Mass shootings as social contagion
By 
Yesterday’s shooting at a St. Louis high school has barely gotten any media attention, given that the shooter — armed with an AR-15 and more than six hundred rounds of ammunition — only managed to kill a teacher and a 16-year-old student before police killed him (The police entered the building four minutes after the first emergency call went out, and according to some reports the shooter’s weapon jammed).
The 19-year-old gunman who killed two people and wounded several others at his former high school left a note saying his struggles led to “the perfect storm for a mass shooter,” St. Louis police said.
Orlando Harris graduated from Central Visual and Performing Arts High School last year and returned Monday with an AR-15-style rifle, over 600 rounds of ammunition and more than a dozen high-capacity magazines, St. Louis police Commissioner Michael Sack said.
Harris died at a hospital after a gun battle with officers.
Investigators found a handwritten note in the car Harris drove to the school. Sack detailed some of the passages:
“I don’t have any friends. I don’t have any family. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never had a social life. I’ve been an isolated loner my entire life,” the note said, according to Sack. “This was the perfect storm for a mass shooter.”
Given the gunman’s extensive arsenal, the tragedy could have been “much worse,” the police chief said.
Authorities credited locked doors and a quick law enforcement response – including by off-duty officers – for preventing more deaths at the school.
But the shooter did not enter a checkpoint where security guards were stationed, said DeAndre Davis, director of safety and security for St. Louis Public Schools.
Davis also said the security guards stationed in the district’s schools are not armed, but mobile officers who respond to calls at schools are.
“For some people that would cause a stir of some sort,” Davis said Tuesday. “For us, we thought it’s best for our officers, for the normalcy of school for kids, to not have officers armed in the school.”
A critical point here is that mass shootings in general and mass school shootings in particular are at this point all very much copycat events. In this case the shooter is making it perfectly clear that he got the idea of shooting up his former high school as a way of dealing with extremely common adolescent experiences — profound alienation, loneliness, and romantic/sexual frustration — from the very media sources that attempt to explain these events even as they publicize them.
As I’ve noted before, there were almost literally no mass shootings in the USA prior to the 1980s. This kind of crime/social terrorism is very much a direct product of the age of saturation mass media, which, along with our insane gun laws, give birth to monsters.