What is the psychology of people who idiolize mass shooters, sees them as heroes and replicate their acts?
Im not fully grasping how the mind of those "copycats" works. People who are obsessed with Columbine for example, and want to do a mass shooting. That is their thought process? Is there some study I can read exploring what's on their minds?
Most are in desperate situations and are truly hurting. So they see someone do that and they tend to think “that would teach the people I view as hurting me a lesson”. They then commit the act and realize it was absolutely not what they wanted and a stark realization of what they did and what their life will become dawns on them. And so they commit suicide.
This is not a blanket statement, but in general this appears to be what’s going on
I agree with most of what you said, but I think the decision to end their lives is often premeditated, not a sudden decision where they realize they fucked up. It’s why some will leave notes or manifestos behind.
Some for sure. That’s why this isn’t a generalization, but after hearing some psychiatric interviews with ones who were caught they often said it wasn’t what they wanted and they knew their life was over and they were really scared
So they see someone do that and they tend to think “that would teach the people I view as hurting me a lesson”.
I'd bet that works because it seems to be is a culture of solving problems with people you don't like by shooting said people.
Damn, that could perfectly be a short description of the US foreign policy.
Alienation and depression. Suicidal ideation can create a general devaluation in other lives as well. That sort of mindset can create a justification in wasting your own life with a splash. The mental calculus is already fundamentally incomprehensible to most folks because of that.
Copycats are motivated by the same thing as the originals, I guess, and just see someone who did it "successfully". (My source is I made it the fuck up)
I've heard it convincingly argued mass shooters are people that a few decades ago would have become serial killers. This is just a new, easier way to kill a bunch of people and feel powerful.
Don't know if it's true but I saw this docu arguing that serial killers can have or typically have multiple personality disorder. It's like they have their innocent self which is unaware of the crazy one that protects them but it also acts out what they experienced growing up.
Or maybe they are just dicks but this is something that I can at least understand.
The existence of that one is controversial, even.
Damaged. Fearful. Aggrieved. Lonely. Hateful. Broken.
Haha, well thank god we don't live in a society that mass-produces such people, can you imagine?
It really depends. A lot of them are hurt in some way shape or form and in a desperate situation like qooqie mentions and get pushed back into a corner over and over until they violently lash out, and a lot of others have a genuine disdain for other people or a warped personality/prespective on something (like Elliot Rogers and his entitlement to a girlfriend/sex) and rather than try and quell it or get help, they let it fester until they eventuallty also lash out.
The end result is the same. Either they get inspired to do heinous actions because there's no other option in their head to stop whatever they precieve as a problem, or they look at someone else that did them before and think "they had the right idea" and emulate them.
A touch of narcissistic psychopathy, lack of empathy.
After looking for info on Wikipedia I only found one brief mention of school shooter fandoms in the "Columbine effect" page:
Since the advent of online social media, a fandom for shooters Harris and Klebold has had a documented presence on social media sites, especially Tumblr.[86] Fans of Harris and Klebold refer to themselves as "Columbiners."[87] An article published in 2015 in the Journal of Transformative Works, a scholarly journal which focuses on the sociology of fandoms, noted that Columbiners were not fundamentally functionally different from more mainstream fandoms. Columbiners create fan art and fan fiction, and have a scholarly interest in the shooting.[73]
The articles they link to are:
I also found another interesting study on this titled "Glamorizing rampage online: School shooting fan communities on YouTube".
They examined the network structure and social and psychological aspects of YouTube communities centered around school shootings, finding that they form a small-world network characterized by high clustering and low density, i.e. loosely-tied subgroups of fans. They argue that this network structure promotes the dissemination of hate ideology and justifications for mass violence, and also has the potential for anti-social behavior, which is consistent with previous analyses proposed by scholars. They also note that the people in these fandoms often talk about depression and other mental health problems, and argue that providing consultation to these people could help them leave these communities and reduce the spread of hateful rhetoric - however they also argue that the current reporting system may be insufficient to deal with these groups.
Article 1 also gives some anecdotal evidence of how some of these people justify their fandom by minimizing its ties to violence:
Shotsofdylan, the same blog that posted the bit of Dylan/T.J. fanfiction above, wrote:
"People who actually think we support murderers and condone their actions are fucking idiots. If you bothered to talk to most of us, we don’t condone anything bad they ever did. And most of us are intelligent, forgiving, compassionate people who learned a lot about humanity and life through the murderers we’re interested in. Don’t talk shit about us before you get to know us. Thanks."
General disinterest in seeing other people as human.
I think this reflects more on the psychology and honestly sociopathy of society rather than specific individuals.
Western society alienates us from the things we do every day to survive. If you're constantly on the knife edge of having the needs to survive, and at the same time you labour to produce insane wealth for others, and this labour is wrapped in a puritan mythos of virtue and "good," people will eventually snap. When access to weapons is easy and a culture of violence and glorifying violence is also involved, it's not surprising that some people snap in a violent way.
