The title is a famous African proverb; I know “African” is an absurd generality, but I’m not seeing where, exactly, it is from. I feel like that simple saying is all you need to know to understand school shooters. When most children are neglected, you get a society where most people are ready to burn it all down, including the place where they themselves are standing, and that is where we are. I just read the “manifesto” of the Wisconsin school shooter (specifically, the December 16, 2024 Abundant Life Christian School shooter) and I have a few thoughts about it.

The Incel Phenomenon

I’ve seen people talking about “female incels” before and I must admit I didn’t pay much attention to it. I think we’ve really misunderstood the phenomenon because we allowed incels themselves to define the problem as sexual in nature. I know that the best practice is to allow the affected person to define the issues affecting them, but it seems like the very nature of incels might limit their ability to understand their own situation. It seems like a person who is severely under-socialized may not only lack the skills to enter into meaningful human relationships (which exacerbates the problem) but also may not fully understand what it is they are missing. As a result, male incels are defining the problem as “involuntary celibacy” when really, the problem is that they lack meaningful relationships with other people. They’ve been effectively shunned by society, but they are also shunning it right back.

Gender and Mass Shootings

I’m sure everyone is aware that mass shooters are almost always male in terms of both gender and sex. I think it is easy to presume that this is because of sex (i.e., because of testosterone) rather than gender (i.e., the way society treats people who are perceived as male). However, it seems like mass shootings are motivated by alienation from and disgust with society, and that they are almost always suicidal (with suicide being one of the goals of the mass shooting). These kinds of feelings are not caused by chromosomes but rather by how society treats a person. It just happens to be true that American society neglects boys more than it neglects girls.

PS: The Abundant Life Christian School shooter was not trans; her online boyfriend was also not trans.

All Mass Shooters are Nazis

A mass shooting is just fascist ideology taken to the logical extreme by a sole practitioner. Fascism is an ideology born of abuse, neglect, and the desperation they create within a person that turns into hatred over time. Not only did the Abundant Life Christian School shooter espouse fascist ideology, but she had a list of fascist heroes that she loved:

• Pekka Eric Auvinen: Perpetrator of the Jokela (Finland) school shooting, made references to a “white revolution” and other far right ideas
• Arda Küçükyetim: Perpetrator of the attack on Tepebaşı Mosque in Eskişehir, Turkey, was clearly a fascist
• Vladislav Roslyakov: Perpetrator of the Kerch Polytechnic College massacre in Kerch, Ukraine; a clear ideology was never determined (I’ll get back to this).
• Harris and Klebold: The Columbine shooters are less obvious with their fascist ideology, but the clues are there, such as calling a Black student the n-word before killing him.
• Patrick Woods Crucius: The Walmart shooter whose explicit mission was to kill “Mexicans”; he was convicted of hate crimes.
• Guilherme Taucci: Perpetrator of the Suzano massacre in São Paulo, Brazil; a Nazi sympathizer (i.e., a nazi).

In 5 of these 6 cases, there’s a clear link to fascist ideology, but that isn’t really why I’m saying that all mass shooters are nazis. Fascism doesn’t really care who the enemy is, as long as there is one, and then it attempts to destroy that enemy with a sense of justice in doing so. Fascism usually starts by targeting a vulnerable group, like Black people, trans people, or Muslims, but then a successful fascist movement inevitably expands until it becomes a nihilistic battle royale. Mass shooters just skip right to the nihilistic battle royale. They are the purest form of fascism.

Human Beings are Social Animals

Don’t worry, I’m going to blame capitalism for all of this, but just saying, “Capitalism did it,” really isn’t anywhere close to sufficient. In fact, it might even be possible for a relatively small number of people to own the means of production without having fascism, but in practice, capitalism always causes fascism because capitalism always seems to make the same choices about important details.

The concept of the “alpha wolf” came from a 1977 study of a captive wolf pack. Later, scientists determined that the social hierarchy (and the toxic behavior that came with it) were caused by the wolves having been taken away from wolf society and forced into a stressful situation (captivity) with strangers. Naturally-occurring wolf packs do not work that way and are instead made up of family groups.

Similarly, studies that showed addictive behavior with rats were partially disproved later on because the addictive behavior only happens with rats who have been isolated from rat society and stuck in a weird box with ready access to addictive drugs.

In essence, any human being (or other social animal) that is abused and neglected is going to develop predictable behavior that is both self-destructive and that prohibits them from developing healthy relationships with other people. Just like pit bull terriers are not naturally aggressive, there’s nothing natural about a person becoming a fascist, but in either case, there are well understood processes that lead to the negative outcome.

If you’ve been neglected and abused enough that you have developed an all-consuming hatred, then a group of people that want to punish the world with horrific violence seems like the closest you can get to a loving family. At the same time, though, such a person struggles to develop real solidarity with any other person, and will just as gleefully destroy someone on their own side under the right circumstances. Sure, “Not all abuse victims become nazis,” but they don’t become healthy people, either. Once a society based on neglect and abuse has been established, its members will not have the social skills necessary to reform it into something healthy. In fact, they will spend all their cognitive resources coping with the toxicity of that society and their own personal trauma.

