Essay About School Shooting

Words: 1014
Pages: 5

School shootings have become one of the most common forms of mass destruction in America. In fact, since the act of terror was introduced to the country in the early 90’s, there has been roughly one school shooting in America per week. Malcolm Gladwell claims that these shooters are only human beings with the threshold level of zero meaning that it does not take much for them to be triggered into taking part in these events. In contrast, Elizabeth Winkler has another theory. She argues that these shooters are not only triggered by a threshold level, but they also have goals that they know they can only accomplish with legitimate plans. Her perception on a school shooting is the complete opposite of what Gladwell believes, choosing instead to …show more content…
Winkler argues Gladwell’s theory is wrong because there is much more planning behind what people actually see in the media about school shootings. Winkler asserts her own thoughts on the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. She says that the two shooter were not just any ordinary mass shooters, but two mass shooters with intentions of going down in history forever. Dylan and Eric created blueprints that would do that. The school shootings following Columbine seem to have proven their mission successful with the way they are based off the Columbine shooting. Winkler believes that Gladwell is wrong and proposes that mass shooters are not only triggered by their peers, but also give it more thought than most would assume goes into these shootings. Riots are not events that are planned with diabolical blueprints in an attempt to mass murder citizens, but only chaos being broken for the public to take part in. When riots are going on, it is safe to assume that more than half are only rioting because of the threshold they have. This is where the monkey-see-monkey-do comes into play again. When people riot, they do it based of the actions of their environment. It is highly uncommon for anyone to want to follow along with mass murder as Gladwell seems explain