Every new school massacre in the US – and we’ve had quite a few – confronts us with the same question: how could someone commit such a cruel act? The strangeness increases when we know that most of the shooters are teenagers or young adults.
Surely there are several reasons. The first is the context in which they live: North American society is a heavily armed society, jealous of its self-defense because it is sustained by the paranoid thesis that the other is always a potential enemy. It is a thesis rooted in their culture, in the epic of the conquest of the West, where each one had to defend himself without the State coming to his aid.
The possession of weapons and their inclusion in the Second Amendment of the Constitution responds to this survival instinct. Hence its support by a large part of the population, in addition, of course, to the lobbies of the NRA (National Rifle Association) and the Republican Party.
The discourses that the extreme right promotes about violence and rejection against minorities are elements that legitimize many subsequent actions, without a doubt. And the easy access to the purchase of weapons, as we have seen in the case of Salvador Ramos, is another easy stimulus to commit these acts.
The reasons for each case
But, beyond these collective and objective conditions, there are always particular reasons in each case. Some we know soon and for others we have to wait to know more data.
We can point out the most relevant features that are repeated in many of these murders. The first is that all these adolescents (mostly male) feel internally violated, stressed by their own demons and fears, issues that come from afar.
Sometimes, they evoke the bullying they themselves have received from their peers at school. Salvador Ramos looks like he was bullied for his stutter and his unusual aesthetics. On other occasions, this harassment is redoubled with a violent family environment where there are habitual situations of child abuse or gender violence.
Situations of social exclusion, due to economic precariousness, disability, mental illness or immigration are another ever-present element that conditions the perception these young people have of themselves and of the future that awaits them. For them, as for any other, to obtain a social inscription, a place in the community, becomes psychologically necessary in order not to remain on the margins.
Acts that leave a mark on social networks
We know its importance because it is a vindication that often accompanies their violent act, in the form of an advertisement or statements on social networks. They want the act to leave a trace of themselves that transcends and gives them a later existence, since the final outcome cannot be other than their own death, either by suicide after the massacre or by the downfall of the security forces.
That internal violence that disturbs and worries them, that distances them from the group – most of them are solitary that people hardly notice around them – pushes them to look for ways to calm and appease the tension they experience. The first formula –we have also seen it in the case of Texas– is self-harm, cuts or blows that they themselves produce as an attempt to put an end to that anguish that overflows in their bodies. Self-harm hurts their skin and tries to neutralize the thoughts that keep tormenting them.
Ramos played with knives to cut his face, in a desperate attempt to put an end to an emotional escalation that violated him. Sometimes, these cuts can lead to suicidal attempts, many of which pass as inexplicable because they cannot be connected to those hidden feelings.
When these autolytic formulas do not work, the violence is carried out on the body of the other through aggression, be it blows or murder. It is only through this passage to the act, which destroys the other, when the subject gets rid of that violence definitively and that includes, as we said, his own disappearance. Thus they kill their own childhood and their family in a dramatic reckoning.
The most recent novelty of these massacres and of their authors, as we said, is the mark they leave on the social networks where they live their world, less solitary than in person, and where they announce their plans, even create some links, to recover something of the precarious feeling of life that overwhelms them. There they are more talkative and daring than in real life, they list their preferences and tastes, challenge those they perceive as harassers and make their own name, thus leaving the anonymity in which they themselves have taken refuge.
Is this violence inevitable? As a whole, surely yes, but that should not make us forget the need to reflect on collective responsibility in these events. That of politicians who promote hatred of others and increasingly polarize society, that of governments that do not invest enough in public mental health policies, that of some families far removed from the real problems of their children and that of some professionals, reluctant to talk and oblivious to the suffering of their patients.
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