This article examines school shootings committed by men at least 25 years old: Marc Lépine, Kimveer Gill, Steven Kazmierczak, and Jiverly Wong.

This article examines five school shooters and five perpetrators of other types of mass violence. The five school shooters are Eric Houston, Eric Harris, Seung Hui Cho, Adam Lanza, and Elliot Rodger. The other perpetrators are Timothy McVeigh, Clay Shrout, Anders Breivik, James Holmes, and Dylann Roof. The article was originally published in Criminology and Public Policy and is posted here with permission. 

This article presents five school shooters from 1975 through 2007, classifies them within my typology, and compares them to the ten shooters discussed in Why Kids Kill. The five shooters are Robert Poulin, Brenda Spencer, Wayne Lo, Luke Woodham, and Asa Coon.

This article first examines Osama bin Laden in the context of Islam, al-Qaeda, and other extremist ideologies. The analysis critiques his use of collective guilt to justify killing innocent people and his misuse of Islam as a rationale for terrorism, highlighting the extent of his bigotry and paranoia. Next, the theme of humiliation is discussed at both the cultural and the personal level. It is hypothesized that bin Laden utilized violence to overcome his humiliation and damaged masculinity. Finally, his ideology, terrorist acts, and behavior within his family are discussed in the context of Theodore Millon’s work on personality disorders, noting avoidant, compulsive, masochistic, sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, and narcissistic traits. The article was published in Aggression and Violent Behavior. 

This article explores domestic jihadists in light of the psychological typology I developed through research on school shooters. The jihadists discussed include Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Carlos Bledsoe (who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad), Omar Mateen, Ayanle Hassan Ali, Nidal Hasan, Colleen LaRose (also known as “Jihad Jane”), and Syed Rizwan Farook. The article was originally published in the Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention and is posted here with permission. 

This article appeared in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior (published by Elsevier) and is reprinted with their permission. The article provides a brief overview of the scholarly literature on school shooters, followed by a presentation of my typology.

This article categorizes nine perpetrators of rampage attacks as psychopathic, psychotic, or traumatized school shooters. The shooters are Eric Houston, Gary Scott Pennington, Jamie Rouse, Jason Hoffman, Robert Steinhäuser, Alvaro Castillo, Eric Hainstock, Tim Kretschmer, and Wellington de Oliveira.

This article explores what is known about Pekka-Eric Auvinen and Matti Saari, discusses them as possibly having had schizotypal personality disorder, and compares them to other psychotic school shooters.

This article presents details about Brazill’s dysfunctional family (alcoholism, domestic violence, and child abuse), and the events leading up to his attack.

Butler’s school shooting did not receive the amount of media coverage that larger scale attacks have, but sufficient information was available to shed some light on his personality dynamics.

This article documents Eric Harris’s self-contradictions and vacillating attribution of responsibility for the attack, demonstrating that his justifications cannot be taken at face value.

Eric Harris left records documenting his admiration for Hitler, Hobbes, and Nietzsche. He also may have admired Charles Manson. This article explores parallels between the ideas of these men and those of Harris in an attempt to trace possible influences on his thinking.

Dr. Langman reflects on his encounters with the mother of one of the Columbine perpetrators. Originally published as a blog post on the website of Psychology Today.

This article first demonstrates multiple types of problematic reporting, showing that many statements made about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold cannot be taken at face value. The article then seeks to present a more accurate picture of Harris and Klebold based primarily on the thousands of pages of Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office (JCSO) documents.

This is a brief summary of the Bath massacre as the first terrorist attack using a car bomb. It was published by the National  Counterterrorism Center. 

This article discusses Lane’s post-attack behavior as evidence suggesting psychopathic personality traits.

This article draws on new material made available in 2014 and 2015, including both official reports and Lanza’s online presence that has been discovered and documented by Reed Coleman. The article was originally published in the Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention (J-BIT) 3 (2015), 1–11. It is reprinted with permission of the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA).

This article discusses May’s psychotic symptoms, school shooting, and the lack of a coherent rationale for his attack. 

This school shooting has received little attention since it occurred, and information about Mitchell is scarce. This article pieces together the little that is known about the perpetrator.

This article pulls together the little available information on Morrison and explores his psychological dynamics.

This article discusses Pierson’s longstanding anger problems, as well as his arrogance, inability to accept responsibility for the consequences of his own behavior, academic failures, and the dissolving of his dream to serve in the military. It also addresses Pierson’s interest in Eric Harris and ways in which he echoed and perhaps imitated Harris.

The school shooting by Reyes has not received much attention, but it has particular interest because of his extreme youth. He committed his attack at age 12, making him the second youngest rampage attacker I am aware of, after Drew Golden, who was 11. Note: since the attack by Reyes, another 12-year-old, Mason Campbell, committed a school shooting. Of these young shooters, only Reyes died by suicide. 

This article examines Rodger’s psychological dynamics, drawing on insights gained through an analysis of his autobiographical document. This is a revised version of the original article posted here. This version was published in the Journal of Campus Behavioral Intervention, (J-BIT) 2 (2014) 5–19. It is reprinted with permission from the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA).

This article by guest author Ryan Smith examines the 2018 Kerch Polytechnic College shooter.

This article provides details on Shrout’s life and attack and categorizes him as a psychopathic shooter.

Apart from Charles Whitman, the rampage by Slobodian in 1975 appears to have been the first large-scale school shooting in the USA or Canada. Despite this, his attack is often overlooked, perhaps because of the difficulty in tracking down information. This article provides a brief summary of his life, personality, and attack.

This article reviews what is known about Robert Smith and his attack, and compares him to several other psychopathic shooters.

In the thirty years since her attack, Brenda Spencer has had five parole board hearings in which she made many claims to either avoid responsibility for her crimes or to paint herself as a victim. This article reviews the many contradictions in her claims.

In the years since his school shooting, Williams has made numerous statements that were either contradicted by other people or contradicted by statements he made at other times. This article seeks to make sense of the conflicting testimonies and presents a tentative conceptualization of Williams and his rampage attack.

This article discusses Woodham’s discrepant and contradictory statements about why he committed murder, including bullying, peer pressure, mental illness, and rejection by his girlfriend, highlighting the problems in taking explanations by school shooters at face value.

This article provides a brief summary of Ybarra’s life, noting the dysfunction in his family as well as his psychotic symptoms and other issues that may have contributed to his frustration and anger.