Mass School Shooter Behavior Analysis

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I have always been interested in examining conducted research concerning the mass school shooters in America, who’ve affected so many lives, and the factors which may or may not have led to the obscene violence. A trend of mass school shootings in the mid- to late 1990s stirred great interest and increased efforts to ‘profile’ school shooters, with an eye on both identifying imminent perpetrators and preventing further incidents. (Ferguson, 2011) A profile is a summary or analysis of a person’s characteristics and past behaviors. In 1999 United States, there were a string of, at least, five incidents including the infamous Columbine High Massacre. Columbine resulted in extensive mass-media coverage, giving the two perps fame and recognition …show more content…
This new, fear-filled population was quick to form its own opinions and had hopeful but unrealistic anticipations about concepts of ‘profiling’ school shooters, widely blaming external factors, such as violent video games and overuse of the Internet by teens. These and other assumptions depicted shooter’s as ‘loner’ types who were victims of bullying in school, and social outcasts. Therefore, attempts were made by various organizations, including the esteemed American Psychological Association (APA) and the FBI. The main challenge was the shortage of surviving killers to examine, which made for a lack of in-depth analyses as well as the many different characteristics of each of the shooters. Still, each produced ‘threat assessments’, producing unexpected results, concluding that few of the characteristics were collective. In fact, there were many differences between each killer and also that violent media seemed to play a small role, at best. Today, we know that these initial conclusions were inaccurate and unreliable. However, both groups undoubtedly were doing their best to respond to vocal demands for answers from policy makers and the general public. (Ferguson, …show more content…
One instance I studied suggested an introduction of a system for automatically profiling school shooters. The approach involves an automatic analysis of ‘texts’ and the utilization of different measures relevant for isolating suspicious students. Comparing texts written by 6 school shooters to 6056 texts written by a comparison group of male subjects found that the shooter’s texts scored significantly higher on the Narcissistic Personality dimension as well as on the Humiliated and Revengeful dimensions. (Assaf, 2015) This new structure mimics ranking procedures currently in affect for automatically identifying sexual predators. Yet, there is still no firm, consistent diagnosis for pre-screening school shooters. After extensive research and experimentation, the proposed process has confirmed that a shooter’s texts are significantly unique from the others, specifically, higher levels of humiliation and revenge