School Shooting Causes

At Umpqua Community College, the causes of the shooting revolved around Christopher Harper-Mercer and his mother Laurel. Harper-Mercer was also diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (a type of autism spectrum disorder), which he had many struggles with when he was a child. His mother did not do anything to treat him for it because she learned how to cope with her own autism spectrum disorder. Because Harper-Mercer had Asperger’s, he did not communicate with people very often, except for when he was talking about guns. He had an interest in guns, and his mother knew about this because “she kept numerous firearms in her home and expressed pride in her knowledge about them, as well as in her son’s expertise on the subject” (Healy). His mother was a root cause of the shooting because she knew he had autism and did not help him, and she helped fuel his

For example, in the Umpqua Community College shooting, the professor (Lawrence Levine) corrected Harper-Mercer on the definition of a word and the future gunman took it negatively. Another student confirmed “that Mr. Harper-Mercer had engaged with the teacher and said he was a vocal member of the class” (Turkewitz). Levine was one of Harper-Mercer’s first victims in the shooting. In the Virginia Tech shooting, Cho had selective mutism, but the professor did not know this and he and the other students kept pushing Cho to make him speak in class. Using tact in both cases could have helped prevent the shootings. With Harper-Mercer, he might have taken the professor correcting him positively instead of negatively. In Cho’s case, if the professor asked Cho why he did not speak in class he could have found out that Cho had selective mutism, or the professor could have not forced Cho to speak in the first place. To prevent school shootings in the future, teachers should be mindful of how they communicate with their