Deviance Of School Shooting

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Deviance of School Shooters
We are all too familiar with the term, school shooting, which seemingly always ends in unforgettable tragedies. We will go through the lives of a few mass school shooters and their behavior before the horrific acts. Despite what we would like to hear, there were several particular social factors and warning signs that were obvious, yet ignored, in the events leading up to school shootings. Shooting massacres such as, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook are great examples of mass school shootings. In addition to the history, I will discuss a theory related to shootings, attempted preventions, and how mass school shootings can be prevented using the knowledge learned from the perpetrators’ history.
Background …show more content…
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Seung Hui, and Adam Lanza were all young males living in broken families. These outbursts of anger and destruction can be referred to as mass murders. Mass murderers act in a sudden outburst of anger and do not have any concern for being undetected (349). These outbursts may be linked to male aggression. James Q. Wilson wrote that males have more aggressive tendencies then females due to high testosterone levels. Adolescent boys have the highest testosterone levels leading them to express more deviant behaviors. In addition, testosterone levels decrease with age and may be the cause of aging out of crime (text 138-139). Hormone levels may have played a large role in the irrational behavior by the young men in these …show more content…
Children without a close family relationship through lack of supervision and discipline are much more likely to develop a lack of self-control (306). Without self-control a child may struggle to restrain from acting out when angry and lead to them acting out with violence. Along with children having self-control problems, they may develop antisocial behavior do to a lack of family structure. Children of single parent families are more prone to antisocial behavior then a typical two parent family. The single parent may have to work more, leaving a child unsupervised for long periods of time or they may be required to move to a lower income area exposing the child to negative influences (224). Statistics show for first time marriages as much as 50% of them end in divorce (301). As you can imagine that would leave a large portion of children struggling with self-control and antisocial problems. The shooters also exhibited anti-social behaviors. Here are some traits expressed by people with an antisocial personality: lack of conformity to the norms of society, does not care for the safety of others, unable to follow rules, and regularly get in fights or arguments
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