Forensic psychologist and blogger Helen Smith comments on my post on the travails of "stupid nerds," and suggests that stupid nerds oppressed by the high school social hierarchy might be responsible for some of the high-profile schools shootings of recent years:
I wonder if kids who shoot up schools tend to be "stupid nerds" as opposed to "intelligent nerds?" Does prestige for one's intelligence or "genius" protect one from acting out violently? Perhaps--certainly some school shooters felt that they were not living up to their potential--but maybe they knew deep down that they had little potential for doing great things and this pushed them over the edge when combined with bullying.
It seems to me a plausible speculation. Certainly, the Columbine killers and some other school shooting perpetrators seem to fit the "stupid nerd" profile. As far as I can tell, these individuals were "nerdy" enough to be interested in ideas (including various crackpot theories that they used to justify their violent acts), but not enough to actually accomplish anything of note in the academic or intellectual spheres. And of course most shooters do indeed tend to stand low on the high school social totem pole. However, we won't know if the theory really does explain a substantial proportion of school shootings until someone does a systematic study.
I should emphasize that even if Smith's theory is correct, it in now way justifies the shooters' acts. Killing people is not a defensible response to social putdowns. Her theory also does not change the reality that the overwhelming majority of "stupid nerds" aren't dangerous. Even if school shooters are more common in this subgroup than in others, they would still be only a miniscule fraction of the total "stupid nerd" population.
Related Posts (on one page):
- "Stupid Nerds" and School Shootings:
- The Tragedy of the Stupid Nerd:
http://www.slate.com/id/2099203/
Now, it's possible that as someone without any great intellectual gift or charisma, he realized he would never be able to accomplish what intelligent or more charismatic psychopaths manage to do: say, embezzle money from a business or defraud people out of their life savings.
But the idea that Harris at least, if not Klebold, were raging against more popular jocks appears to be a myth.
Quite possibly. But psychopath and "stupid nerd" are not mutually exclusive categories. Both could have contributed to his actions.
Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death.
and see how stupid that is.
* The VaTech kid made some remarks in his tape to this effect.
worried about some stupid nerds in the audience i see
I don't buy it. As pointed out in the other thread you haven't differentiated between "stupid nerds" who are underachievers due to regular adolescent underachieving and those who are underachieving due to lack of ability. And I don't think Dale Carnegie would recommend that label, its equivalent to "legal wonks with poor social skills" or "immature legal wonks".
It's a very rare phenomenon, although not rare enough. It appears to be as rare as or even rarer than serial killers and the shrinkers have a hard enough time getting a handle on them. I don't think picking on every kid that isn't making out with a cheerleader regularly is going to result in you finding the answer to it all.
And even if they do, is someone who is otherwise willing to shoot up his school not going to do it because he realizes he's smart enough to get a computer science degree? Somehow I doubt it.
I don't know how intelligent the Virginia Tech shooter was, but from the fact he was a senior at Virginia Tech I doubt he fits into the "stupid nerd" category. Certainly he had serious social problems, but I don't see any reason to think he wasn't intelligent.
I mean ultimately it seems the phenomena that both this facts are hitting upon is the obvious fact that people with good things going for them are less likely to go on shooting rampages (because of both causal directions).
---
Moreover, it seems a large reason that nerds commit these kinds of shootings is simply that what it takes to be 'this kind of shooting' is that it be committed by someone we think of as a nerd. I mean it's not like their aren't other types of people who go on murder sprees. Think of the para-military style sniper shootings or mass poisonings. Even the texas tower shooting which was a school rampage by any objective measure for some reason seems not to be grouped with this type of attack. I propose for the simple reason that the offender didn't fit into our nerd lashing out narrative.
At best I think we might be able to say that meek anti-social types are more likely to commit their killings in one short burst if they snap than other people (and I'm still skeptical).
I understand what a nerd is but largely this involves their self-definition in terms of their academic abilities. I'm not at all sure how being a "stupid nerd" differs from having low social status and being anti-social/failing social interactions.
Also something about the term really just irks me at a deep level but I can't put my finger on what it is. Maybe I feel that nerd should be reserved for the intelligent kind I dunno.
http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ssi_final_report.pdf
I can never get the link feature to work on this board, so I'm putting it up in plain text.
By far most of my high-school classmates who took honors/AP courses, went to competitive colleges, and otherwise did well in school were well-adjusted, fashionably-dressed, and went out on dates. They ran the student government and the publications. They were voted onto homecoming court. They were not "nerds" even though they took calculus, economics, and organic chemistry in high school.
Indeed, if you look at the "nerds" from my class, you'd find they didn't do any better in terms of college admissions than the "jocks" did--especially since a varsity letter may convince an admissions officer to overlook a low grade whereas a collection of Magic cards won't.
