Spiteful Shooters
A Psychological Profile of School Shooters
One of the problems with writing a book—such as my recently published volume, Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Religion and Politics in the 21st Century—is that there is a definite cut-off point. Once the book has reached what is known as the “galley stage”— when the publisher has thoroughly edited and indexed it—you can’t make significant changes, even if something new occurs to you.
This is particularly frustrating if just before the book finally goes to the printers, there is a significant news event that causes you to have a flash of inspiration. That news event is the recent school shooting in Texas. I recognized, far too late, that I should have done a chapter, or at least a sub-chapter, on mass shooters. As I looked into the psychology of these criminals, which I had not previously done, I understood that they are, in many key respects, “Spiteful Mutants.”
For those who aren’t familiar with this term, I will define it shortly. First of all, let’s explore the psychology of school shooters and other mass murderers. A study published last year (Glick et al., 2021), and lead-authored by Professor Ira Glick of Stanford University, did precisely this. “Domestic Mass Shooters: The Association With Unmedicated and Untreated Psychiatric Illness” was published the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. The authors analysed psychological reports on the 35 mass shooters in the U.S. who committed their crimes between 1982 and 2019 and who survived the incident, meaning that they were subject to in-depth psychiatric examination. The authors also interviewed the psychiatrists and psychologists involved and considered any further information gleaned from trial transcripts or media reports. On this basis, they were able to make clear diagnoses of 28 of these mass shooters. They found that 18 of them, that is almost two thirds, were suffering from schizophrenia. Small numbers of others had Bipolar Disorder (oscillation between extreme depression and extreme mania) or Borderline Personality Disorder (compensating for fear of abandonment by creating an unstable false self), disorders that I discuss in Spiteful Mutants, if you would like greater detail. I will focus here on schizophrenia, for reasons that will become clear.
What exactly is schizophrenia? Schizophrenia affects less than one percent of the American population (American Psychiatric Association, 2022), so schizophrenics are clearly massively over-represented among spree killers. That such an association should exist makes a great deal of theoretical sense. Schizophrenia is conceived of, in part, as hyper-mentalism. Mentalizing involves being observant of external cues of many kinds and being interested in deducing people’s mental states from these cues. Psychologist Christopher Badcock (2003) argues that schizophrenics practice this to a pathological degree. They are obsessed with such cues and are so hyper-sensitive to them that they read too much into them. This means that a frown could be interpreted as murderous intent, leading to schizophrenics becoming paranoid.
This extends into how schizophrenics experience the world. They strongly perceive cues of a mind from everyday observation of the world itself, with the result that they are not only hyper-religious but prone to believe in the paranormal (Thalbourne, 1994). An individual’s placing on the spectrum that has schizophrenia at one extreme is also correlated with believing in outlandish conspiracy theories (Barron, et al., 2018). There is a range of severity to schizophrenia-type conditions. Mild symptoms are summarized as “schizoid personality.” This is characterised by anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure), apathy, solitariness, being cold and detached, and having a stilted style of speech. More severe is “schizotypal personality,” where the schizoid symptoms are accompanied by social anxiety, paranoid ideation, unconventional or paranoid beliefs, and, sometimes, psychosis (Hodgekins, 2015, p.184). Diagnosable schizophrenia is a particularly severe manifestation of these characteristics, sometimes even involving hallucinations (Dowson & Grounds, 2006). Schizophrenics may, for example, hear voices telling them to go and kill people.
The heritability of schizophrenia—that is, how genetic it is—is extremely high, although there is an environmental component:
Studies of schizophrenia using clinical diagnoses have consistently suggested an important genetic component, with heritability estimates from 41% to 87%. Heritability estimates for commonly used operational definitions of schizophrenia have been toward the top end of this range, between 83% and 87%. (Cardno et al., 1999)
An “operational definition” is a clear and concise definition of a concept. The key environmental factor in inducing a schizophrenic episode appears to be general stress (Corcoran et al., 2002). Like all such conditions, it tends to be first noticed in late adolescence, with a mean age of 19 for schizophrenia diagnosis (Gogtay, et al., 2011).
Not only is schizophrenia strongly genetic, there is some evidence that it is new; the disorder didn’t actually exist until quite recently. This cannot be so confidently said of Borderline Personality Disorder or Bipolar Disorder. As British psychiatrist Jonathan Burns has summarized, there are a number of researchers who have argued that schizophrenia did not exist until the early 1800s. There was simply no concept comparable to it. It was first described in 1809 and gradually, and ever-more rapidly, noticed all over the world. One theory is that the disorder was always latent but was induced by the stress of the modern world. The Industrial World places us in an “evolutionary mismatch.”We are adapted to an agricultural ecology where we know everybody and everybody is relatively closely related to us. So the Industrial World, in essence, sends us mad. Another second possibility is the rise of asylums during this period meant that schizophrenia was more likely to be noticed, but this begs the question of why most other mental disorders had previously been noticed. A third, rather more radical, possibility is that schizophrenia is some kind of contagious disease (Burns, 2007).
