First elements of differentiation and definition in the configuration of the group of cases

Our examination of the 116 files created allowed us to find some differences among the multiple cases, which will be explained by means of a typology of the attacks created for this research:

Type 1: sociopolitical rebellions in educational institutions. These include acts that are generally believed to be linked to insurrections and sociopolitical struggle, regardless of assessments about their legitimacy. They involve groups in conflict that are identifiable in society before their attacks take place; e.g., openly terroristic attacks or student uprisings suppressed by the State or the police.

Type 2: random acts of extreme school violence. This type of cases are violent attacks that by chance reach the educational institution but are the result of struggle or conflict that are in principle not connected to it, and whose perpetrators are not agents of education (administrators, teachers, students or parents) although their victims are. An example would be the case of Bay Ningyang, an 18 year-old in Henan, China, who in 2006 reacted to being rejected by the elementary school teacher he was in love with by setting fire to the classroom where he had locked in both the teacher and her students.

Type 3: acts of school violence proper. These include attacks carried out unexpectedly in schools, usually by an agent of education, and more rarely by two of them. The forces in conflict in this kind of attacks had not been instituted before the attack, nor recognized collectively as such; quite the opposite, all evidence shows that it is through the attack itself that they become manifest and force their way into public awareness through the subversive nature and destructive power of the attack. Following one of this paper’s main theses, the political dimension¹² is not excluded from the causes of this kind of violence, an issue that will be further discussed below.

Age of the attackers and incidence of the attacks

Another significant piece of data is the age of the perpetrators. When analyzing this information we must take into account that attacks 14 and 16 were carried out by two young men, attack 52 by an unspecified number of pre-college students whose ages were not recorded, and attack 63 was committed by a young man whose age is unknown. For this reason, the number of attackers is greater than the number of attacks. The following chart records the ages of 65 attackers because the cases in which two of them participated make up for the ones in which their age is unknown.

Chart 5 Correlation between ages and incidence 

From the 37 subjects of the group of attackers between the ages of 15 and 19, 27 were minors⁴⁵time of the attack, and the other ten were legally adults.

It can be clearly observed that attackers who were minors constitute the largest group, 36 adolescents, boys and girls, and 55.38% of the total subjects in this sample. It is important to notice that the youngest attacker was just six years old. The youths who were legally adults, on the other hand, were 29, accounting for 44.61%.

These figures also reveal that the age group to which more subjects belonged at the time they carried out the attack was the one between the ages of 15 and 19, precisely those that correspond to the transitional stage between adolescence and young adulthood. Following it is the next age group, between the ages of 20 and 24.

Explaining the predominance of minors in this statistic, as well as the way in which they obtained the firearms that the laws forbid them to use, are issues that require further research, since it is important to investigate what these facts let us know, and what they point to in the future. These questions, however, will be the subject of further study.

The differential dimension of gender between the attackers

From the 65 cases of attacks recorded and studied, only four were perpetrated by female students, that is, 6.15%. These four students were 16, 23, 11 and 15 years old respectively, according to the chronological order of their attacks. 93.85% of all the attackers were male.

As for the four attacks carried out by girls, what stands out regarding their motivation and modus operandi was that only one of them, Brenda Ann Spencer (1979, U.S.A., Case 5), acted in a way similar to some of the males who had carried out massive attacks years before: she shot as a sniper against a school with children. Two other cases were perpetrated as a direct vengeance against friends: Latina Williams (2001, U.S.A., Case 19) used a firearm, and Natsumi Tsuji (2004, Japan, Case 23), a sharp weapon, specifically a cutter. The last of these cases was the one of Lara Tolosa (2017, Argentina, Case 61) who, after threatening several students in her classroom who routinely bullied her, shot them and killed herself with the same gun.

This Sharp gender difference in the statistics of school attacks points to a new line of research.

