. Posted by Jane Galt at April 26, 2002 9:15 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links