Why Kids Kill: Understanding School Shooters' Psychology - Insights for Parents, Educators & Mental Health Professionals

As other reviews have indicated, I work in public safety as front-line response personnel. I encounter a variety of emergent - and several not-so-emergent conditions - as a matter of routine and understanding them can lead to prevention, improving others' health and decreasing my own workload.Not so much here. A mass shooting or other active violence incident is a personal fear of mine; yet there is precious little that I can do to genuinely prevent them. Understanding statistics helps (but the data is rough; think p values < 0.5...), but does little to mitigate the problem. Planning helps, but as Von Moltke the Elder said, "no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."A PhD candidate for Homeland Security recommended this text as a point-of-reference for understanding not just the mass violence perpetrator, but more specifically, the school shooter. Lang's work moves beyond the cliched "socially isolated victim retaliates" model and instead identifies crucial clinical features that, predicated with the specific circumstances for each shooter, led to the outbreak of a mass violence event at a school.Langman's work arrives at a critical conclusion - each of these shooters experienced signs and symptoms of mental illness. Some of them could have been treated - and in fact, multiple shooters were - but the absence of closely monitored care and appropriate support structures in the overall healthcare picture meant that too little was communicated too late. Further compounding these events is a phenomena known as "leakage" - specific, targeted, actionable threats known to other students in advance that were not relayed to the authorities. Hundreds of lives have been lost that could have been saved.Mass violence - be it shooting, stabbing, vehicular homicide, explosives - has a broad array of causal factors ranging from socioeconomic circumstances to geopolitics to the quality and availability of healthcare. Attempting to blame any one cause fails to assign responsibility ultimately to the individuals committing the act and detracts from understanding why they deemed mass violence as the appropriate outlet.Langman's work presents a strong analysis of the psychological states of several well-known shooters and contextualizes not only the events, but the shooters' lives leading up to them. Based on local reviews from co-workers, Langman's insight into the minds of troubled children is a welcome view into an otherwise-inaccessible combination of psychology and clinical development.This is not a bible. This is not a solution, or profile, or magic totem to prevent school shootings. It is, however, a warning - and one that may very well save lives.