by L.K. Daue

Created on: February 19, 2008

In the 1960s, a charismatic young Micronesian from the island of Ebeye committed suicide by hanging, sparking a decade-long rash of suicides in Micronesian males aged 15-24. In 1999, two teenagers by the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed into Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, catalyzing 19 separate shooting attempts across the United States over a 22-month period, all modeled after the Columbine incident. The question that is raised, then, is how several seemingly-uninspiring young men can instigate such epidemics with relatively inoccuous action. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, argues that these young men tacitly gave permission to their peers to act.

The same theory of permission can be applied to the recent campus shootings across the United States, beginning with Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Technical Institute on April 16, 2007. In the ten months since the two-shooting massacre at Virginia Tech, two shootings have occurred in February alone, one on February 8, 2008, at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, LA, and one on February 14, 2008, at Northern Illinois University in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. In each of those cases, the gunner shot several rounds before killing him- or herself, modeling their modi operandi after Cho.

In the Viriginia Tech case, Cho had been seen for social anxiety disorder in junior high school and continued to receive therapy and treatment until his junior year of high school. In college, he was accused of stalking two female students, and was asked by at least one professor to seek professional treatment. Although he was declared mentally ill, there was no conclusive evidence that he would open fire on one residence hall and one scholastic building. The Northern Illiois University case was similar; gunman Stephen Kazmierczak had been on medication for an unknown mental condition, but there was no indication that the 2006 Dean's Award winner would open fire on an oceanography lecture. The astonishing piece of information from the NIU incident is that Kazmierczak made reference to Cho's shooting at Virginia Tech, thus linking the two events.

Extensive studies have not been completed on exposure to violent video games, TV, and/or movies in either the Cho or the Kazmierczak case, but it's safe to assume that the 23-year-old Cho and 27-year-old Kazmierczak had been exposed to all three media over the course of their 20-plus years. However, thousands of American men in their 20s are exposed to violent media on a daily basis, whether through watching the news, playing Splinter Cell, or catching the latest Bond flick, and yet there are not thousands of young American men shooting up college campuses. Cho, and Harris and Klebold before him, was of a subset of young men who were not only in a precarious mental state, but also carried out his plan in a manner that garnered a lot of attention and therefore copycats.

The recent outbreak of campus shootings, then, is not due to exposure to violent video games, TV, or movies. If this were the case, then thousands of young men across the country would be pulling triggers in lecture halls and tens of thousands more college-age kids would be dead. Gladwell's theory of permission of peers is much more likely the case, and is limited to a small, yet dangerous, subset of young Americans.

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