Framing Shooters as Victims

According to Dr. James E. Bayley (1991), who studied the concept of victimhood, people are defined as victims if and only if they meet three conditions: if they suffered, if the suffering has an identifiable cause, and if this suffering makes us morally obligated to care. Through my research, I was able to find out if the way the Columbine and Virginia Tech shooters were presented matched up with these conditions.

The first one is simple: whether they suffered. Harris and Klebold, the shooters of Columbine, were portrayed as members of the Trench Coat Mafia, a socially unpopular group that was targeted. Cho, the shooter of Virginia Tech, was shown to be someone who suffered mental illness and social ostracism for being quiet. As for the media’s depiction of the causes of the suffering, for Harris and Klebold, it was not just athletes and bullies, but also their parents and even the hard-rock music they listened to. For Cho, bullies were also identified as well as Virginia Tech for a possible lack of care for Cho’s mental illness. In other words, the aggressors of these three shooters were all issues and aspects of society.

Art by Stephanie Varela

But Bayley’s third condition asks this: Why do we care? Specifically, why do we, the general public, want to see these shooters as victims too? Wouldn’t it have been easier for us to mourn the people lost in the shootings by casting the men who took their lives as cold-blooded killers with no conscience?

Seung-Hui Cho

Although such a frame would have seemingly helped soothe us, it could’ve actually made us feel worse, according to the scholarship of Moos and Schaefer. Following a tragedy, if the media were to cast the shooters as ruthless beings with no hope of prevention, it implies that such massacres could always be repeated because there is nothing to be learned. The Columbine Shootings and Virginia Tech Shootings, which have killed 48, injured 38, and traumatized countless more, would thus be pointless tragedies with no greater meaning to get from them.

In actuality, the facts differed a bit from the media frame. Investigations later showed that Harris and Klebold were not part of the Trench Coat Mafia itself and were well liked by friends (Cullen, 2009). In addition, their motives were not to exact revenge on the popular students who bullied them, but because of their desire to redirect their general hatred of humanity toward killing as many people as possible in spectacular fashion. In fact, Harris “would brag about topping McVeigh,” the perpetrator of the deadly Oklahoma City Bombing that killed 168 people (Cullen, 2009, p. 32). Similarly, after the Virginia Tech Shootings, what was not emphasized as much was how Cho’s alienation was largely a result of choice, repeatedly rejecting any invitations from his peers to socialize (“Virginia”, 2007, p. 42).

Trench Coat Mafia Members

Therefore, it is likely that the media talked about societal issues because of their search for meaning behind the shootings. To achieve this, they framed the shooters as victims because of how that implicitly evokes the definition of victims—not just that they too have suffered, but that they have suffered because of an aggressor, which is Bayley’s second condition. Identification of these aggressors, such as bullying, the school, and the mental health system, allows the media and thus the public to address them. Accountability of the shootings can be transferred from individuals onto a larger, enveloping entity – the society we belong in.