Still unclear, however, is whether any or all of us belong in the stupid nerd category.
By the definition here, everybody else is a stupid nerd.
That's about 90%.
It's a useless concept.
For the record, my kids were in the ten percent.
Innyway, Mark Twain has Tom Sawyer reflecting on his punishment by Aunt Polly--when it was Sid who upset the sugar bowl--and contemplating how sad they'd all be if he died, how they'd know then how they'd mistreated him, and how bad they'd feel.
I'll take Twain's insights on human nature over the first twelve shrinks in the Yellow Pages.
Killing others emphasizes the enormity of the injustice the kid feels. Now they'll really know. Suicide doesn't make the same impression.
I'm going to second what Bama 1L said. The majority of the popular and successful people in my school took honors and ap classes, played sports, and/or were in student government. You had subsets of geeks - band geeks, jrotc geeks, tech geeks, etc - but for the most part, the truly socially awkward kids were not in the advanced classes I took.
Seung Cho's writings
I would submit that the above is proof that Cho does indeed fit the stereotype. His writing is absolutely terrible.
But so does the person who thinks he should QB the school team, thinks of himself as the ultimate jock but never makes it off the bench. I'm not sure why pseudo-nerds are any more likely to be prone to violence than that pseudo-jock.
Does that mean I'm banned from the Conspiracy?
It depends.
(Your SAT Score) X (Your attractiveness score, 1-10 scale)/(Cheerleader's SAT Score) X (Her attractiveness score)
If the result is > 1.0, we'll still talk to you.
Special Disqualifications: Varsity letter in any team sport that other students actually come to watch. Cross country/Track and Field are not team sports.
By the way, I do like the "stupid nerd" theory. As someone said in the other thread, just think Napoleon Dynamite.
Hear, hear. My high school had more defined cliques (the homecoming court was almost always drawn exclusively from the jock/cheerleader clique). But the high achievers on the whole were not nerds in "The Revenge of the Nerds" stereotype. Stupid Nerds is a little harsh though. How about "nerds of average intelligence"? Because that is what we are talking about in general. I would say that most of the people in my high school (a very good public high school in suburban Chicago--real John Hughes country) who fit the 'nerd' mold were solid B and C students. The truly stupid tended to be the aspiring criminals and druggies ('burnouts' as we called them back in the day) and were definitely not nerds.
For an older generation, Just think Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club.
"Emotional intelligence" is BS, but there is something to be said for acknowledging and celebrating core competencies. It's everyone's choice whether we focus (efficiently) on our comparative advantage, to the other skill's exclusion, or if we distribute our energies evenly. What distinguishes a "stupid nerd" is NOT the fact that he's not as smart as he hopes his peers will think, but rather that he's not cognizant enough to weigh the marginal analysis of redistributing his efforts. OR he's not sufficiently honest w/ himself to admit that he's emulating his peers' defense mechanisms rather than real skills.
In my humble opinion. But then again, I'm the dumb nerd's inverse: equally awkward, the smart sorority girl.
It used to be that there was acceptable levels of violence. If you were being picked on you could hit with your fist the guys picking on you. AKA A Boys Fight. There were rules taught by fathers and by other boys about what was allowed and what wasn't. This could stop bullying because the bully knew that he might suffrer because of it. The teachers knew who was being bullied and if they blew up against the guy bullying them. The only person that got into trouble was the bully.
Different things could be worked out with a Boys fight and because of the rules no body really got hurt.
Now there is no acceptable level of violence. There is no checks on Bullies at all. Being talked to is NOT a check. Even being expelled is not a check. With no acceptable level of violence being taught when violence happens it is all out, nothing barred, hurt the other guy as much as possible. The first instance I heard about was in a High School in Dallas in the early 90's. One guy gouaged the eyes of another in a fight. Way, way outside the acceptable levels of violence. It has gone down hill from there to the school shootings. Some guys become so flustrated, bullied, picked on, etc that they can't stand it any more. They have no way to fight back. Finally they decide that they cann't live this way any longer and they might as well take their tormentors with them. Before they could fight their tormentors, now they cann't. If they did their tormentors would win and they would be punished. Besides if they are going to BREAK the rules why do it small, why not do it big shooting. They have been taught that ALL VIOLENCE IS WRONG. So there is no difference between fighting and shooting.
Lib BS in the schools has directly lead to more extreem levels of violence.
The suprize is not that there are school shootings but that they happen so seldom.
