OPINION & EDITORIAL
Shooting reveals there is no “profile” [ONLINE EXCLUSIVE]
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Also by Marissa Rubin:
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by Marissa Rubin
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
School shootings, because of their rare and tragic qualities, lead to a mass media craze. Once the shooters are identified, the media looks to provide the public with insight into the mindset and motivations of the killers.
All of us on school campuses are frightened that this could one day happen at our school. So we, along with the media, hypothesize. We want to understand why this happened in order to prevent it in the future. In retrospect, we see the warning signs, but before the shooting, no one could predict that these “warning signs” would lead to a school shooting. We also want to understand who would do this, so we can identify this type of person before the shooting occurs. Because of this, inaccurate stereotypes are formed.
In 1999, two young boys arrived at their high school in Colorado with an execution plan for their fellow students. They went on a shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 23 others. Then they killed themselves. This incident — the Columbine massacre — led to widespread hysteria.
Why were these young students driven to commit this horrible act? How did no one see this coming? Who is to blame?
In the media, the students were portrayed as bullied outcasts who were part of a group called “the Trenchcoat Mafia,” associated with goth subculture. Some said these students were reacting to the years of bullying with anger and hate. Others blamed the attacks on mental illness. These portrayals, accurate or not, stereotyped the profile of a school shooter.
Eight years later, a disturbed young man at Virginia Tech went on a shooting rampage, killing 27 students and five teachers and wounding many more. Then he killed himself.
The media portrayed the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, as an angry loner. He was also said to have a history of mental illness and stalking. We viewed horrific video recordings that showed Cho as an irate and troubled young man, reinforcing our preconceived notions about school shooters.
The haunting but unanswerable questions raised by these incidents are again in our minds: Why was this student driven to commit this horrible act? How did no one see this coming? Who is to blame?
Just last week, a former student entered Northern Illinois University and began a shooting rampage, killing five and then killing himself.
Stephen Kazmierczak, the shooter, was an outstanding student who had no record of previous violent incidents. According to his girlfriend in an interview with CNN, Kazmierczak was a friendly and loving person. She also rebutted the idea traveling through the media that he was violent because he went off of his medication.
This case does not fit the stereotype.
When a tragedy occurs, we tend to look for answers to unanswerable questions. We also feel the need to place blame on someone, whether it is on the shooter’s parents, the bullies, friends who did not come forward with the warning signs, or campus administration and police who did not see the warning signs. The media feeds into our fears and makes an effort to create hypotheses to explain these shootings. We must keep in mind that these are only ideas, not facts.
The stereotypical school shooter — reclusive, dressed in all black, spewing hatred for the world — is a myth. These may be characteristics of some shooters, but not all. School shootings are unpredictable, and the perpetrators in these incidents do not fit a certain mold. We may never eliminate these kinds of mindless, random massacres, but we must reject the media’s simplistic search for some non-existent unifying profile.
Marissa Rubin (mkrubin@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in journalism and political science.
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