School shooter followed video game-like ‘script’

De: We also know that he had tried to commit suicide before.

Newman: It is quite common, unfortunately, for school shooters to have suicidal impulses. Those that survive so that we can interview them will record this history of suicidal thoughts and ideation and sometimes they leave behind notes, those who pass away. So it's quite common because school shooters are often very depressed, they are at the beginnings of serious mental disorders, which if they survive become full-blown when they're older.

And we don't have an easy time recognizing what a schizophrenic looks like when they are 13 or 14 years old. They may be in their early years of hearing florid voices in their heads or screaming instructions that they should be destructive actions towards others.

But they know something's wrong with themselves and go to great lengths to conceal how troubled they are. So it's very difficult for other people to see this in them.

But suicidality is very common among school shooters and they often put themselves in positions where they expect to be killed, what we call "suicide by cop." And that's what I think happened in this case. I think this boy expected to be assaulted by law enforcement. He got to himself first, but not until after law enforcement people had been shooting at him.

I don't think he expected to survive this incident. And many school shooters don't expect to survive. They are putting themselves in the a situation where somebody else will basically commit suicide on them, if you like.

De: Is that part of the idea of going out in a "blaze of glory," so to speak?

Newman: Yes because they don't want to go quietly, "dweebily" if you like. They are looking again to reverse the image the community has of them and at the same time to exit what is for them an intolerably painful social situation.

Which is often no worse than millions of other kids experience: teasing, feeling inadequate, being excluded, these are very common feelings for teenagers. But the kid who is in a state of clinical depression or in the beginning stages of a schizophrenic development may magnify the importance and pain of those ordinary experiences of bullying, for example.

De: You feel he shares many of the same behavioral traits as you saw at Columbine or in the Paducah school shooting?

Newman: I think everyone's heart goes out to the Native American community that feels somehow as though they are implicated. But from my vantage point, having studied school shootings all over the country, I really don't see that is an important causal angle here.

What is important is that that community, like many others that I've studied, is in a remote area, they are geographically isolated, it's a small town and that they have in common with many other school shootings. It may well be that the way the community experiences grief will be special because of their cultural heritage, but I recognize all the same signs I saw outside of Paducah, Ky., outside of Jonesboro, Ark., and what these communities have in common is that fact that they're small, residentially quite stable, geographically quite isolated, so that the kid who feels he's not doing well socially senses he's a million miles from anywhere where there might be kids he could cleave to and that it's a life sentence of social isolation.

The very things that make these communities often excellent places to raise kids, places people move from big cities to join because they feel they'll be safe, they'll be part of a stable social situation, precisely those elements can make it very hard for the marginal unsuccessful boy and make him feel like he's trapped.

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