Also, I never thought that academic achievement was especially characteristic of nerds. In general, nerds don't care about grades any more than they care about other social signs of success (this is not to say that they don't care at all, just not enough to put a lot of work into it) so unless they are extraordinarily talented they don't do well in grades compared to the kids whose lives seem to depend on getting good grades.
Nick
Second-hand info from my jock kids is that the real jocks kept the bullies under control.
Thing is, a bully is generally so unpleasant that he has few friends--although a couple of sycophants can usually be found nearby.
Jocks, especially those in the smash-mouth team sports, bond like the prehistoric hunting band, or the rifle platoon, or some other brutally macho organization for dominance. You don't mess with, say, a football player, even if it's a girl place kicker seconded from the soccer team. Even the little (for football) girls will rip your head off and do vile things in your throat.
But then there are the other guys....
Its also worth noting that our construction of school shooting has a very strong cultural bias. When I worked at a school in one of the rougher neighborhoods in Chicago our students shot each other with alarming regularity, but somehow no one ever called that a school shooting. School shootings were something that happened when pretty white kids in the suburbs were shot by scary white kids who listened to Marilyn Manson in the suburbs. They happened in modern glass buildings with fresh paint and big parking lots, the kinds of places someone interviewed would be guaranteed to describe as "the kind of place you just don't expect something like that to happen."
Interesting observations:
Your school's kids shot each other without having to be pathological.
White kids have to be pshrunk to figure out why they did it.
Soft bigotry....
There was no limit to the time us pimple-faced nerds could spend in shop-class, to the extent we built grandfather's clocks, lathed brass lamps and all kinds of stuff we got to show-off to the jocks and their girl-friends. Eventually we brought the stuff home and it did not cost us a dime.
This was in the days when schools were properly funded and income taxes on America's top-earners was 91%.
Us nerds also had band and orchestra whereby no one had to pay for their own instrument. Pittsford School System even had a couple of electric guitars and amps for the ultra-nerds who just wanted to stay afterschool and rock-on.
Oh, in Pittsford, N.Y., circa 66' we did not teach/learn/test A/B/C/D.
I think you're missing an important point here. School shooters (or really, violent criminals in general) are only rarely people who succumb to some kind of temptation within us all and snap. In order for a school killing to happen several things need to come together: the ability to control impulsivity and delay gratification long enough to plan, a deep disregard for the rights of others, a degree of deceitfulness that allows someone to pass below the radar, and either an inability to understand or a disregard for future consequences. These aren't kids who just snapped one day after one too many wedgies. The "there but for the grace of god go I" theory of violence is comforting because it removes some level of responsibility and denies the fact that there might be real evil out in the world but it is rarely supported by the facts.
The reality is that the kid you describe, the kid who just can't take it anymore, is far more likely to commit suicide than homicide. The hatred that comes up from a pattern of abuse, an inability to prevent it, and the unwillingness of others to protect you from it gets internalized. You see depression and self-hatred far more often than external aggression. When you do see aggression externalized it is either an immediate reaction to a stimulus (attacking your abuser) or a displaced attack on something the individual believes it can hurt (siblings, small animals, etc).
Your phrase below sounds alike like an accurate description of United States District Court Judge Edward Nottingham:
"ability to control impulsivity and delay gratification long enough to plan, a deep disregard for the rights of others, a degree of deceitfulness that allows someone to pass below the radar, and either an inability to understand or a disregard for future consequences."
You may recall Judge Nottingham is accused of drunken carousing at strip clubs, surfing porn sites in his chambers, patronizing an escort service, and behaving abusively toward a wheelchair-bound woman in a parking dispute.
Maybe we need to provide our public high school kids with the traditional outlets such as shop-class (with all the tools), acting, band, orchestra and debate. Likewise, maybe we need to require Article III players to undergo neuro-psychological testing prior to appointment and throughout their tenure.
I do wonder if a significant percentage of the "stupid nerd" population may in fact have undiagnosed conditions such as Apsberger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
I guess MKDP has really flicked your bic-a-bit to the point you broke your pencil.
Here's a plan, Holmes:
(1) acquire some bright red polo shirts custom printed with the insignia "Court of Oyer and Terminer;"
(2) Arrange to travel with the 2008-2009 Autism Today Conference Series as a guest speaker whose lecture is titled "A Harvard Power Couple's Suggestions In Dealing With Genetic Pre-dispositions related to Autism and Asperger's Syndrome";
(3) Wear the printed red polo shirts and freely hand-out said shirts to evert person you perceive as autistic.
(4) Take to the podium microphone and advance your above posted theory to the extent of revealing the manners and methods you and your colleagues employ to "flush-out" these autistic "demons" by stalking them on internet blogs and traveling across state lines to feed their disability service animals food laced with aflatoxins.