Rise of purposeless, non-ideological gun violence by young American men

Why does a kid open fire inside his school or take a shot at the former President? The scariest reason might be shooting innocent people for no reason at all.

Two weeks after the attempted assassination of former President Trump it doesn’t appear that the shooting was politically motivated. The 20-year-old assailant didn’t leave behind a manifesto or make statements about seeking fame, attention, retribution, or appealing to a social group’s ideology.

Occam's razor (also known as the 'law of parsimony') suggests that when faced with competing explanations for the same phenomenon, the simplest is likely the correct one.

The simplest explanation is that a 20-year-old in Butler, PA tried to kill Trump just because he could.

He had access to multiple guns at his home including an AR-15 rifle. It was normal for him to go shooting on the weekend and when he left the house with a gun, his father thought he was going to the shooting range. Buying bullets was easy, he stopped by the store and purchased 50 rounds for the AR-15 the morning of the attack. Flying a drone around the site 2 hours before the rally and checking the distances to the stage with a range finder was also easy because police and the Secret Service didn’t stop or apprehend him.

A very important detail is the 20-year-old was wearing a “Demolition Ranch” t-shirt which is from a YouTube channel that glorifies shooting at random things for no reason. What happens if you saw off the barrel of a .50 caliber machine gun (note: this violates federal gun laws)? Demolition Ranch makes a YouTube video to find out and it gets 3.6M views.

The idea that citizens in a developed Western society need to be armed with long-range sniper rifles and combat infantry weapons like an AR-15 to defend themselves against criminals and tyrannical government is a sign of the theory called “social anomie” (which I’ll explain in detail).

My hypothesis is the 20-year-old committed the shooting just because he could with:

1. Constant access to guns.

2. Social media firehose of gun content (which he idolized and internalized to the point of wearing the YouTube channel t-shirt during his public suicide).

3. Ease of carrying a gun around anywhere in rural PA.

4. His family didn’t question what he was doing or where he was going with an AR-15 rifle.

5. He could find a location to shoot at the former President without friction.

6. There were minimal forces in the opposite direction of violent action.

What’s amazingly lucky is that a much more common scenario didn’t take place at the rally. What if he just fired randomly into the crowd? He had 26 seconds on the roof from his first shot to when he was killed by the Secret Service snipers. Instead of firing 8 rounds, he could have easily fired as many shots as possible at the dense crowd of attendees. The temporary fences with locked gates stopped police from running towards the building where the shooter was positioned. Police had to ram the fence with a patrol car to make a hole. Those same fences would have trapped rallygoers who were trying to flee from indiscriminate gunfire just like the Las Vegas festival shooting when people in a crowd couldn’t run, hide, or fight a sniper.

The fact that the 20-year-old shooter was not trying to kill as many random people as possible lends even more credence to my theory. He was shooting at Trump just because he could.

School shooter who flipped a coin before the attack

January 23, 2018—three weeks before Parkland—was otherwise a normal morning as a 15-year-old boy ate a bowl of cereal, and then his mom dropped him off at school. She had no idea he had a handgun and extra magazines in his backpack.

He went to the band room where his friends hung out before classes started with a coin and asked them to pick 'heads or tails'. They picked the flip wrong but were oblivious to the consequences of it. Based on the outcome of the coin flip, the 15-year-old then went to the common area and opened fire. Two students were killed and 18 others wounded at 7:57am as they waited for classes to begin at Marshall County High School in Kentucky.

During the police interview, the 15-year-old said:

"He was an atheist and that life had no purpose, had no meaning, and his life had no purpose. Other people’s lives also had no purpose." He wanted to “further society through science” but said he was failing his science class.

He described the shooting as an “experiment” to see how students would respond, how police respond, how society would respond, and how people would react.

On the morning of the shooting, he wanted to '“break the monotony” because “his life had no purpose”.

Durkheim and Anomie

Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist, theorized the concept of “anomie” which is a state of social disintegration due to a far-reaching social change and an increase in social differentiations (e.g. poor vs rich, urban vs rural, religious vs secularized). When the disappearance of old principles of structure weakens social cohesion, the result is that general social rules are no longer observed, the collective order dissolves, and a state of anomie emerges.

Anomie can occur at a broad social level—or within individuals—when there is instability resulting from a breakdown of social values or from a lack of purpose for individuals. The consequences of anomie are increased suicide and crime rates from disregarding social rules and a dwindling collective consciousness.

The feelings of purposelessness that the Marshall County school shooter described are exactly how Durkheim defined anomie.

School Shooters without purpose or values

The lack of motives for the attempted assassination, a coin flip deciding if a school shooting would happen in Kentucky, and the theory of anomie made me think about other school shooters who acted without any clear motives beyond general anger toward society.

An ideology is beliefs or philosophies—usually political, social, epistemological, and ethical—that create a coherent system of ideas about how someone (or a group) views the world. What’s so disturbing about many of these school shooters is they appear to lack a clear ideology that motivates or explains their violence. Dr. Manfred Steger (one of my professors during my PhD courses) wrote that "ideologies are patterned clusters of normatively imbued ideas and concepts, including particular representations of power relations. These conceptual maps help people navigate the complexity of their political universe and carry claims to social truth." Inversely, without an ideology there is no social truth.

School shootings at Freeman High School, Townville Elementary School, and Madison High School all fit this general circumstance of purposeless violence devoid of ideology. Nothing speaks to a state of anomie more directly than the recently released writings of the CVPA school shooter.

Here are ten school shootings from the last decade where the young male perpetrators were in a state of anomie and lacked a clear ideology beyond social dysregulation to explain their motives: