The Science of Stephen King

Ferguson maintains that it is difficult to find any causation, or to appropriately profile school shooters, as they are such a small sliver of the population and often they are killed by gunfire or suicide. A 2002 study, cited within Ferguson’s research by the Secret Service, further highlighted that violent video games cannot be scientifically linked to mass school shooters, saying that only 59 percent of perpetrators demonstrated “some interest” in violent media of any kind (as compared to Griffiths & Hunt’s 1995 results suggesting that over 90 percent of nonviolent males play violent video games alone) including in their own writings. For video games, the figure was even lower—only 12 percent.

2018 was a record-breaking year for the industry, with total video game sales exceeding $43.4 billion.

While there is no study on the effects of music on school shooters, there are numerous general studies on the link between music and violence. In 2003, fifty-nine college students participated in a study and separated into two groups in which they listened to music with violent and nonviolent lyrics. In order to keep the study’s efficacy, both songs were sung by the metal band Tool. The participants were then tasked with filling out sentences about their current emotions, including rating how they felt on a “hostility scale.” This test along with several others led the researchers to conclude that “the violent content of rock songs can increase feelings of hostility when compared with similar but nonviolent rock music. It is important to note that this ‘violent lyrics effect’ occurred in the absence of any provocation.”6 It is later said, after numerous tests with hundreds of more subjects, that “repeated exposure to violent lyrics may contribute to the development of an aggressive personality.”

Music has been used as a defense in several murder trials. In 2002, Ronald Pituch blamed the song “Ronnie” by Metallica on the murder of his mother. In 1994, two teens claimed a song by rapper Tupac Shakur caused them to kill a cop.

The reality of school shootings is clearly more complicated than any one influence or personality trait. At the end of Rage, Charlie Decker is committed to a mental institution. He has no answer for his sudden, violent rage. Written before its time, Rage is a haunting look at the warped and troubled mind of a teenager provoked to perpetrate senseless murder. It is a novel and character that are perhaps closer to our modern, true horror than we’d care to admit.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Stand

As I (Kelly) write this in the spring of 2020, the coronavirus is prominent in all of the current news headlines. A new, deadly outbreak of a virus is wreaking havoc across the globe with panic setting in and death tolls rising. If it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s eerily similar to the plot of Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand. The virus in the novel is nicknamed Captain Trips and ends up wiping out nearly all of the human population on Earth. By comparison, COVID-19 currently has somewhere between a 3–7 percent mortality rate. Hopefully we won’t go down the same route as the civilization did in that story, but maybe we can learn something about humanity from it. The idea to write this epic story had long been in Stephen King’s mind:

For a long time, ten years, at least, I had wanted to write a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings (1954), only with an American setting. I just couldn’t figure out how to do it. Then, slowly after my wife and kids and I moved to Boulder, Colorado, I saw a 60 Minutes (1968–) segment on CBW (chemical-biological warfare). I never forgot the gruesome footage of the test mice shuddering, convulsing, and dying, all in twenty seconds or less. That got me remembering a chemical spill in Utah that killed a bunch of sheep (these were canisters on their way to some burial ground; they fell off the truck and ruptured). I remembered a news reporter saying, “If the winds had been blowing the other way, there was Salt Lake City.”1