Types of weapons used in the attacks

The following chart shows the types of weapons used by the students in the attacks:

Among the firearms used were pistols, rifles and machine guns of different kinds of power and lethality; among the sharp weapons were knives, a sword and an ax. The two ballistic weapons used were a bow and arrow and a crossbow. In the last category I included a case in which a student died after a bullying episode in which he was subjected to torture, which got out of control and led to his death.

What is it that these adolescents and children proffer through their attacks and the use of weapons in their schools? This is a question we will address in depth next.

Incidence of suicide

The number of students who actually committed suicide at the end of their attack is considerable: it is between 29 and 30,⁴⁶ent to 46.15% of the total attackers.⁴⁷eless, in the rest of the cases we find 15 in which the link between suicide and attack was present due to at least one of the following motives:

This high correlation between attack and suicide shows a sort of mutual implication in the thinking behind the attack itself, which will be addressed next.

The 65 cases in our research

After this necessary detour to explain the methodological foundations and the aims that guide this line of research, we will now specify the effective modus operandi for the study of the issue at hand, after having found not just one case or a few but 65 of them. As much as possible, all of them must be taken into account. Thus, we searched on the internet for all audio, visual and written materials that would document parts of each one of these cases, in the shape of newscasts, articles of opinion and analysis, and even testimony - written or on video - from the attackers themselves. As was to be expected, the results were different for the creation and organization of each dossier, since the quantity and the depth of the materials related to each case were very variable and depended usually on the nature, the magnitude, the severity, and the social and political impact that each attack had at the time it happened.

How to proceed, methodologically speaking, faced with the multitude and heterogeneity of the cases of school attacks carried out by students, taking as a reference the case study in psychoanalysis? The answer we found was to find in the analysis of each one of the 65 cases the common coordinates that ran through their conformation and the process through which they came to happen, in order to extract their implications vis-à-vis the phenomenon under study, and reflect on them.

The findings made in the research work, which have already been discussed, led to several questions that have been raised throughout this text. From now on, the text will focus on its main aim: finding out what the student attackers have made known about the motives and purposes of the planning and execution of their attacks.

The making known of the motives of the cases of school attacks by students. Is there really something they “want to make known”?

This section begins by specifying some important points. Our study does not intend to make a psychopathological diagnosis of the individual attackers - which in several cases has been divulged on the web - as a cause or explanation of their initiative to carry out a school attack and of its execution. Farther still from our intentions would be to prioritize this diagnosis over the exploration of what was determining in each case for the act - that is, the attack - to be carried out, because doing so would jeopardize the possibility of finding what was intended to be made known in each one of them.⁵²

According to the information provided by the sources consulted, in 25 of the cases there are diagnostic labels - some established before the attacks, others afterwards - such as attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADDH), Asperger syndrome, autism, dyslexia, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, personality disorders, psychotic outbreaks, etc., but in this research we believe that these psychopathological categories, regardless of their validity or accuracy, cannot explain why the acts were perpetrated, nor can they, therefore, aspire to reduce to them whatever led those individuals to carry out a transgression of such dimensions as the attacks, nor the character that defines this action in its particular sense.

Trying to establish a direct correlation between diagnosis and the carrying out of the attack introduces surreptitiously a circular reasoning, closed upon itself, that does not allow for any rethinking or analyzing of the issue at hand.⁵³espite the existence of these diagnoses, we have opted for following all the clues that the structuring of the cases offers. If what is intended is to study what the school violence attacks are based on what drives certain individuals to carry them out, rather than focusing on diagnoses, it is advisable to reconstruct the logical-strategic structure of the attacks and try to elucidate which experiences led the students to carry out such irreducible and baffling acts, and how they thought about such experiences.

Thus, what we suggest here is to open and follow alternative lines of research through which it becomes possible to try to address each one of the cases in and of themselves, and not through a conceptual framework that is external and foreign to them from the start.