I would suggest a fourth possibility: Schizophrenia is both latent (that is induced by our evolutionary mismatch) and also a reflection of our crumbling genome. As I explore in Spiteful Mutants, until the Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 18th century and the Maunder Minimum of extreme cold, which was hit in about 1700, we were under extremely harsh Darwinian selection pressure, with child mortality being about 50 percent. Every generation, those who did not have excellent genetic health were purged from the population before they could pass on their genes. The brain is about 80 percent of the genome, rendering it a massive target for mutation; in other words, if you have mutations of the body, you will surely have mutations of the mind. Thus, this system was purging the mentally ill from the gene pool before they could pass on their genes.
This system collapsed, rapidly, with the Industrial Revolution, which brought us better conditions, inoculations, superb medical treatment, and cheaper food. Child mortality was less than 10 percent by the end of the 19th century, and it is now less than 1 percent. The inevitable result is a higher percentage of the population with mental illness. This is because so many people who would have died in childhood due to their high mutational load, under conditions of purifying Darwinian selection, have now survived. The most extreme of these can be understood as the “Spiteful Mutants.” They espouse ideas that are maladaptive at the individual and group level—such as allowing your group to be invaded by foreigners—and they undermine adaptive societal constructs, such as religion, which tends to turn that which is adaptive into the “will of God” (or “the gods”). Espousing “spiteful” beliefs is strongly associated with mental illness, especially depression. It would have to be. Such people are genetic deviations from what was selected for under harsh conditions: mental and physical health and being group-oriented so that you can defeat other groups, allowing your genes to survive via what is known as “inclusive fitness.” You pass on your genes directly but also indirectly by aiding your family, your kin, and your ethnic group.
In that the heritability of schizophrenia is extremely high, and in that it is negatively associated with fertility in terms of the schizophrenics themselves and even their close relatives (Haukka, et al., 2003), it can be reasonably understood as a spiteful mutation. It causes its carriers to fail to pass on their genes and, in some cases, it snuffs out the fertility of others who get killed due to the schizophrenics’ paranoid delusions.
There is also evidence, from regional differences in schizophrenia in Finland, that it is clearly genetic, and not a disease. It appears to be stronger in eastern Finland due to tiny, isolated populations, leading to a genetic bottle effect (Neale, 2013). This would imply that schizophrenia emerged, in part, due to weakened selection pressures.
All of this being so, we can reasonable assert that spree shooters are Spiteful Mutants. In that the symptoms of schizophrenia manifest, on average, at about 19, one solution to America’s spree shooting problem is to ban gun ownership for anyone under 25. Another is detailed background checks for the over-25s to ensure that Spiteful Mutants cannot own deadly weapons with which they can kill genetically healthy people.
References
American Psychiatric Association (2022). What Is Schizophrenia? https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/schizophrenia/what-is-schizophrenia
Badcock, C. (2003). Mentalism and mechanism: Twin modes of human cognition. In Crawford, C. & Salman, C. (Eds.). Human nature and social values: Implications of evolutionary psychology for public policy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Barron, D., Furnham, A., Weiss, L., Morgan, K., Towell, T. & Swami, V. (2018). The Association Between Schizotypal Components and Conspiricist Beliefs Through Cognitive Mediators. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 44: s368-369.
Burns, J. (2007). The Descent of Madness: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain. London: Routledge.
Cardno, A., Marshall, J. & Coid, B. (1999). Heritability Estimates for Psychotic Disorders: The Maudsley Twin Psychosis Series. Archives of General Psychiatry, 52: 162-168.
Corcoran, C., Mujika-Parodi, L., Yale, S., Leitman, D. & Malaspina, D. (2002). Could Stress Cause Psychosis in Individuals Vulnerable to Schizophrenia? CNS Spectrum, 7: 33-42.
Dowson, J. & Grounds, A. (2006). Personality Disorders: Recognition and Clinical Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dutton, E. Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Religion and Politics in the 21st Century. Whitefish, MT: Washington Summit Publishing.
Glick, I., Cerfolio, N., Kamis, D. & Laurence, M. (2021). Domestic Mass Shooters: The Association With Unmedicated and Untreated Psychiatric Illness. Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 41: 366-369.
Gogtay, N., Vyas, N., Testa, R. et al. (2011). Age of Onset of Schizophrenia: Perspectives From Structural Neuroimaging Studies. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 37: 504-513.
Haukka, J., Suvisaari, J. & Lönqvist, J. (2003). Fertility of Patients With Schizophrenia, Their Siblings, and the General Population: A Cohort Study From 1950 to 1959 in Finland. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160: 460-463.
Hodgekins, J. (2015). Schizotypy and psychopathology. In Mason, O. & Claridge, G. (Eds.). Schizoptypy: New dimensions. London: Routledge.
Neale, B. (2013). Finnish Bottlenecks Enrich Risk-Conferring Deletion of TOP3β. Science Translational Medicine, 5: 203.
Thalbourne, M. (1994). Belief in the paranormal and its relationship to schizophrenia-relevant measures: a confirmatory study. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 33: 78-80.