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I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.
I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.
This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.
It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.
The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
I found this comment while trying to find another one via the search function. I just want to add that I did some reading out of curiosity and I think I have to nitpick a bit.
Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator) - committed by an adult
Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed) - committed in a university dormitory, not a school
For these reasons I'd argue these weren't school shootings in the everyday sense of the word.
This seems like splitting hairs on two fronts. Some of the most infamous "canonical" school shootings were committed by adults: Sandy Hook, Parkland High, Uvalde, Columbine (Eric Harris turned 18 a week before the shooting; Dylan Klebold was 17). The category "school shooting" is generally taken to include shootings which take place at universities, hence why Virginia Tech is usually considered the bloodiest school shooting in American history. The idea that "school shootings" only refers to mass shootings committed by minors at primary or secondary (but not post-secondary) educational institutions seems like a stipulative definition that doesn't reflect common usage.
My assumption is that widespread cable TV coverage and peculiar interpretations of the ‘classic’ US school shootings of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s compelled normies to put these in a different mental bucket as a particular phenomenon different from spree killings or ‘mass shootings’ in general.
The common characteristics are:
• The horror of ‘kids killing kids’ (of course, many ghetto shootings technically fall into the same category, but again, normies generally ignore those altogether or at least put them in a different mental bucket), college students and recent graduates who are technically already adults also being “just kids” in this context
• If the killer happens to be an adult, he’s a young adult who attended the school in question and is motivated by vengeance; otherwise adult killers are largely uninteresting and thus fall into a different mental category
• The killer is not mentally ill in the technical sense of the word (which is another reason I argue the Bulgarian case does not count) but is driven crazy through addiction to violent FPS games and metal music, by a deep dive into various weird-ass online subcultures or due to sexual frustration
• The massacre is happening strictly on school premises, with the killer hunting his victims indoors like prey
• Neither the killer nor the victims are nonwhite criminal or criminal-adjacent ghetto-dwellers; this needs to be stressed because it’s a big aspect making the whole incident a case of incomprehensible horror
• The shooting is interpreted as a sad commentary on the decadence of modern society and kids these days just being all screwed up
Perhaps this is what the typical person thinks when they hear "school shooting", but I'm not sure if it accurately describes any specific school shooting, thus rendering it a Dead Unicorn Trope. Consider the most infamous American school shooting which inspired legions of copycats, Columbine:
Come on. Nobody in their social circle considered Harris and Klebold to be either criminals or adults. Normies don't care when present and future career criminals, especially ghetto-dweller nonwhite ones or lumpenprole white trash ones, are violently hurt or killed because they understand that it all obviously comes with that lifestyle.
But let me approach the subject from another angle. Look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)
I'd say less than half (maybe a third) of these incidents bear any of the hallmarks of what average people think of when they hear of a 'school shooting'.
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