American Capitalist Society

In American capitalist society, the first thing that happens to a person is that they are taken away from their mother into another room where a stranger quantitatively evaluates them. This is because the relationship between the baby and their mother has no value under capitalism, and everything (including human beings) must be quantified. If the person is male, the next thing is that part of their dick is cut off. This amputation is because a bean counter once noticed that Jewish soldiers were catching fewer STD’s, and since STD’s caused inefficiency within the military, those in charge decided that all males should be circumcised. (The STD rate had nothing to do with circumcision, it turns out.)

The parents adjust to having a newborn with very little societal support — sometimes none at all (for reasons I will explain below). Next, children are separated from their mothers because the parents must both go to work for 8 hours a day (the father typically never had any time away from work to spend with the baby). Under capitalism, work always happens away from your family. The children are stored with some strangers who are paid and who don’t really care about the children (certainly not as much as their parents would have); this storage of children is a major industry in the USA and a major financial burden for new families.

Meanwhile, the parents are spending their days in a completely authoritarian world governed by rules that seem arbitrary at best; whatever their job is, the purpose of their job is to maximize profits for a capitalist. While on the job, the various workers are physically and psychologically isolated from one another. The separation of an office, cubicle, or delivery van is just as effective as the separation of a loud factory floor where everyone is too busy to have a conversation. Their managers will demand miracles of them so that shareholder profits can continue to increase.

In the evenings, this family of neglected and abused individuals comes back together briefly, but their relationships between each other are already damaged. The parents are typically on some kind of drugs (e.g., alcohol, weed, SSRI’s, anti-anxiety meds, etc.); if the child hasn’t been completely docile at daycare, the child will also be given pharmaceuticals. They spend their time together consuming media — so, typically, not really “together” at all.

The child is eventually sent to a large school where they know almost no one. Their social skills are poor if not self-destructive. The main point of schools in the United States is to store children so their parents can work; education is a secondary concern despite the wishes of the teachers. The education is meant to create a viable workforce, not to make them better people, or informed voters. Not only is the feedstock of the US school system problematic (because the scenario I described above does not result in children who are ready for school), but money for education keeps getting cut (as a benefit to the wealthy) so schools don’t have enough resources to deal with these unprepared and anti-social children.

As adults, American children typically end up moving away from their families; a mobile labor resource pool is very important for the health of the economy of the rich, so they make it important for your economy, too. For people who go straight into the workforce after high school, this is either because they must move to be close to their job or because they can’t afford homes near their parents. For those who attend college, the college is typically not in the same city as their parents, and then, of course, they have to move again after they get their degree — frequently to another state — because that’s where the job is. In some cases, Americans will move far away in an attempt to escape their social problems, which naturally follow them to the new location.

If they are lucky, they manage to enter into a relationship with one other person, but that relationship will be predictably difficult given how the individuals who make up the couple were raised. They will express their affection for one another primarily by buying each other things.

In any case, they end up in a “neighborhood” where they don’t know anyone, and the neighbors they do meet are fellow Americans — i.e., neglected and abused people with poor social skills — so the idea of creating relationships with them is not very appealing. In fact, they look out at all these hostile people surrounding them and think, “I need to be armed!” Those that end up getting paid well enough will move to a different neighborhood or city, effectively resetting the process of creating a community for themselves. They will hope to attain a home that is big enough for their entire extended family, but only their small nuclear family will reside there.

Once these adults are fully isolated from one another, the only thing left to do is have a baby or get a pet. If they just get a pet, though, everyone from their mother to Elon Musk’s mother will be pressuring them to have a baby. Honestly, are these people even equipped to have a cat? Even a rat requires a healthy society to be happy, after all. Anyway, if they do decide to have a child, the pregnancy is overseen by a medical system whose primary goal is to maximize profits rather than provide good care. The mother will be forced to give birth at 40 weeks despite initial pregnancies taking more like 41 (or even 42!) weeks. She will be forced to lay on her back for the convenience of the doctor during the delivery. Then, they will take the baby away and cut off part of his dick.

It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking bleak.

Conclusion

Every American child is, effectively, a shunned child, but given random variation in their lives, not all of them end up being mass murderers. However, even those who don’t end up being mass murderers will typically end up supporting the US government’s machine of oppression and empire in some way or another. In other words, we are all mass murderers by proxy. Americans are a people obsessed with “burning it all down” — the only disagreement is really what “it” is and whether to participate actively in the arson. The optimists in American society are looking to how much money they can make from the fire or from rebuilding after this iteration of the fire. Occasionally, Americans consider how they (alone) can survive the fire. No one believes that the fire can and should be stopped.