Understand and Prevent School Shooters: 10 Warning Signs

As of November 2024, there were more than 445 mass shootings in the United States, killing more than 450 people and injuring 1,975, according to the Gun Violence Archives. Unfortunately, as of 2020, gun violence has been the number one cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States.

While no single factor predicts a child becoming a mass shooter, the etiology of school shootings is complex and an intersection of multiple issues: undiagnosed mental illness, marginalization, chronic abuse, and access to guns.¹ Mass shooters don’t just shoot, they often exhibit noticeable, observable behavior. Recognizing and reporting the warning signs of someone preparing for violence can be lifesaving.¹ This list is intended to help schools and communities identify behaviors so they can intervene and take action before violence occurs.

10 Warning Signs Many Adolescent School Shooters May Exhibit

1. Quiet, smart, no relationship, undisturbed: Many school shooters our team studied were intelligent, but disconnected from themselves and others.

2. Bullied, Marginalized: Although most who are bullied do not become mass shooters, the finding that the majority of school shooters were bullied is an important connection. Isolation can create a sense of psychological powerlessness, something so commonly reported in male school shooters. The societal pressure placed on our young boys to continually perform is not only discouraging, but can also mask these boys’ feelings of inadequacy.

When a young person feels profound powerlessness, he may rush to the opposite position, equating power with violence, which instills a false sense of potential. To cope with their feelings of hopelessness, these school shooters arm themselves with illusions of power to shift their sense of fear and helplessness onto their victims.

3. Youth abuse, neglect: These children experience profound psychological, physical and… emotional abuse in their families. They often witness parental violence, suffer from poor hygiene and are not adequately fed or clothed. These children’s souls were decimated, leading to their misplaced, desperate need for an auxiliary weapon to solve their hopeless dilemma of feeling erased.

4. Minimization by parents and/or denial of the child’s mental illness and/or family history of mental illness: Partly because of the fear Because they are stigmatized, these adolescent shooters and their families repeat their denial and continue to hide their symptoms from their treating physicians, which has contributed to the failure to be properly diagnosed. Misdiagnosis and abuse exacerbated the underlying psychotic symptoms. These children become more hopeless because they once again feel excluded by society.

5. Experience humiliation And shame: Many of these children are seen as strange loners. They feel humiliated because they are expelled from schools and ostracized from other societies. Some faced murderous threats from their parents or were told that this was their parents’ biggest mistake. They feel like they have nothing left to live for, so they take revenge with violence.

6. Psychosis, suicidal and/or homicidal thoughts: Psychotic symptoms included paranoid thoughts, delusions, and auditory hallucinations that commanded them to kill.

My research team and I conducted the first one psychiatric A study using standardized measures of domestic mass shooters found that although their origins were multi-specific, there was a high prevalence of attackers suffering from not diagnosed And untreated psychiatric illness.¹ Most of the school shooting cases our team has studied could have been prevented if the attacker, after typically being identified as “impaired” by secondary support systems, had received an appropriate psychiatric diagnostic evaluation, followed by medication and psychotherapeutic support.¹

However, it is important not to lose sight of the bigger picture that most people are suffering from treated mental illness is no more violent than the rest of the population.¹

7. Difficulty coping with recent stressors and trauma: Many of these attackers experienced the loss of a stabilizing parent or conciergefrequent disruptions or rejection by a love interest.

8. Fantasies about violence: Many of these attackers express fantasies set in violent, murderous video games, written between the lines of an essay, a scribble of words and drawings, and/or reported in a dream. They feel like they can’t stop their thoughts from killing.

9. Public statements about violent plans: Many expressed violent plans and developed a hardened position through conversations, writings, social media messages and drawings, which lead to identification and radicalization via extremist websites. Some have even drawn up a manifesto to declare their future violence. Death and violence become the preferred option for these disenfranchised children. They feel bloated by society and the optimal response is to blow themselves and others up.

10. Access to Firearms: The majority of adolescent mass shooters got their guns from their own home or from that of a friend or family member. Including Parkland High School, Thurston High School and one of the Westside Middle School shooters, many of these attackers learned how to load and fire a gun through their high school gun clubs.

If a psychotic, suicidal, and/or homicidal child has access to guns, whether through their own home, through extended family, or through other means (such as high school gun clubs), this poses a significant risk that should be addressed by immediate psychiatric treatment to guarantee. . Even if parents think they have locked up their guns, FBI studies have shown that children can easily and conveniently unlock and open them.

Conclusions

Mental health professionals must urgently communicate to the public how pervasive child abuse and isolation predict future acts of violence.¹ Furthermore, these discarded children did not receive appropriate psychiatric treatment, which contributed to the reenactment of their child abuse.¹

There is an urgent need for a more interdisciplinary approach involving families, school counselors, law enforcement, mental health professionals, and advocates, with a redoubling of efforts to ensure appropriate psychiatric treatment for children with untreated mental health conditions who are marginalized. These children may be at higher risk of violence than the general population.¹