Understand and Prevent School Shooters: 10 Warning Signs

As of November 2024, there have been more than 445 mass shootings in the United States, leaving more than 450 people dead and 1,975 injured according to the Gun Violence Archives. Sadly, since 2020, gun violence is the number one cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States.

Although no one single factor predicts a child becoming a mass shooter, the etiology of school shootings are complex and an intersection of multiple issues: undiagnosed mental illness, marginalization, chronic abuse, and access to guns.¹ Mass shooters do not just snap, they often display noticeable, observable behavior. Recognizing and reporting the warning signs of someone preparing for violence can be lifesaving.¹ This list is meant to help schools and communities identify concerning behaviors to intervene and take action before violence occurs.

10 warning signs that many adolescent school shooters may exhibit

1. Quiet, smart, not in a relationship, unmoored: Many school shooters that our team studied were intelligent, but were disconnected from themselves and others.

2. Bullied, marginalized: Although most who are bullied do not become mass shooters, the finding that the majority of school shooters were bullied is an important association. Isolation can render a sense of psychological impotence, which is so often reported in male school shooters. Societal pressures placed on our young boys to constantly perform is not only emasculating, but may hide these boy’s feelings of inadequacy.

When a youngster feels profound impotence, he may rush into its opposite station, equating power with violence, which instills a false sense of potency. To process their feelings of hopelessness, these school shooters arm themselves with illusions of power in order to displace their feeling of terror and helplessness into their victims.

3. Childhood abuse, neglect: These children experience profound psychological, physical, and emotional abuse in their families. They often witness parental violence, suffer poor hygiene, and are not adequately fed or clothed. These children’s souls were decimated, leading to their misguided, desperate need for an auxiliary weapon to solve their hopeless dilemma of feeling that they are erased.

4. Parental minimization and/or denial of child’s mental illness and/or family history of mental illness: In part due to the fear of being stigmatized, these adolescent shooters and their families repeat their denial and continue to conceal their symptoms from their treating doctor, which contributed to not being properly diagnosed. When misdiagnosed and mistreated, their underlying psychotic symptoms were exacerbated. These children become more hopeless because they felt discarded once again by society.

5. Experiencing humiliation and shame: Many of these children are perceived as oddballs. They feel humiliated by being expelled from schools and rejected from other societies. Some experienced homicidal threats from their parents or were told that they were their parent’s biggest mistake. They feel they have nothing left to live for so they retaliate with violence.

6. Psychosis, suicidal and/or homicidal ideation: Psychotic symptoms were paranoid ideation, delusions, and command auditory hallucinations telling them to kill.

My research team and I conducted the first psychiatric study using standardized measures on domestic mass shooters and found, although multi-determined in origin, there was a high prevalence of assailants who suffered from undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric illness.¹ Most of the cases of school shootings that our team studied might have been prevented had the assailant, after typically being identified as “troubled” by secondary support systems, received appropriate psychiatric diagnostic evaluation followed by medication and psychotherapeutic support.¹

However, it is important not to lose sight of the larger perspective that most who suffer from treated mental health illness are not more violent than the rest of the population.¹

7. Difficulty dealing with recent stressors and trauma: Many of these assailants experienced the loss of a stabilizing parent or caretaker, frequent dislocations, or rejection by a love interest.

8. Fantasies about violence: Many of these assailants express fantasies played out in a violent homicidal video games, written between the lines of an essay, a scribbling of words and drawings, and/or reported in a dream. They feel that they can not stop their mind from festering on killing.

9. Overt statements about violent plans: Many expressed violent plans and developed a hardened point of view through conversation, writings, social media posts, and drawings, which lead to identifying and radicalization via extremist websites. Some have even created a manifesto to explain their future violence. Death and violence becomes the desired option for these disenfranchised children. They feel blown up by society and the optimal answer becomes to blow themselves and others up.

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10. Access to firearms: The majority of adolescent mass shooters obtained their weapons from their own homes, or that of a friend or a relative. Including the Parkland High School, Thurston High School, and one of the Westside Middle School shooters, many of these assailants learned how to load and fire a gun through their high school gun clubs.

If a psychotic, suicidal and/or homicidal child has access to guns, whether through their own home, extended family, or other means (such as high school gun clubs), this poses a significant risk that must be addressed by securing immediate psychiatric treatment. Even if parents think they have locked up their guns, FBI studies have shown that children can unlock and access them easily and readily.

Conclusions

Mental health professionals urgently need to communicate to the public how profound childhood abuse and isolation predicts future acts of violence.¹ In addition, these discarded children were not provided appropriate psychiatric treatment, contributing to reenactment of their child abuse.¹

There is an urgent need for more of an interdisciplinary approach involving families, school counselors, law enforcement, mental health workers, and lawyers, with a redoubling of efforts to secure appropriate psychiatric treatment for children with untreated mental illnesses who are marginalized. These children may have a higher risk of violence than the general population.¹