Have there always been school shootings or are they a sign of a sick society?

Yes. After the 50s, everything bad started happening. Many people don’t know this, but there was actually complete peace and prosperity all over the world before 1950, I’m so serious.

That is exactly what I think, @Blackberry . How did you find this out? lol And why did “everything bad start happening?” Which was my question, actually! Or are you kidding.

@Aster I was being sarcastic. Here you are: ”The earliest known United States shooting to happen on school property was the Pontiac’s Rebellion school massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Lenape American Indians entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only three children survived.”

@Blackberry ok; that’s what I wanted to know. There have always been school shootings. Thanks for informing me.

I’ve got to wonder if the popularity of “first-person shooter” video games isn’t a contributing factor. If you regularly spend hours in a virtual environment where you’re rewarded for shooting everything that moves, and if you are an alienated loner who has no sense of social contract with peers and authorities, then I can see how shooting up a school might seem like an attractive option.

@thorninmud I just don’t think the video game has that much influence. It’s like people saying “look what infidelity does to people, that woman cut her husbands penis off!” The woman clearly may have had some underlying issues, whether they came from abuse by the husband or a history of earlier mental illness etc.

I think that while it is true, there is no new news under the sun mantra, that certain crimes have escalated in our modern, post industrial civilization. I think an ever increasing population has upped the odds of more psychos in the general population, yep, I do.
Overcrowding in large city environments adds stressors, and like rats and other animals, overcrowding lends itself to stress induced violence and more mental illness.
The more people the higher ratio of nut cases.

@Blackberry OK, but say the woman works in a slaughterhouse, and her job is to cut the penis off every steer carcass that roles by. Don’t you think that if her husband were unfaithful, her mind might more easily entertain that possibility?

@thorninmud That’s true lol.

@thorninmud Haha…you have a vivid imagination. I dunno, I might not go for the penis but yeah, she might bring home the bolt gun and fire a bolt into his forehead. lol

One “trait” that has not yet attracted as much attention is the gender difference: nearly all school shootings are perpetrated by young males, and in some instances the violence has clearly been gender-specific. Bob Herbert addressed this in an October 2006 New York Times editorial.[6] Only two female school shooting incidents have been documented.[7][8]

Another reported similarity is that most of the perpetrators had been taking antidepressant drugs,[9][10][11] which have a documented history of producing violence and aggression as a side effect.[12][13] Wikipedia

I wonder what role gun laws play in this as well. Was it common for people to have access to as much firepower (rounds fired per minute) back in the day as we do today? Was it common to have more than one gun (weren’t they expensive)?

Ultimately, I think it has many factors, such as overcrowding, less parental oversight/evolvement (partly due to 2 working parents as the norm), access to guns, and even just having the “template” of Columbine in recent history that might give kids bad ideas. I don’t buy videogames/movies, simply because they are SO common, that if there were a causal relationship we would be seeing dozens of massacres a week.

@Aster: “Have there always been school shootings or are they a sign of a sick society?”

First, @Blackberry nailed it in his first comment. Additionally, I don’t think you necessarily need to set this up as an “or” condition. Yes, there have always been shootings. But what exactly does that say about a “sick” society? Is it meaningful to discuss a society as being “sick” based on behavior that it has always exhibited? Sick seems to imply that it was once “well”.

@thorninmud – While I’m somewhat sympathetic to the video game thing, I’m not entirely sure that video games contribute to such things as much as they are just another expression of a society that glamorizes war and violence.

And I wonder what role daycare and after school care with both parents working in order to “give the kids what they want” has played?

@tom_g I see what you mean. We are not living in a sick society at all. Nothing has changed other than improved media communications. As far as video games contributing to violence I’d have to see studies to decide if they’re a factor. It seems they could have a de-sensitization effect.

I’m going to broaden the category to massacres in general, since schools are just one place massacres can occur.

Even though the number of massacres that an average person knows of has gone up over time, I do not feel like the actual number of massacres has gone up over time.

The reason that people know of more massacres today is because of globalization of the media, which means that when a massacre occurs, everybody knows about. Likewise, recent massacres are much more documented and are not yet subject to the death of knowledge, and information about them is easier to access. (also, with the internet and computers, death of knowledge probably occurs much more slowly in modern times)

In 200, 500, or 1000 years, will some of our recent massacres be common knowledge? Probably not, given the fact that I can’t name a single massacre that occurred 1000 years ago.

For an idea of what I am talking about, look at this list of known massacres, which seams to convey a recent increase in the number of massacres. According to to this list, almost no massacres occurred before 1000 AD, which surely cannot be the case. This shows how knowledge can be lost over time.

So, my main point is massacres aren’t actually more common. This may be interpreted as either that today’s society is not sick, or that humankind in general has always had a tendency to commit massacres. Sadly, I fear that it is the latter.

It’s pretty easy to find research supporting either side of the argument on how first-person shooter games play into real-world violence. I would never assert that gaming would turn an otherwise healthy person into the kind of person that would shoot up a school. Then, as @gorillapaws says, school shootings would be even more prevalent. But I don’t think its a reach at all to wonder whether the game environment might not suggest a course of action to someone who already suffers from social disaffection.

I understand how this suggestion raises objections from all of the healthy people who play these games all the time and effortlessly segregate the virtual world from the real world. But is everyone able to do that? Really?