I dunno it seems like there's a pretty solid "type" for mass shooters - young, white, male - that means something is left out of your evaluation. Economic oppression (by the owner class) and easy access to guns (enabled by the owner class!) makes it easy for these disaffected people to commit mass violence on the rest of us.
I'm sure if people had more economic security there would be fewer shootings but I don't expect they'd go away. But a lot of these shooters talk about feeling alienated or disrespected. In my estimation that comes from expectations not being met. Probably unrealistic expectations.
(Yes I know "not every shooter is a young white male")
There certainly is a type. I did leave that out of my initial response but it's not missing from my evaluation. US culture is built in large part on white supremacy and toxic masculinity. When you combine these with the Marxian alienation I touched on in my original response (different from but not unrelated to the alienation from unrealistic expectations you mention), you have very high potential for young white men to snap in violent fashion. Another characteristic to add to the young white male profile is US military experience, at least a third of mass shooters are veterans.
Why don't the rest of the oppressed working classes commit these types of mass shootings? Because, to put it bluntly, they already know their place, whether this is conscious or not. We as working people are all oppressed by the capitalist class, and the products of our labour are taken from us. Yet only white people are taught through all elements of popular culture that they are the chosen ones, in a manner of speaking, and on top of that only white men are taught that they were meant to have it all - in liberal/capitalist culture this can be roughly reduced to power, wealth, and sex. When a young white man then struggles to achieve these supposedly easy targets society has told him he deserves, he becomes frustrated, and this frustration has the potential to build to violence against others, especially in a society which, for lack of a better term, celebrates violence like the US. This is very different both individually and culturally to women and people of colour failing to achieve such goals, for the goals society sets for them are very different. I'm also not saying that people do not have agency, but we are in many ways products of our material conditions.
I strongly believe that in a world with not just economic security for all but a sense of social security in our communities and a humanist and collaborative culture, acts such as mass shootings would never happen - the material conditions for them to occur, as I've briefly gone into here, simply would no longer exist.
People see shooters and murderers and how they get infamous and gain notoriety. Since that's the most available outcome from an outside perspective, they assume it's the motive.
This is why some people think that refusing to name shooters is somehow denial or punishment; a way to fight back.
The motive doesn't matter. I mean is there a good reason?
almost all mass shooters are bullies, so the question can be why they are assholes like that?
I don’t know that I agree with this take…plenty of them are bullied, feel like outcasts, suffer from mental illness, and I think often have some latent sociopathy (lack of remorse) and this all combines to them feeling like they want “revenge” on society. I’m thinking about the columbine shooters from when I was a kid but many fit that profile.
So others feeling this way might feel gratified that these other shooters got revenge, the people picking on them got what they deserved…etc.
I think it’s also a different reaction to feeling suicidal. Instead of wanting to hurt yourself…you want to hurt “the world” but for the same reasons
Well, in a nation where bullying is glorified as a necessary rite of passage, why should it be surprising that so many bullied people end bullying others?
People require validation of a sort, and when they don't get it, they can take many different paths. Some choose to take the vengeance route to reciprocate their feelings on others. Some just get depressed, and of course there are many other things individuals can do as a response to a lack of validation. Then there's the facet of mental health problems which could, or could not be mitigated.
I can't speak for the suspects, but it's probably many different forms of psychology we're looking at, some of which I know (as long as they're going down) want to take society down with it (what many call a lose-lose-situation, probably the worst interpretation of the parable of the tigers and the strawberry) and some of which see their actions as forcing society forward (known as accelerationism).
I don’t think they think of them as heroes. I think they think of them as rockstars or artists.
Basically as a person gets more uncomfortable, lashing out in anger becomes more attractive. The instinct comes from evolution where a good subset of misery could actually be remedied with violence.
But it goes beyond instinct. Like I said it’s an art. And I mean activist art. Art meant to shock. Art meant to open eyes.
They see normal human society as a mechanism allowing people to ignore suffering. They see a world in which some people are treated like trash, consistently.
We humans have a very nasty instinct to pick someone to treat like shit. Unless a person is very careful, they’ll find themselves part of a group of people who unconsciously collude to label a particular person as “the problem”, and then heap cruelty on that person in the name of “heroically fighting the bad guys”.
The Villain is an archetype, and our society is lacking in villains, so people fill in the blank by picking the person who rubs them the wrong way, and they cast that person as The Villain.
The Villain is a mask with super glue on the inside that we stick onto certain people’s faces. We treat them like they’re a disease, or a parasite, or an inhuman invader.
Because The Villain is everyone’s enemy, The Villain lives in a world of nothing but enemies. He lives in enemy territory. Eventually, he carries out his side of the war.
You mean conservatism? Just Google “GOP.” That should tell you all you really need to know about it.
They're just being edgy, most don't do a damn thing. It's for attention.
In my experience, the most dangerous are the quiet kids who just draw ridiculously detailed guns on their books all day.
I was always nice to those kids.