ADOLESCENCE AND GUNS: A TOXIC MIX
The President’s backtracking on minimum age of gun ownership puts a brighter halo around Rick Scott and the Florida legislature’s turning the tables on the NRA’s position on teenage gun ownership and the responsibility of parents and teachers in recognizing warning signs of imminent violence. Why does age matter and why are warning signs so seemingly difficult for parents and other adults to identify? Adolescents have a near monopoly on school shootings, in part because many shooters have had a connection with the school and feel emotionally wronged or devalued by teachers or peers. But such simple explanations- including violent urges, impulsiveness, vengefulness, perceived injustices, wanting to settle a score, mental illness–do not get to the heart of the matter. None of these emotional issues are unique to this age group. The heart of the matter is the unique time in human development called adolescence. Peter Blos, a pioneer in child psychoanalysis from the school of Anna Freud, referred to adolescence as a “crazy time”, noting that episodes of seemingly irrational behavior are not unusual and they are rarely preceded by an explicit warning, especially to parents. The unique combination of psychological coping mechanisms and the biology of the adolescent brain makes this time of life a perfect storm for destructive behavior, including potential violence.
The recently published confession of Jesse Osborne, the 2016 school shooter in South Carolina, illustrates as an extreme example the potential for highly disturbed adolescent reasoning and the difficulty parents have in recognizing what’s going on with their children at this age. Jesse’s pattern of sharing his feelings and fantasies with friends and on social media but not with his parents, who reportedly said they were unaware of what he was thinking, is a typical pattern seen with many adolescents. In a large study commissioned by Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Foundation” of over 3000 young people between the ages of 15–24 and over 1000 parents, researchers found that more young people would turn to friends or to no one rather than to parents to talk about serious personal issues, including feeling belittled or ridiculed by peers. More remarkably, over two thirds of the parents believed that their children would talk to them about these issues. Approximately a third of the young people said they would talk with their parents if they felt harassed or unsafe on line, but two thirds of the parents thought their children would talk with them about such issues. Clearly, there is a mismatch between what parents think their adolescent children will bring to them for discussion and what they actually will.
The motivation for Jesse’s shooting spree is shocking in its irrationality and simplicity. There is no recognition of the impact of his actions on the students he targeted, no sense of long term implications for him or his victims. In his case, it was about seeking notoriety, viewing a mass killing as a personal achievement, as a way of elevating his status to that of the Columbine school shooters whom he idolized. While there are unique personal features to the motivations of all school shooters, most fail to recognize the full implications of their actions beyond their immediate intentions, and most involve almost magical thinking about the aftermath.
The capacity to understand cause and effect, to see future ramifications of current actions, to empathize with victims, and to have a realistic understanding of one’s own behavior involve relatively mature brain functions that do not fully develop before adulthood. These brain functions depend on a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, the most human and highly evolved of our brain resources. Scientific research on brain development has shown that from virtually every biological perspective -i.e. anatomy, physiology, and chemistry — the prefrontal cortex of a teenager is still under construction. Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss psychologist who codified much of what we know about cognitive development in children, pointed out that the ability to synthesize information into a complex strategy to solve real world problems, what he called formal operations, did not even begin until adolescence. To make matters worse, while the prefrontal cortex is learning how to get up to speed, those parts of the brain that respond to the environment with strong emotion are on overdrive. The adolescent brain does not have all the resources it will eventually have to calm violent impulses and put them in a realistic perspective.
The developmental characteristics of the adolescent brain and the restricted pattern for help seeking create the perfect storm. When guns are in the hands of disturbed and vengeful adolescents, with these combined handicaps, the likelihood of carnage is especially acute. After the Santana High School shooting in 2001, I wrote in the NY Times (March 10, 2001) that no matter what the town or the school, if a gun is put under the control of the not-yet-fully-developed prefrontal cortex of a hurt and vengeful adolescent, it is very likely to go off. And it has again and again and again.
