Small Town America and its Ticking Time Bombs: Killing Kids

While doing some research in the wake of the latest school shooting in Texas I came across the highly interesting book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters (2009) by Peter Langman, who investigated 10 school shooters, including Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters. Langman comes to the conclusion that there are three distinct types of school shooters. While school shooters generally suffer from various mental health problems, I provide the most typical in parentheses:  

• psychopathic (antisocial personality disorder - ASPD)
• psychotic (schizotypal personality disorder - SPD)
• traumatised (PTSD)

While Langman thinks that a school shooter may actually fall into two categories, he considers all 10 cases discussed as clearly belonging to one type

(source)

While I consider Langman’s typology useful, I don’t think that the cases are so clear-cut. To begin with Ed Harris did show grandiose delusions and the cases in the traumatized group typically had paranoia, which is part of the schizophrenia spectrum (psychosis) and which was also the most common psychosis in the psychotic group.

What did the school shooters across all groups have in common?

• Misfits (although not necessarily loners)
• Failure of empathy
• Existential rage
• Suicidal ideation in addition to homicidal ideation
• Highly reactive to criticism, teasing, bullying
• Problems with their “manhood” & feeling powerful with guns
• Problems with status, hierarchy and authority

Like the Uvalde shooter, Salvador Ramos all of the school shooters were introverts. That alone does not make one a school shooter, of course, else half of the world’s population would be school shooters. Which other personality traits did the school shooters share? In online forums, the personality template for school shooters is often considered IXTX, introverted (I)  plus T (thinking). Even though Jungian psychology and Myers-Briggs aren’t considered scientific, you can think of T as evolutionary provisioning types (predominantly men) and F as evolutionary caregiving (predominantly women).

However, this template is simply not true, as you can see from the following table, providing the MBTI type of the school shooters (as far as I have been able to find them), half of the shooters discussed in the book are F types:

Even though F types are much higher in empathy than T types, they may have lower perceived manhood. In the two cases, in which two shooters teamed up, the F types were basically followers of the T type: Johnson (ISFP) following Golden (ISTP) and Klebold (INFP) following Harris (INTJ). These F type shooters are particularly hard to understand as they were generally described as quiet, friendly, agreeable (agreeableness correlates somewhat with F) and kind, whereas the T type shooters were generally perceived as more angry and aggressive.

It is difficult to understand Dylan Klebold. Although people were shocked that Eric Harris and Dylan perpetrated the Columbine attack, they were more shaken by Dylan’s participation. Eric was more arrogant, more belligerent, and more blood-thirsty. But Dylan? Dylan was often described as quiet, painfully shy, and peace loving. How can a painfully shy, nonviolent child become a cold-blooded mass

murderer?

Let’s have a look at the different types. Andrew Golden (ISTP) is the one who sticks out most from the rest. In contrast to Harris (INTJ), he showed psychopathic and sadistic (not part of core psychopathy) traits in early childhood. He is also the only one who showed no signs of suicidal ideation, even though school shootings are often suicide missions, with the perpetrators either killing themselves or getting killed by the police. He planned a getaway, not typical of school shooters. Even though it may sound somewhat counterintuitive, real psychopaths are quite unlikely school shooters. If psychopathic traits are at least partially due to evolutionary adaptations (no empathy, callousness, remorselessness) then school shootings just don’t make sense as there is nothing to gain from them, evolutionarily speaking.

Eric Harris (INTJ), on the other hand, did not show any psychopathic traits in childhood. He specifically wrote that he had to suppress his empathy once he went on a shooting spree. Another thing that sets Harris apart from psychopathic Golden is his motivation: while Golden is driven by sadism, Harris is driven by a vision of - as strange as it may sound - making earth a better place.

Beyond killing “inferior” people, Eric fantasised about eliminating humanity: “the Nazis came up with a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem. Kill them all. Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND’ no one should survive.” In an email conversation, Eric wrote of humanity: “I think I would want us to go extinct.” Not content with this, he added, “I just wish I could actually DO this instead of just DREAM about it all.”

