Peter Langman - youlikewelike

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On 20 April, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve of their Columbine High schoolmates and one teacher before taking their own lives. Ten days later, Dr. Peter Langman met a child in the psychiatric hospital where he then worked, who exhibited all the signs of being a potential school shooter. Langman decided to learn everything he could about what drives children to pick up arms against their fellow students and, ten years later, his book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters has been published on what he has learned.

"We need to get away from the idea that there is a homogenous group of kids who fit this profile," he explains. "There is not. What a lot of people were looking for was, what do these kids have in common? What I was looking at was what made them different from each other? I found that some kids came from middle to upper-middle class families, and had supportive parents. Outwards, everything looked good. But some of these kids came from poor and broken homes, suffering physical abuse, and had criminal parents.

"Also, not all the school shooters were victims of bullying, so it couldn’t be retaliation in some cases. Even when the kids were picked on, they don’t go after the kids harassing them, they shoot other people or kill randomly, so it can’t be understood as simply an act of retaliation. Kids are teased or harassed everyday. The question is, what makes these kids react so differently?”

So what separates these killers from other children who endure bullying and the problems and anxieties in their lives? Who are they?

"There are three distinct types of kids who do this,” Langman srgues. "The first is what I call the psychopathic school shooter. This would be Eric Harris; very narcissistic, lives for himself, doesn’t think morality and laws apply to him, and rejects conventional social values. He has a sadistic streak, gets a thrill out of having power over people and wanted to play God.”

According to Langman, the psychopathic shooter would be the most easily understandable by the public, whose interpretation of these crimes is shaped by news reports focused on hateful diaries left behind and YouTube confessionals. "Eric wanted to go down in history," he says. "‘I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,’ he wrote on his website. Multiple factors were driving him: overwhelming anger, that desire for fame, and a desire to experience God-like power by being able to kill."

The second type, psychotic shooters, consists of children whose deeply-rooted mental problems have gone mostly, if not completely, undetected.

"Most of these kids are schizophrenic, but no-one has identified them as such, so they’re not getting the treatment they need," Langman argues. "These are kids who are, to one degree or another, out of touch with reality. Some of them hear voices talking to them and the voices say kill yourself or kill other people. Some of them have paranoid delusions, or they get both hallucinations and delusions."

The final type is classified as traumatised children, children whose lives have no family continuity, and routinely feature harrowing physical and sometimes sexual abuse.

"These kids came from broken homes, with parents who were either never married or were divorced," Langman explains, citing the children he studied. "They all have at least one parent with an alcohol or drug problem and at least one parent with a criminal history. There is chronic instability and overwhelming stress in the lives of these kids. This made them depressed and suicidal but also full of rage and homicidal."

School killers are often solitary actors or lone “avengers”, but there are cases other than Columbine that feature partnerships. Without a dominant leader, however, Langman believes the ‘sidekicks’ probably would never have committed their crimes. He cites Mitchell Johnson, who along with Andrew Golden carried out the Golden Westside Middle School massacre in Arkansas in 1998.

"Mitchell was a traumatised kid. He was sexually and physically abused, he had been depressed and suicidal, with an unstable family life. In the case of Dylan, I put him in the psychotic category, but with a difference. He was not schizophrenic. My diagnosis is he was schizotypal. It’s kind of a low-grade schizophrenia, but with a combination of things: extreme social anxiety such as paranoia, and odd thoughts, kind of getting lost in fantasies, maybe not fully delusional, but kind of losing their grasp on reality. If you read Dylan’s journal it shows evidence of that."

Regardless of their motivations or the relationships shooters may have with their eventual accomplices, questions are asked of the adults in the background of these kids lives as to why they didn’t anticipate these horrific crimes. Langman, however, is quick to defend the teachers of Columbine, citing the example of one who was disturbed by an ultraviolent short story penned by Harris that described a school massacre. The teacher was assured by the soon-to-be killer, and his parents, that it was merely fiction.

“They were living in a pre-Columbine world," Langman says. "It hadn’t happened yet. It’s easier in retrospect to find warning signs that could be picked up on."

It is in this post-Columbine world that law enforcement, parents and teachers must now come to grips with these warning signs, as oblique or frightening as they may be.