what characteristics are school shooters most likely to have in common gender issues
Dissecting the distinctive profile of schoolhouse shooters: 'There'due south always a trail of what they're about to do'
They tend to point their intentions, experts say.
— -- Xix-yr-old Nikolas Cruz has get the latest boyfriend accused of storming a U.S. school and gunning down students and staff.
Cruz allegedly fired his way through his one-time school last week, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoolhouse in Florida. Seventeen people were left dead. Cruz was apprehended and charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder.
Alleged details about the suspected killer quickly emerged: his expulsion from Stoneman Douglas Loftier; how he was fascinated by talk of guns and preoccupied with wars and terrorists; how he posted photos of weapons on social media.
Cruz was "aggressive" and "psycho," neighbour Brody Speno told ABC News
Another neighbor, Malcolm Roxburgh, said Cruz would attack pets.
Speno said he remembered ane day when Cruz suddenly "cornered a squirrel and was pegging it with rocks trying to kill it."
Such alarming behavior is non uncommon for school shooters like the defendant Cruz, who differ from other mass shooters in the sense that they are usually younger and usually signal their plans, experts say.
They have a clear profile, "with some variations," according to one-time FBI amanuensis and ABC News contributor Brad Garrett, including anger, depression, and careful planning.
"There's always a trail of what they're about to exercise," Garrett said.
Building the profile
"Nigh every school shooter, no matter what their socioeconomic status might be; all have some very specific characteristics that seem to exist universal betwixt them: low, anger and rage towards others," Garrett said.
That describes the 2 students at Columbine High School in Colorado who opened fire at the school April 20, 1999, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher. The gunmen, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, then killed themselves.
Several FBI profilers and psychologists analyzed Klebold and Harris' writings and reviewed the so-called "Basement Tapes" -- a series of videos they secretly recorded where they discussed their shooting plot (the videos were never made public) -- and afterward adamant that Klebold likely suffered from astringent depression and suicidal thoughts, while Harris was likely a psychopath. Neither boy was formally diagnosed.
"The signs can start at a fairly early age," former FBI agent and ABC News contributor Steve Gomez said.
School shooters "tend to show that they're outcasts in guild," Gomez said. "They just take difficulty establishing and maintaining friends and social relationships. And oft yous find that as a consequence of that they are either being bullied or are a bullier."
The way Cruz allegedly showed violence to animals is "another sign of exhibiting violent tendencies -- that's a red flag," Gomez added of the suspect.
A principal common thread is "a loss of purpose," Gomez said. "They just don't know what they're on the earth for."
While mass shooters "all have some baseline characteristics," Garrett stressed, "If you accept every 1 of those variables ... that'due south literally millions of people."
"People are depressed, sad, aroused, enraged," he said, and may want to injure people, but they don't carry those thoughts out.
A "vast, vast, vast, vast bulk of usa are not going to be mass shooters," Garrett said. "It's such a small percent."
"When you take the variables of a mass shooter, that person is troubled and they need assistance," Garrett said.
'A seed that gets planted'
"When does it plow to where the student gets to a point where they are actually going to commit violence?" Gomez said. "It's almost like a seed that gets planted into the private, and unless somebody is in that location to intervene, to conduct some type of informal intervention over the course of that person'south life, whether it'south a parent or teacher or coach, that child continues to motility towards what could ultimately be an human activity of violence."
Compared with other mass shooters, school shooters are generally younger so they typically share what they are going to do, Garrett said. Now, that's done through social media, Gomez said.
They also tend to write or post nearly their interest in weapons and committing violence equally well as publicizing the weapons they accept access to, Gomez said.
Columbine's Harris kept journals and wrote about violence, wanting to have guns, how easy it was for him to lie to people and the pleasure he got from duping others, and included graphic fantasies nearly getting revenge on people who insulted him.
Two months before Columbine, Klebold'southward parents met with Klebold's teacher to discuss a story he had written about a man in a black overcoat who fills a duffel handbag with weapons and guns downwards a group of "higher preps," Klebold'southward mother, Sue Klebold, told ABC News' Diane Sawyer in a 2016 "20/20" report.
Sue Klebold said she and her married man asked their son about the paper twice but when he told her he didn't have it, they let it go.
