The media persistently lies about what causes school shootings. The reason, of course, is simple: They are themselves one of the causes, and the remaining reasons all involve things that political correctness forbids discussing. The three main factors driving this phenomenon appear to be:
1) Increasing rates of autism, likely driven by more women having children later in life.
Let's consider how many of these shooters appear to have been autistic:
A) Dylan Klebold F) Dylan Roof
B) Seung-Hui Cho G) Audrey Hale
C) Adam Lanza …among others
D) James Holmes
E) Nicholas Cruz
Given the rarity of large-scale school shootings, autists are massively overrepresented. As for the shooter’s transgenderism, a psychological disorder that significantly overlaps with autism, we can expect more transgender shootings as time goes on. Transgenders have an elevated suicide rate already. Given that school shootings are a form of suicide, it seems likely that this suicidally inclined and aggrieved group will engage in more of them.
2) Increased media coverage producing a copycat effect. A large psychological literature describes how suicides increase after a celebrity kills himself. School shootings are, mostly, a form of revenge suicide, so it is unwise to ignore the suicide literature when discussing it. If media reporting of a celebrity suicide increases suicide, doesn’t it seem likely that coverage of school shootings increases school shootings?
3) Increased use of SSRIs, which are known to improve motivation before they improve mood. Ironically enough, many suicidally depressed people are saved by their lack of motivation. They are literally too tired and depressed to kill themselves. The danger of SSRIs appears to be that they created a window where the user has his motivation to act return to him before his mood improves. Of course, depression itself is a factor in these shootings, making the exact role SSRIs play hard to determine. That said, as mass shootings are most often a prelude to suicide, it is likely that the literature on SSRIs play a role in this particular type of suicide, just as they have been shown to encourage other forms of suicide.
This recent shooting in Nashville illustrates why autists are unusually likely to commit this crime—the choice of target suggests that Audrey Hale had a fixation on some unpleasant experience or association with the school that most normal humans would simply have forgotten: And the fact that she identified as transgender shows that she, like many other autistic people, is susceptible to social contagion. We have yet to see if the third factor I identified above played a role, but I will not be surprised to discover she just recently started anti-depressants.
Firearm availability, on the other hand, is actually lower than it was in the past, meaningfully lower than they were in the 1980s and 1990s: It cannot explain the increase. Bullying, long assumed by the public to be the driving force behind the Columbine massacre despite ample testimony from Columbine students to the contrary, will inevitably be used to justify Audrey Hale’s actions: The media will be filled with stories about how it was just a matter of time before a transgendered person lashed out. However, it is hard to see how she would associate her grade school years with gender dysphoria or any associated harassment. Tom boys are quite common among that age cohort—if bullying were the cause, she would almost certainly have shot up her high school instead. No, her motivations likely center on a hostility to Christianity and bizarre fixations stemming from her autism. The narratives the media is producing are invented: And you can tell they are mere rationalizations because they do nothing to explain the data; they do not explain why these events are becoming more common.
We can expect more transgendered shootings in the future: The combination of inflammatory rhetoric, high rates of depression, and susceptibility to social contagion that exists among the transgendered is a lethal combination. You cannot lie to people, telling them that they are being subject to genocide, without fostering violence.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/