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
What was the chemical spill Stephen King was referring to? The Dugway sheep incident took place in 1968 in Utah when six thousand sheep were killed due to chemical and biological weapons testing. The Dugway Proving Ground had been testing nerve agents in the days prior. One test involved the firing of a chemical artillery shell, another the burning of 160 gallons of nerve agent in an open-air pit, and a jet aircraft spraying nerve agent in a target area.2 Although the sheep were grazing twenty-seven miles west of the testing area, over six thousand died as a result of the nerve agent. Answers about the incident aren’t definitive, but some people believe a malfunction of a nozzle could explain what happened.
The Dugway Proving Ground is a US Army facility established to test biological and chemical weapons.
Scythian archers infected their arrows by dipping them in decomposing bodies or in blood mixed with manure as far back as 400 BC.3
Biological warfare is another theme that inspired Stephen King to write The Stand. Although it seems like a modern-day invention, biological warfare is not a new tactic. One of the first recorded instances of this type of warfare took place in 1155 when Emperor Barbarossa poisoned a water well with human bodies in Tortona, Italy. In 1346, Mongols catapulted bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Caffa in the Crimean Peninsula. The Spanish mixed wine with blood of leprosy patients to sell to their French foes in Italy in 1495 while the Polish fired saliva they took from rabid dogs at their enemies in 1650. In the United States, the British distributed blankets from smallpox patients to indigenous people in 1763 to try to get them to spread the disease unknowingly. The effectiveness of this last example is unknown, but experts speculate it wasn’t successful because smallpox is spread more efficiently through the respiratory system. In 1797, Napoleon flooded the plains around Mantua, Italy, to try to spread malaria and in 1863, Confederates sold clothing from yellow fever and smallpox patients to Union troops in the United States to spread disease.
More recent biological weapons include the development and deployment of anthrax and sarin gas. Anthrax inhalation is often fatal. Initial signs and symptoms of inhalation of anthrax include flu-like symptoms, shortness of breath, nausea, coughing up blood, fever, and possible meningitis. In 2001, twenty-two people got anthrax through letters that were sent through the mail and five of them died. Sarin gas was initially developed in 1938 in Germany as a pesticide. According to Dr. Lewis Nelson from Rutgers New Jersey Medical Schooclass="underline"
Sarin targets an enzyme within the body’s neuromuscular junctions, where nerves meet muscles. Usually, this enzyme deactivates the nerve-signaling molecule acetylcholine. But sarin stops this deactivation by blocking the enzyme. Without the enzyme to switch it off, acetylcholine will repeatedly stimulate nerve cell receptors. This can lead acetylcholine to build up in the muscles, cause excessive twitching and then result in paralysis. If the muscles that control breathing become paralyzed, the person can die.4