Those familiar with MBTI will notice that what is absent from the above list of introverted types is ISTJ/ISFJ. So, if there are types among whom school shooters are more frequent, then the pattern is ISXP + (more frequently) IN. IN types are also the ones who are most frequently represented among Nobel Prize winners. And what about SJ types, are they simply better human beings? How does this all make sense?

I have argued that MBTI does make evolutionary sense and that the different temperaments are derived evolutionarily from our ancestral modes of subsistence:

Why should farmer types (SJ) not be represented among school shooters? It is not impossible, but very unlikely. Farer types would be much better adapted to status, hierarchy and authority than pastoralist (SP) types, who do have status but mostly lack hierarchy and authority, and hunter-gatherer (N) types, who generally have low status distinctions and lack hierarchy.

There is a mystery about American school shootings: they all happen in small-town, suburban or rural areas, where tight-knight communities least expect them to occur as people are generally happy. That is, as long as you are part of the community. These tight-knit communities allow little room for non-conformity. Small town America and suburbia are amazingly conformist and uniform. High conformity is a farmer (SJ) value:

This can leave people with different evolutionary programming completely alienated. In fact, alienation is a recurring theme in Langman’s book. Almost all school shooters felt alienated from society and two of them specifically had psychotic thoughts of being aliens.

Michael Carneal [INTP] did not have an easy time. By all appearances, however, he should

have. He was a bright boy from a loving family in the small town of West Paducah, Kentucky. His father was a respected lawyer. His mother was a devoted home-maker. Both parents were sincere, generous, and actively involved in their family and their community. Michael’s sister was both a social and an academic success. Michael, however, did not fit in with his family. When Michael was approximately 14 years old he wrote something titled “The Secret,” which contained this passage: “I have been led to believe that there is a secret in my family that my parents and my sister know . . . I am always excluded from things . . . I overheard my parents debating ‘whether they should tell me or not.’ I still don’t know what they were talking about. I think I’m an alien but I’m not

sure.”

I am an INFP, and while I have never had any homicidal ideation (in fact I was surprised to find two INFPs among the 10 school shooters), I can relate a lot to their struggles:

Dylan [INFP] experienced an ongoing struggle regarding friendship and female companionship. He was painfully aware of his social difficulties. He wrote about the routine of his life in this way: “Go to school, be scared and nervous, hoping that people can accept me.”⁵ He longed for acceptance, but he felt he never really achieved it: “nobody accepting me even though I want to be accepted . . . me looking weird and acting shy—BIG problem.”⁶ It is common for teenagers to worry about being

liked, but Dylan’s social anxiety was extreme. He wrote: “I see how different I am (aren’t we all, you’ll say) yet I’m on such a greater scale of difference than everyone else.”⁷ In fact, he believed that if people knew how different he was, they would abandon or persecute him: “I know that I am different, yet I am afraid to tell the society. The possible abandonment, persecution is not something I want to face.

So, what do school shooters and Nobel laureates have in common? A vision to change the world. I am aware that these ideas sound far-fetched. But it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand that a hunter-gatherer child would always feel alien or alienated in a farmer society. The struggle of Native Americans who are trying to integrate in our “food-producer” (farmer-herder) world is the best testimony I can find in order to support my hypothesis:

A year before Jeffrey’s rampage, a survey on the reservation revealed that 80 percent of ninth-grade girls had thought about suicide.  Between 1990 and 2005, the suicide rate for Native Americans in Beltrami County was approximately four times higher than the state’s overall suicide rate.

And it’s not only Native Americans. The last remaining foragers all over the world have high suicide rates: Aborigines 2.4x the rate of other Australians, Inuit in Canada 5-25x the rates of other Canadians.

For more on the hunter-gatherer hypothesis check out my book