Science Blog

Response to the school shooting in Finland
Associate Professor Robert Heath
Crisis management expert at the University of South Australia
24 September 2008

As details flow in about the tragedy in Finland, in the latest Science Blog, Associate Professor Robert Heath, a crisis management expert at the University of South Australia, discusses several issues related to the shooting

“When people commit an extreme act it is usually a choice between what they consider the worst hurt and least hurt. Humans have limited options in any situation, we think we have an infinite number but usually it adds up to 5 or less. Once you have learned somehow through your experience and your interpretation of that experience, that your life is painful or is going to be more painful or could become extremely painful, you start choosing the least pain.

What happens once you see your options as ‘everybody is against me, I am not powerful enough, the world is bad, I am in pain, I am very angry’, what happens is you start saying ‘if I am going to hurt then other people are going to hurt with me’. Once that sort of broad option hits your head, if you have got access to a gun or mass violence from explosives or even arson or something like that, then the chances are very strong that you will probably activate it.

Unfortunately in most of these cases there are either one or two scripts that end up almost the same way. The first script is “I am going out in a blaze of glory” and that is usually anywhere from the terrorist swing of blowing yourself up or killing yourself but it is often through suicide by cop, that is you force law enforcement authorities to eliminate you as a threat.

In this situation the chances are he was slightly on the second script which is “this will show the world I am a powerful being” and after he has done a few shootings, and it does not take more than a few minutes at times, he suddenly realises that there is not an answer with this either. At that point in time the only thing you can do is end the pain so you kill yourself.

Coming across to the Australian situation, there is tighter gun control but yes it can happen here. So what are the signs people should be looking for? Unfortunately parents, for example, tend to block out changes in their kids, partly because adolescence is not exactly smooth sailing and partly because parents are locked into their own worlds, especially if they are both working or if they have got multiple kids or kids with special needs. Any of those distracters can stop people from completely interpreting the scene.

Also this is accretional growth, that is it is slow. It is not like overnight they wake up saying ‘that is it. I am going to kill everybody’. Its an idea that percolates for a long period of time and they look for conformation that it is the best option they have got. Often this option may be what they end up doing becuase they ignore, overrule or exclude any contrary opinion. This is also how terrorist groups form or indeed any action group.

What can we look for? Shut down signs. What we are looking at is someone who starts excluding the people around them. They will dress diferently, they won’t communicate with certain groups, they become less communicative, they can often have somewhat of a blank face or are unresponsive. Even with people who were ‘mild friends’ they will start shutting them down if those friends do not have the same point of view. What happens of course, especially at school level or that age goup is that kids say ‘if you start excluding me then I will exclude you as well’ so people simple shut down and join another group.

The other thing you look for is when people start saying there is a problem. This person gave a clear signal there was a problem because he expressed an actual intent of violence on Youtube but he never expressed it in a directed way. He never said ‘I am going to shoot you John so and so’ with a directed intent to create harm. If he had, this could have allowed, in some countries, a chance for psychological review or allowed authorities to hold that person for 24 hours and that sort of thing.

The other part to all this is of course that if everybody got prosecuted, put in jail or sent to phychological evaluation for saying things like ‘I am going to kill you’ then there would be a lot of us lined up. Many of us have had that intemperate moment but later we might say ‘that was not me that was just my anger speaking’.

So it is very difficult for psychologists or indeed the authorities or even school and university authorities to actually act on what is formative rather than factual. This is part of the problem, it is also part of the problem with intelligence and looking for terrorists, because yes you can identify people by these patterns and trends but until they actually do something, legally you can’t really do much about it.

So coming back to the Australian circumstance, it is a little less likely but if you notice there are still outbursts of gang violence here and that is another sign of this exclusion/inclusion type of thing going on but it is groups rather than individuals.

It is probably more likely in Australia, that if a person is hurting over exclusions happening to them in their teenage years that we would see more suicide rather than this angst suicide where they take it out on others.”

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