Term Paper on Psychological profile and Personality of Shooters in Schools

An research of school shootings athwart the nation, including the some latest incident, found students who seek revenge on their classmates shared certain characteristics, such as chronic anger, an incapability to bond and a hypersensitivity to censure.
Parents, school personnel, and children now be familiar with that such violence can happen at any school, at any time. With this consciousness comes intense nervousness and fear about the safety of our schools. Children be anxious about going to school, parents worry about sending their children to school, and school personnel be anxious about how to stop a shooting at their school.

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In reality, events of besieged school violence are rare with only 37 occurrences since 1974. However, there seems to be a infection effect where one incident, chiefly if it is widely publicized such as Columbine, endorses the idea, the plan, and perhaps the execution of other acts of targeted violence. This contamination effect may account for the inflammation of targeted school shootings during recent years. And when school shootings occur, the resulting tragedy for families and communities is overwhelming. The effects swell out across America promoting more fear and concern.

These school shootings are shootings where the shooters recognize specific targets and develop an open plan of when, where, and how to kill their targets. Therefore, the idiom targeted school violence is applied. Targeted school violence is a totally different beast from other forms of violence, such as active violence and random violence. With instrumental violence, the goal or incentive for the violence is to get something from the victim: money, information, property, food, etc. With chance violence, the victim is in the incorrect place at the wrong time and the doer sees the victim as an easy target for his/her violence. With targeted school violence, the drive is very different. Most often, getting vengeance is the goal of committing the violent act, especially revenge for apparent wrongs that his targets have committed. The violence is also seen as a way to resolve problems, a way to get rid of the basis of problems.

Profiling identifying a set of uniqueness or traits that are linked with committing violence is just not useful or effective in the effort to be familiar with youth with a possible for targeted school violence. School shooters have integrated the full range of economic and ethnic backgrounds. They have come from a assortment of home environments from negligent foster homes to supportive, intact families. Their school recital has ranged from failing to honor roll. No reliable profile of mental illness, matter abuse, or prior history of violence was found. The only reliable characteristic of school shooters is that they have all been male and three quarters of the shooters have been white. Or else, there is no consistent profile linked with committing targeted school violence.

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This need of consistent risk factors leaves us at a loss for how to identify possible shooters and prevent their violent acts. How can we interfere if we don't know what promotes targeted violence? Public fear and concern increase as we understand that there is no picture of who to look for. In the vast preponderance of cases, the school shooter's peer relationships played a essential role in the idea or implementation of the targeted violence. Most school shooters experienced constant, severe harassment and teasing by peers that bordered on anguish. Persecution such as teasing and bullying and rejection by peers obviously played a role in motivating the school shooters to kill exacting targets that either bullied them or unsuccessful to help them. But children experience banter and bullying all the time and do not option to murder. It appears that over many years, start in elementary school, these youth were disliked, rejected, and harassed. As their attempts to put together into the normal peer group failed again and again, they turned to evenly abnormal youth for friendship. The continuing years of unrelenting pain and humiliation promoted feelings of despair and despair. Many of the school shooters were clearly miserable and suicidal. Often, part of their plan was to kill themselves as well as others also by their own hand or through `suicide by cop'. The crucial goal was to make the anguish stop one way or the other.

Many youth, perhaps due to discomfiture or fear of reprisal by peers, take great efforts to hide their peer problems from adults. Though, some of the school shooters required adult interference from parents, counselors, and principals. When Evan Ramsey killed 3 students and the principal in Bethal Alaska asked his school principal and counselor for help, they told the conundrums to stop, but, after a short break, it continued, even worsened. When Evan went again to the principal for help, the principal instructed Evan to ignore it.
 

In adding to being victims of teasing, there was more often than not peer knowledge or participation in the planning of violence. In approximately all cases, at least one peer knew of the plan in front of time and, in almost half the cases, peers expectant, even pressured, the shooter to act violently. One of the aftermaths of being cast off from the mainstream peer group is associating with equally or more unusual youth as the only source of friendship. These `friends' often reinforced and deepened the plan for violence perhaps out of their own anger and aggravation.

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While considerate the processes that promote targeted violence in no way reasons the actions of the school shooters, better considerate will improve our capability to interfere in these processes and stop another child from seeing violence as the only solution. It is clear that the profiling method is biased and prone to error. Reviewing the nature and amount of teasing, bullying, and rejection is necessary to preventing targeted school violence in the future. We need to know who is experiencing these peer problems early on so that we can interfere before problems become constant and obstinate. The best source of this in order is other children who see and hear all that goes on within the peer group. (Ben Jonjak, 2002.)
 

Teachers and other adults are not able to precisely recognize social problems. In fact, research says that teacher-report misses 80% of children who experience severe teasing at school. This high error rate is comprehensible though. Children who are rejected, bullied, and teased do not tend to report it to adults, perhaps due to embarrassment or fear of reprisal from bullies. And children who tease and bully are rather adept at keeping their unenthusiastic behavior out of the ear and eye shot of adults. Accessing peer knowledge of social and behavioral problems is the key to precise threat assessment. Only when we can precisely recognize the social and behavioral problems within our schools can we efficiently intervene.

 

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