Malcolm Gladwell on Understanding School Shooters
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2018
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his New Yorker story “Thresholds of Violence,” Malcolm Gladwell turned his attention to the psychology of school shooters. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden, Gladwell explains why the social dynamics of school shootings are comparable to those of a riot, where every act of violence makes the next one slightly more likely. He also explains why the problem is far too complex to be addressed through gun control.
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| 1:11.6 | I'm Dorothy Wickendon on today's Politics and More podcast, I'll talk to New Yorker |
| 1:17.0 | staff writer Malcolm Gladwell. In a piece for the New Yorker in 2015, Gladwell wrote about |
| 1:22.9 | school shootings. The trend of mass violence, he argues, can be understood as a slowly evolving riot |
| 1:29.5 | on a national scale. After this month's shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, like the |
| 1:37.9 | shooting before that and the one before that, tragedy after tragedy, we're left yet again |
| 1:42.8 | to continue a conversation about our society and our culture |
| 1:46.4 | and what it is that causes this epidemic of violence. Regardless of your views about the Second |
| 1:52.3 | Amendment, how does a teenager, a kid, show up at a school determined to kill as many of his |
| 1:58.7 | own classmates and teachers as he can. One answer to that |
| 2:02.4 | question, by no means definitive, comes to us from staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, who looked for |
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