To go back to my slaughterhouse analogy, clearly most people who work in slaughterhouses aren’t violent people. But it has long been thought that there was a desensitization effect that accrues with this work, and that has been supported by modern research. This kind of finding doesn’t raise lots of objections because A) it’s not surprising on an intuitive level, and B) not many people in the general population are slaughterhouse workers. Where video games are concerned, A still applies, but B is not the case.

@thorninmud – Interesting.

But why is it that video games appear to be overwhelmingly violent? It’s not the case that there is a large pool of kids who are demanding cooperative or loving kindness-based video games. I guess my comments were more based on the fact that the nature of the culture demands and produces these violent video games, which in turn (may – according to some of the research) be troublesome for some unknown percentage of people with tendencies.

This reminds me of the topic of the dangers of certain religious ideas and parents killing their kids to save them. Nobody is claiming that these specific ideas are causing parents to kill themselves. Rather, it may be that these ideas have a tendency to exploit tendencies that some people have, and it may encourage the behavior. In other words, Andrea Yates was ill and had some major problems. It’s possible to argue that Christianity had an influence on her killing her kids to save them from Satan – even though most healthy Christians don’t go around drowning their children.

Would Yates have drowned her kids if she had not been infected with the concepts of Satan, etc, that rattled around in her messed-up head? Who knows. Would person x not have shot up his fellow students were it not for violent video games? Who knows. We’re talking about people who a) have access to guns, and b) grow up in a culture that celebrates violence and war. If there is (to be honest, I haven’t seen the data) a true increase in school shootings that corresponds with an increase in the number of kids playing violent video games, I’d be careful not to assign causation where there is merely correlation.

Trying to figure out crazy people makes you crazy.
I tend to think that those whose cheese slips off their cracker are somehow predisposed as it is. Be it emotional and mental fragility, brain chemistry, genetics, who the f—k knows.
“Crazy” is a veritable smorgasbord of entrees, an all you can eat buffet of psychiatric victuals. lol

There was this peace loving hippy at my school, always banging on about flower power & loving each other…..I shot him with a pea shooter because he was getting right on my tit ends.

So I remember picking up some video game at my buddies house, smoking a joint and then getting very submerged.

I was a young black male in the city. I would jack a bitch in her car and then steal it. Then I would drive on the side walk, mangling anything in my path and shooting out the window. I would then evade the police, shoot down their helicopter and pick up some hookers to take back in the alley. We would dry fuck, I would then beat the shit out of them, stab them and take their money…Then sometimes (just for laughs) I would back the stolen car over them a few times. Time to time we would play this game, get high and often even include some N.W.A. at high decibel levels to accommodate the awesomeness of becoming virtually immune to the fact that I was sitting down, sinking in to a couch, shooting bitches in the face and singing along to Fuck The Police.
Now when I play that game I just use my cheat codes and run around with a dildo baseball bat and swing it at old folks.
I love it when I am online and joining up with about 12 other folks who are doing the same thing… Especially love it when someone let’s their 10 year old boy play. FUCKING AWESOME.
Ahhhhh, society.
Where did we go wrong?
Bad parenting is the number one reason why things have gone to shit.
The number two reason is the soft ass society that we live in.

None of the kids I went to school with had ever used, handled or even seen a real gun never mind brought one to school. Extreme violence involved punching or throwing stones at each other. We were no less sick than kids today, we just didn’t have guns.

Wiki has a list of school shooting (and other school related massacres) events that go back a few centuries.
I think there’s something in that list about some guy making a homemade flamethrower or something. I checked it out about a year ago, so I don’t quite recall.

@shooters
Also, I highly doubt that video games are responsible for such massacres. You know how many people played Doom, Call of duty or Wolfenstein and whatnot? If video games caused violence, so many people downtown would be dead by now, and I sure would have killed a buncha people already. although I don’t like shooters unless it’s Duke Nukem, maybe I’ll just go in a bar and stick my dick in a hole, assuming it’s a glory hole
Maybe games can adhere to an already sick mind, but if that person hadn’t been a fan of games, something else would have been the trigger, like people in the sixties who committed suicide when their D&D character died. Too many people play games to blame games for such things. And anyways, death and chaos were always around, video games however, have existed since like, the seventies or so. People have always massacred one another, man has always drank the blood of his fellow man.

I don’t think school shootings, whatever sources that drive them, shitty ass parenting, lousy environment are a sign that our society is getting sicker. It’s always been fucking sick, it’s just that we upgrade equipment, and dish out skull fuckery in different ways. But that skull fuckery is as ancient as man.
In fact I’d much rather live where I am now, than back in revolutionary France when anyone was a target for the guillotine.

I know this question ain’t about if games cause violence, but I’m sick of that belief, when you consider the amount of gamers and casual gamers out there. If that had any bit of truth, gaming wouldn’t be an industry. To me that’s just as ludicrous as saying that if you clap your hands when seeing aura borealis, it will come in your mouth and eat your soul. It sucks that some events come to define the entirety of something for some people.

The latter.

From @Symbeline‘s linked source:

July 26, 1764
July 4, 1886
July 4, 1940
July 22, 1950
July 14, 1952

I doubt the above were due to the influence of FPS video games and were most likely because the poor kids had to go to f**n summer school! ;-(

@Symbeline I love you.