The Social Media Drives School Shootings

Interesting article.   Over at National Review.  It links mass shooting events (particularly school shootings) to social media.  He talks about thresholds, which is a part of the Broken Windows theory of policing.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if every one around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

So, thresholds get lowered with each repetitive event, like throwing rocks in a riot.   Then, the argument might be that Columbine lowered the threshold.

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

What has changed since Columbine?  That horrific event occurred in 1999, about the time that social media started the whole Facebook/Twitter/Instagram revolution.    High-scollers and college-age kids are much more conversant in social media than my generation ever was.  Communication is instant, and it is easy to find sites or forums that share interests.  The Columbine shooting has become nearly a template for mayhem, and the threshold had been lowered.

In other contexts, he’s elaborated further. The preparations for massacres are often extremely detailed. Shooters (and wannabe shooters) will often film videos, mimic the dress and poses of the Columbine killers, and otherwise copy the shooters who came before. Gladwell is hardly an NRA conservative — and he believes gun control “has its place” — but he also shares this grim warning: “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.”

It's easy to scream for gun control, but in my view, it's misplaced.  The events that we're seeing on a more frequent basis are not about guns, they are about how we communicate.  Communication has changed drastically over the past 20 years, and we're just now starting to grasp the implications.