Recently this blog has been haunted by some “comments” that are possibly spam but possibly simply illiterate conspiracy theorists. My only recourse has been to shut off comments on current posts—but I can’t shut off comments on all past posts with the “flip of a switch.” As a result, these pesky comments keep coming.

In hopes that I can forestall future comments on the topic of school shootings I caved in to a comment request to research them, and now I will write briefly about this topic. I hope this will exorcise these comment demons.

Conspiracy Theory

In the late 1990s, when the frequency of school-shooting rampages was at its peak, my over-heated fiction-writer’s imagination conceived of a conspiracy theory. I was watching a news video of the aftermath of one of these crimes: squad cars and ambulances were amassed in front of a school; parents crowded around; and then a man walked past the camera and seemed to say something to the lens. The microphone did not pick up his words, but it looked to me as if he said, “It’s going to happen again.”

And of course it did.

The TruTV website has an interesting article on the topic: “School Killers,” by Katherine Ramsland. It discusses not only the history of these nightmarish crimes but also several psychologists’ theories of what causes violence in children. Please read it.

A couple of offhand comments in Ramsland’s article may lend credence to the conspiracy theories. There is a hint, for example, that the Columbine shooters were part of a wider “network” of some sort. Elsewhere in the article, Ramsland notes that one self-styled shooter wannabe claimed to be “active in the right-wing.” Several school shootings had Nazi overtones. Most school shooters were assisted by parents, other adults, or friends in obtaining lethal weapons.

Given these “facts,” it isn’t all that far-fetched to make the leap from assigning the blame to failures of society, all the way to believing in a conspiracy theory.

Organized Rings of Child Exploitation

The murder of JonBenet Ramsey is thought by some to have been inspired by or instigated by child pornographers: when John Mark Karr was under suspicion, I heard a private detective say on the air that he was on the trail of a child pornography ring. Madeline Mccann’s parents are convinced their daughter was kidnapped by pedophiles. And, sadly, these are not baseless conspiracy theories. The FBI devotes a considerable amount of its resources to preventing and solving crimes against children by organized criminal gangs.

With regard to school shooters, one of the first suspicions of both law enforcement and psychologists is that the shooters were themselves victimized by adults at some point in their lives, probably by their parents. It’s difficult for most people to give the parents of shooters the benefit of the doubt, if for no other reason than we all hold parents responsible for properly parenting their children. And  when the parents are somehow well-connected politically or are wealthy or are professionals, such as doctors or lawyers, we are prone to feel that the police exonerate them too readily and possibly corruptly.

So, of course it is possible that powerful conspiracies are behind some or all of the school shootings. But the best research to date indicates that childhood violence is the end result of years of anti-social behavior that every adult ignored. It is also true that child-exploitation rings do exist—and they always seem to be able to get away with murder. When is the last time you heard of a conspiracy to exploit children being thwarted?