Psychologist Peter Langman became an expert on a difficult aspect of human nature when he started evaluating potentially violent students in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 1999 Columbine High School shootings. To make some sense out of why school shootings continue to occur, he wrote School Shooters: Understanding High School, College and Adult Perpetrators (Rowman & Littlefield, Jan.). Langman believes that there are ways to prevent this kind of violence from recurring.
"Lockdown drills are good in terms of safety," he says, "but they don't do anything for prevention. Schools need to develop threat assessment teams to train people within the school about the warning signs of potential violence. That's one of the most distressing aspects of studying these cases. There were warning signs that [other] kids knew about, but they didn't come forward. We need students to recognize these signs of potential threats and learn what to do with them."
Using court records, police reports, personal journals, and social media postings, Langman analyzes 48 shooters in his book. He explains that these people generally falls into one of three categories. "One is psychopathic, someone without a conscience who is very narcissistic, meets his own needs at the expense of others, lacks empathy, and believes that rules and laws don't apply to him because he's special. Then there's the psychotic. This is someone who is not fully functioning in reality and has a psychotic disorder such as schizophrenia. They may have paranoid delusions or delusions of grandeur, and often have poor social skills and are misfits. The third category is what I call ‘traumatized shooters.' These are kids from broken homes, having alcoholic, drug-addicted parents. There is domestic violence, physical and emotional abuse, and sometimes sexual abuse as well. They bounce around from parent to parent to grandparent, sometimes in and out of foster homes, so there's chronic instability and trauma in the form of one type of abuse after another."
While Langman targets his book for professionals in education, law enforcement, and mental health, as well as anyone interested in school safety, he tells Show Daily, "This book is also for people who are interested in the criminal mind or true crime stories, who want to know what to do about violence. In almost every case I looked at, there's a long trail of warning signs, and if we as a society educate our professionals, parents, and students, we can do a lot more to keep everybody safe."
Today, at 1 p.m., Langman signs copies of School Shooters at Rowman & Littlefield's booth (1444).
This article appeared in the May 27, 2015 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.
