Why Kids Kill: Inside the minds of school shooters
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Author(s): P. L. Langman
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230608023
Format: hardback
247pp
Price: £15.99, $24.95
Review Date: 29 April 2009
Review: The author, a psychologist, has looked at 10 cases of rampage school shootings where students or former students attack their own schools and quite publicly. Although these really started in the 1990s in the US, one of the worst school shootings was in 1927 by a 55 year-old man using dynamite which killed 45, mostly children. The author points out that rampage school shooting are too complex to have a single cause, although several have been put forward often as a ready news ‘sound bites’: the US gun culture, psychiatric medications, school loners, watching violent media, rejection at school, depression and bullying. Although some of these were factors none could alone account for the shootings. By studying the perpetrators in depth, the author could say they all were disturbed individuals. Indeed they had serious psychological problems, often missed or minimized in reports on schools through lack of experience of mental health. He realized that certain shootings had shared factors and so he began to group them in clusters. From this he found all the shooters came under three clusters: psychopathic, psychotic and traumatized which he describes in a very readable way.