School shooter followed video game-like ‘script’

Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise, who shot dead nine people at and near his Red Lake, Minn., school before killing himself, reportedly left clues to his troubles in Web site and blog postings on Hitler, suicide attempts and school shootings as well as a violent animation posted on the Internet. NBC “Nightly News” producer Subrata De spoke about the warnings with Dr. Katherine Newman, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and the author of “Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.”  Below is a transcript of that interview.

Subrata De: So, you saw the animation. Tell me your very first impressions when you saw it.

Dr. Katherine Newman: My first impression of the animation was how well drawn it was.

This was obviously a kid with a lot of talent. It's a tragedy that it's been wasted in this way. But also a great deal of anger brewing inside and murderous rage that is expressing itself in ways we all find quite familiar from countless video games. This is not an original piece of artistry in that sense.

He's following out a script he's very familiar with, with a tragic suicidal ending to it.

De: When you say "script" — what do you mean?

Newman: What I mean by "a script" is that when you look at popular culture, movies, video games, you will see this kind of "shoot ’em" pathway running through many of them. It's not an original idea of his; it's something that kids are exposed to by the millions.

Only a tiny, tiny handful become shooters, but this stuff is everywhere. What it tends to reinforce in the shooter's mind is not so much a violent impulse as a template for how to be notorious and alluring and cool as a shooter, and that's really most of the time what they're trying to achieve.

They're trying to reverse their reputation from a social loser to a notorious and attractive character in an anti-hero kind of way.

De: When you say "template" what do you mean by that?

Newman: If you pick up the average video game, you're going to see sequences that look just like the animation this boy produced. It's not something that we look at and say, “Oh, I've never seen that before.” You will see it a million times if you pick up any of the common video games available to teenagers today.

De: Can you tell us a little more about this "anti-hero" idea and why it might appeal to someone like Jeff Weise?

Newman: I think if you look at many of the most popular figures that exemplify male identity in our society, you'll see a Rambo, you'll see a Matrix, you'll see many examples of the lone gunman, who achieves a degree of masculine superiority over others through shooting. And so what I've argued in my book is that this is not a question of media inspiring violent rage in a kid so much as media providing a script, if you like, a popularly recognizable sequence that displays the male in this admirable violent role.

And a shooter who feels socially marginal, who is not accepted by his — by kids he'd like to be friends with, is looking for a way to reverse his reputation, go out as a notorious character rather than as a loser.

De: Do you think this alone would have been indication of the violence he was about to enact on this community? There were clearly a lot of warning signs, but was this animation the biggest of all?

Newman: It is not unusual. I have examples of this kind, not animated examples, but stories, drawings, comments made to friends that are exactly like this coming from other school shooters.

What is typical (is) broadcasting your intentions, making it clear in so many ways you're thinking about shooting people, you're thinking about violence, because you're trying to pique people's attention.

Now, should the community have seen this coming? How many school principals or teachers track access to Web sites? No one does that. We'd be up to our eyeballs in work if we tried to track the actions every kid takes on the Web. It's really almost impossible to do.

But the fact that he was letting out his behind-the-scenes ideas, not only on the Web, but telling other kids in the community that he was thinking about shooting, that is quite typical of school shooters because they're trying to attract attention.

They're not just going quietly into the night. They want to go out in a blaze of glory because they want to be seen differently from the way they're typically seen in their community, which is as a loser.

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