Ep. 39: Talking about "unspeakable" violence (like Columbine) with Rev. Dr. Ingebretsen

Article: Columbine's 'MONSTERS next door' and cultural rituals of school shootings

Guest: Georgetown University professor Rev. Dr. Ed Ingebretsen, an expert in monsters, cultural studies, and the author of At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture.

Host: David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

Each of these four elements plays out in the social discourse following a school shooting:

1. The monster comes from some distant place that is separate from civil or mainstream society like the trench coat mafia, goth kids, mentally ill, loners, outcasts, and transgender.

2. The monster destroys the things a culture covets like innocent women and children inside a school.

3. The monster must die for cultural stability to return as police train to kill a teenage assailant, minors are sentenced to life in prison without parole, and politicians call for the death penalty for juvenile assailants.

4. The monster’s death cannot be my fault because even when families, communities, and institutions fail to protect vulnerable children who then turn their severe trauma into an act of mass violence, it’s rare for anyone beyond the young teens to be held accountable.

Reference:

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) - Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture - Rev. Dr. Edward J. Ingebretsen

Monster-Making: A Politics of Persuasion - Rev. Dr. Edward J. Ingebretsen

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David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.