A second clarification to be made here is that the aspect of the family complexes, although assumed and acknowledged in this research as a very important element in the makeup of each one of the cases, will not be given privileged attention.⁵⁴ly, from the experience in the practice of psychoanalysis it may be surmised in a very general way that carrying out severe and transcendent acts, by children, adolescents and young adults, is somehow intended to challenge their parents or families.⁵⁵, for the particular aims and interests of our study, the fact that the attacks are carried out within the school and affect it in different and irreparable ways is an irreducible action that deserves to be looked at specifically as such.

We will now address the analytic coordinates that run through almost all of the cases, which are the subject of this research. The evidence found through the analysis of the information on 60⁵⁶cases studied suggests that there are reasons involved or intertwined⁵⁷which give them a certain character or meaning. These reasons are generally found through the historical reconstruction of the facts and the statements and testimony of the perpetrators made before, during or after the attacks, in different contexts and through different means.⁵⁸

As has been mentioned, it is impossible to conduct in this space a case-by-case study, but the information provided by the versions studied on the 60 cases that have given us a glimpse of what led the attackers to act as they did suggests, broadly speaking, five different and interlinked dimensions. The description of these dimensions that follows aims to show how they are all present in different proportions in the structuring of each one of the cases, as different undertones given by the perpetrator - often unknowingly - to the meaning of his act-attack.⁵⁹

Nevertheless, due to the realm of subjective reality in which these dimensions are inscribed, such proportions are not measurable, but the information gathered about the preparation and execution of the attacks generally provides clues about it, so that a certain dimension seems to prevail upon the others.

First dimension: responding to the loss of fundamental components of oneself

One dimension of the attacks is that they are planned and executed as an action of response to moral and material losses - or patent threats of them - suffered by the attackers; losses related to those elements and assets on which their own sense of worth rested and that were essential for the sustenance of the self. In the 60 cases studied in which traceable motives were found in the production of the armed attack, we found in variable measures this dimension that we will call the dimension of the unbearable losses, which of course include the loss of the prospect or hope of having a livable life. Such losses are linked to the effect of the fact that the perpetrators were continuously the object of multiple forms de exclusion: marginalization, intimidation, dishonor, humiliation, rejection, neglect, physical and subjective abuse, harassment, betrayal, etc. These forms of exclusion finally became unbearable for the perpetrators, who were under conditions such as these:

One of the paradigmatic cases of this first dimension is the attack by Charles Andrew Williams (15 years old, Case 19) to the Santana High School in California, U.S.A., on March 5 2001. He shot a firearm in several areas of the school, killing two students and wounding 13 more. In his statement to the police he said that he was tired of being bullied by his classmates. He had tried to speak about the problem with a school counsellor, who could not see him “because he was busy”. He had also told his friends that his situation made him lose his wish to live. Shortly before the attack, a teacher had humiliated⁶⁰t of the class. His parents had separated recently and he had moved with his father in Santana, and he was a new student in the school. Before the shooting, he wrote his father a note saying “I tried really hard, and I made it so far, but in the end it doesn’t really matter”. At the end of his attack he was found trying to shoot himself, unsuccessfully.

This first and important analytic dimension in the study of the phenomenon of armed attacks in schools - aimed at seeing the attack as a response to unbearable losses - finds resonance and convergence with some findings made by other scholars and critics of the subject. One of them is ^{Langman (2015)}, a Ph.D. in psychology, who in his work School Shooters discusses the driving role of some events experienced by the perpetrators that threaten part of their most fundamental subjective makeup, such as facts related with their physical and personal features, and attacks or challenges to their gender identities, especially the male identity.

From a socio-anthropological perspective, professor Leyton, an expert in the study of serial murders, mentions⁶¹veral school shootings have been carried out by immigrants or children of immigrants, pointing to the possible role played in some attacks by the exclusion and marginalization that immigrants have been subjected to for generations due to racist ideologies. Consequently, Leyton highlights the importance of taking a non-individualistic or psychological approach to the phenomenon of the attacks, which encourages countries to examine the governmental or social attitudes that might be at the root of the problem.

