The Science of Stephen King

There have been many fingers pointed toward gun control, mental health reform, and school security. In their article “Protecting Students from Gun Violence: Does ‘target hardening’ do more harm than good?” for Education Digest, Bryan R. Warnick and Ryan Kapa suggest:

Educators should also think about how the school climate and culture contribute to the possibility of school shootings and work to change those factors. Reading detailed accounts of school shootings provides clues about what schools could be doing differently. In the early 1990s, the sociologist Katherine Newman led a team of researchers in a study of school shootings since 1970. Their report shone a light on the perennial social competition among teens in the school environment, which Newman termed the “status tournament of adolescence.” Some school practices intensify this competition. Think of the prominence of sports in American schools, with the tryouts, rankings, and sorting that go along with it. Think, too, of the teenage fixation on popularity and the common practice of anointing “kings” and “queens” at proms and homecoming dances. School shooters often report feeling like the losers of these status tournaments, and this disappointment sometimes turns to anger against the school environment, as was apparently so in the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado (1999), East Carter High School in Kentucky (1993), and Westside Middle School in Arkansas (1998). Instead of fostering competition, schools might look for ways to increase students’ sense of belonging.3

As the reality of school shootings came into media focus, particularly with the watershed massacre at Columbine High School in 1999, in which thirteen people perished, Stephen King felt a responsibility to censor Rage. Today, Rage is no longer in print, as reprints of The Bachman Books now only contain The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. In fact, much like how Mark David Chapman suggested he was inspired by J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) to murder John Lennon, four school shooters pointed to Rage as inspiration for their acts. This included fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal, who in 1997 killed three fellow students at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky. Eerily, there was a copy of Rage in Carneal’s locker. It was this shooting that prompted King to make certain that Rage would no longer be readily available, as he explained in his 2013 nonfiction essay Guns.

I suppose if it had been written today, and some high school English teacher had seen it, he would have rushed the manuscript to the guidance counselor and I would have found myself in therapy posthaste. But 1965 was a different world, one where you didn’t have to take off your shoes before boarding a plane and there were no metal detectors at the entrances to high schools.4

He further asserts that although he didn’t believe Rage alone was the cause of the violence, he felt a need to take it off the shelves. “I pulled it because in my judgment it might be hurting people, and that made it the responsible thing to do.” This leads us to the question of the true influence of media on violence. This was a hot-button issue when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the shooters at Columbine, were found to be fans of violent video games and “dark” music. Desperate to find the source of such inexplicable tragedy, people pointed to music, video games, films, and books as the reason for the rise in school shootings. In his research study “The School Shooting/Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?” Christopher Ferguson compiled data from over fifty sources, coming to the conclusion that:

There simply is no quality evidence for the predictive value of violent game exposure as a risk factor for school shootings. Indeed, the risk of false positives is significant, even when considered in light with other variables (the inclusion of even one or two “universal variables,” that is, variables that are near universally true for the population of interest, give the illusion of multiple risk factors when considered in combination). Even if the focus is on “incessant” interest in violent games, most elders (teachers, parents, psychologists, etc.), as unfamiliar with game culture as most are, simply lack the perspective to evaluate what constitutes “incessant” interest, and what is developmentally normal or even healthy.5