"I did not grasp the seriousness of that paper," she said. "I don't think whatsoever of u.s. did at the time."
Garrett, the one-time FBI agent, said, "Every mass shooter obviously is very, very troubled. In that location are varying sort of degrees of what their mental health issues are. Some are extremely severe, some not and so severe."
"But unremarkably almost across the board, particularity with school shooters, a few exceptions, they all know exactly what they are doing: They plan it, they buy the ammunition, they selection the day. They make up one's mind how they're going to become into the school, they decide what part of the school are going into."
The planning might exist weeks, months or years, Garrett said.
Adam Lanza, for instance, shot and killed his mother at the abode they shared December. xiv, 2012, before heading to Sandy Hook Simple Schoolhouse in Newtown, Connecticut. He shot and killed 20 starting time-graders and six educators. Lanza then killed himself.
Lanza didn't "'snap,' merely instead engaged in careful, methodical planning and training," the FBI Behavior Analysis Unit ruled, according to documents released final twelvemonth.
Lanza, who "had a complex background featuring many problematic bio-psycho-social issues," was also "fascinated with past shootings and researched them thoroughly," the documents said.
"In that location'south e'er a trail of what they're about to exercise," Garrett said. "It'south all about seeking revenge and gaining ability."
A person shut to Cruz, the suspected Florida school shooter, called an FBI tip line Jan. 5 with data nigh his alleged want to kill people, erratic behavior, agonizing social media posts, likewise as the potential of his conducting a school shooting, according to an FBI statement. But the FBI said proper protocol was non followed in response to the tip.
Public defender Melisa McNeill last week in court chosen Cruz a "broken child." He has non entered a plea.
'I wanted to do something … then this doesn't happen again'
In the aftermath of the 2012's Sandy Claw massacre, parents of two children killed at the elementary school founded the organization Sandy Hook Promise, which aims to preclude gun-related deaths past teaching Americans to identify, intervene and get help for at hazard-people. The nonprofit is funded by donors and provides its programs to schools no toll.
1 of the founders was Mark Barden, whose son, Daniel, died at the schoolhouse.
"I just knew that I wanted to do something to honor my son, to protect my surviving children," Barden told ABC News. "I wanted to do something to brand a difference so this doesn't happen over again."
"Families in America only felt completely out of touch, helpless, hopeless," Braden said. "We realized and so that we needed to look at this similar a social motility, and to do that you need to get folks engaged ... in a bipartisan or nonpartisan manner."
The foundation takes a preventative approach by designing programs that teach students and parents the tools to recognize alarm signs also equally how to "take the next step and arbitrate and get that person help before it becomes a tragedy," Barden said.
Among the tools they provide is an app with an anonymous reporting organisation that allows a student to report a tip to a telephone call center that's staffed with professionals.
He said two.5 million students and adults have been trained.
"Students are empowered to know that they can make a difference," Barden said. "They can have a positive impact on somebody's life and that's a huge souvenir to give somebody."
"We've seen it work," he added. "We've already prevented school shootings, we've already stopped suicides."
While information technology'due south unclear how many plots were thwarted by the foundation's work, information technology appears that far more school shooting plots in the United States are stopped than carried out.
A schoolhouse security officer in Southern California last week allegedly overheard a "disgruntled pupil" threatening a school shooting and weapons were and then recovered from the pupil's home, regime said. Guns and machetes were plant in Pennsylvania high school educatee'due south chamber last month afterwards a classmate allegedly overheard the student threatening a mass shooting, officials said.
But some threats skid through the cracks, every bit in the case of doubtable Cruz. The FBI has said proper protocol was not followed in responding to a tip about the 19-twelvemonth-sometime.
After last calendar week's school massacre in Florida, Barden said, "I was just immediately filled with sadness and despair and frustration and anger."
"If our programs were upward and running and in place, nosotros could have prevented this," he said.
But he added he recollect his foundation can aid cease more plots as it grows.
"I have to keep going," he said. "Give it all I've got and never let upward."
ABC News' Lauren Effron, Margaret Dawson, Christina Ng and Tess Scott contributed to this report.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/dissecting-distinctive-profile-school-shooters-trail/story?id=53197511
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