From a different critical platform, Keith Rock, a young Native American, in an interesting analysis of the sociocultural context of the school attack perpetrated by Jeffrey Weise in Red Lake, U.S.A. in 2005 (Case 25), in a documentary on Weise directed by Rock,⁶²s the concept of Legion to think about, group and even bring together the experience of individuals who, because of their race and other reasons, live in a state of utter social marginalization and neglect within their own country. The young school attackers, says Rock in his documentary, belong to this Legion, defined as a “mental underground of people of the darkness. You who know who you are, and the legion is your unknown family that no one else can see but you. It is a collective of loners”.

Considering that this concept opens a fruitful and important path of problematization of the subject of this paper, we might add to the definition that Rock gives of himself that the Legion congregates - arguably through their loss - the so-called “losers”, “outsiders”, “outcasts”, “weirdos”, and “loners”⁶³ generally refers to a large number of people in a specific place, but we must take into account that historically this term has designated specialized and elite military groups that had been coopted by colonizing states, and who actually constituted armies of individuals who originally belonged to subordinated or marginalized groups of foreign people.

So we would have to ask: Does Legion designate a group whose member oppose their segregation and their segregators, and fight against them? And in trying to follow the basic arguments in Rock’s approach, do the attacks respond to a rebellion against a configuration of power relationships in which the perpetrators were held captive?⁶⁴

For the time being, recapitulating the elements presented so far on this first dimension, we can establish that the losses of the self - or the threat of them - of the characteristics described - such as being the object of oppression, exclusion and segregation - under certain circumstances may actually raise, for people like the young school attackers, the possibility of responding to those who have dispossessed them in these ways. Although the nature of such dispossessions or losses may in principle be considered symbolic, it is important to recognize that they have real effects in the lives (^{Butler, 2005}) of those student perpetrators, and that they might move them to warlike behavior that, evidently, includes the actual use of weapons. Such ways to respond, as insinuated by Rock, are linked in different ways to similar attacks carried out before by other young people, as multiple and successive expansions in space and time of a guerrilla. This leads us to the second dimension.

Second dimension: start a rebellion

This second dimension of the attacks consists of the fact that the attackers were driven by imperative impulse to rebel, as an act of settlement of forces to restore one’s subjective place in the conglomerate of power relationships in which they belonged after the dimension of the loss. It has to do with making oneself be taken into account and getting respect, with showing an overwhelming superiority before the rivals and enemies who have harmed them.

In this regard, it is worth mentioning that in the different cases of school attacks studied this restoration is characterized clearly by the use of the weaponry, technological, strategic and rhetoric resources of their time. In particular, the appearance of internet and social networks in the 1990s as instruments of access to knowledge and information, as well as of expression and communication with others, has given previously unheard of performative possibilities to the plans of school attacks perpetrated by minors and young adults.⁶⁵

One of the then paradigmatic cases of this second dimension is the so-called Massacre at Columbine, perpetrated in Colorado, U.S.A. in 1999. Two students of Columbine High School, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, 18 and 17 years old respectively and friends of each other, after having planned for a long time an attack on their school, which presumably intended to have massive destruction consequences similar to the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in 1995, arrived to the high school heavily armed and set up several home-made bombs. Some of their artifacts, however, did not explode, and as their original plans were frustrated, the young men attacked the building with their weapons killing 12 students and a teacher, and wounding more than twenty students and several teachers. After learning that the police was on its way to the school, they knelt together in front of one of the school security cameras and shot themselves in the head. The information gathered shows that both of them had continuously been the object of intimidation, insults and rejection by students known as “jocks”, who said that Klebold and Harris “were weird, not normal kids”, dressed differently, were clumsy in sports and not popular among the rest of the Columbine High School students. They were, in fact, seen as outcasts.

On the internet there are still videos that the two young men uploaded to rehearse and divulge their plans, as performances in which they acted as “bad, avenging boys” who threatened and terrified their enemies in the Hollywoodesque style of the time.

Third dimension: seeking revenge

This dimension is related especially with attacks in which the emphasis of the act itself seems to be on getting revenge or settling accounts, as a violent retribution for some harm done - actually or as a threat - upon those who did it.

An example of this shift on the meaning of the attack seems to be the so-called Massacre of Erfurt, perpetrated in Germany on April 26 2002 by the 19-year old student Robert Steinhäuser (Case 20), who had been expelled from his school, Gutenberg-gymnasium, without the right to obtain grades, for having missed school to go to a shooting club, and having submitted false medical notes on the days when he was supposed to take the exams he had failed the previous year. According to the strict norms of the State of Thuringia, young Steinhäuser had exhausted his opportunities to retake the classes required to finish high school, and therefore to have access later to college studies and to aspire to a good job. Humiliated and with no way out, he put on a sort of ninja black costume, took a gun to his former school and began to shoot, walking through the classrooms and killing 13 teachers, a policeman and two students, and wounding seven more people, after which he shot himself.

Fourth dimension: making others and the authority acknowledge oneself by force, by throwing a capital problem at them

This includes the cases in which the modus operandi of the attack shows a mostly rhetoric intention, although the other dimensions may also be present. For the young perpetrator, the idea is to throw the school a serious existential problem - related to the losses described in the first dimension - through the bullets or the display of weapons, in order to make the authorities and the collectivity involved acknowledge him through the planning and carrying out of the attack.

A significant example of this dimension is the case of the so-called Massacre at Virginia Tech, in Virginia, U.S.A., perpetrated on April 16 2007 by 23 year-old South Korean student Seung-Hui Cho (Case 29). Everything seems to indicate that he had serious problems to master what is considered proper English, which made him the victim of mockery, rejection and marginalization by other students, especially the girls, who snubbed him when he tried to approach them. Moments before he carried out the attack, he wrote a sort of multimedia manifesto⁶⁶ that he sent to NBC News, in which he included a text explaining the meaning of his actions, photographs of himself carrying weapons in different positions - pointing to the viewer or to himself - and videos in which he explained why he would do what he did. Fragments of his manifesto are still in the web. This is part of what Cho explained in his videos:

When the time came, I did it. I had to do it. There were thousands of opportunities and ways to avoid this today. But you chose to shed my blood. You cornered me and gave me just one choice. The choice was yours. Now there is blood on your hands that will never wash off.

Cho murdered 27 students and five teachers, and wounded 29 more people with a gun. He ended it by killing himself. Witnesses to the massacre revealed that the young man ran in the aisles asking “Where is my girlfriend?” before shooting.

Another example of this dimension is the case of Luke Woodham, a school attacker in Mississippi, U.S.A. in 1997 (Case 12), from which I will only quote a note written by the attacker just before he began his attack on the Pearl River Central Secondary School, where he studied.

I am not crazy, I’m angry. I killed because people like me are abused every day. I did it to show society that it is pressuring us and we will pressure back. All my life I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, really blame me for what I’m doing? Yes, yes, you will… It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a cry of sheer agony to tell you that you can’t open your eyes. If I can’t do it through peaceful means, if I can’t make them see through a display of intelligence, I will do it with a bullet.⁶⁷

Fifth dimension: trying to find a final solution⁶⁸problem they suffer

In this last dimension, the attack seemed to be for the perpetrator the only solution or way out left before a troublesome situation that he found it impossible to bear anymore.

A case that exemplifies this dimension is the attack carried out by 14 year-old Brandon David McInerney in his middle-high school in Oxnard, California, U.S.A. on February 12 2008 (Case 32). Once inside the school, the adolescent drew a gun and shot a 15 year-old classmate, which led to his victim’s brain death and eventually to his death two days later. At first it was believed that the attack had been motivated by homophobia, since the victim was openly gay and wore girl’s clothes to school, but later it was found that the victim used to provoke McInerney, taunting and trying to seduce him in front of other classmates, who had started to make fun of him in school.