Malcolm Gladwell Talks to Dorothy Wickenden About School Shooters

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Malcolm Gladwell Talks to Dorothy Wickenden About School Shooters

Podcast: The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Date: March 14, 2016
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Malcolm Gladwell

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Episode Overview

In this episode of The Political Scene, Dorothy Wickenden talks with Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer at The New Yorker and bestselling author, about the psychology behind school shootings in America. Drawing from his article "Thresholds of Violence," Gladwell introduces a sociological perspective, comparing the evolution of school shootings to the spread of social contagion, particularly that of riots. The discussion centers on how the motivations of school shooters have changed over time, the impact of media and the internet, and the limitations of gun control as a solution.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Case of John LeDoux and the Modern School Shooter

• Gladwell introduces John LeDoux, a student caught preparing to bomb his high school:
  • LeDoux was an honor roll student, not abused, traumatized, or socially alienated aside from being "on the spectrum" (Asperger’s).
  • His parents were unaware of the severity of his plans, seeing his interest in making small bombs as "normal" science geek behavior.
  • Quote:

    "His parents are incredibly alarmed because he’s in police custody… it’s past 9 o’clock and he’s never out past 9 o’clock. He’s that kind of dutiful a child."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (02:13)

• Discussion about normalization of dangerous hobbies:
  • Both Gladwell and Wickenden debate whether making bombs as a child is typical, with Gladwell suggesting experimentation with explosives is a longstanding adolescent curiosity, especially among boys.

Shifting Motivations: From Psychopathology to Social Contagion

• Gladwell draws a contrast between early school shooters, who were often deeply disturbed, and more recent incidents involving seemingly "normal" students.
• Gladwell references Mark Granovetter’s riot theory:
  • People have different "thresholds" for participating in riots.
  • Early shooters had extremely low thresholds — acting out intense pathology.
  • Over time, as the phenomenon persisted, more "ordinary" individuals began participating.
  • Quote:

    "If you have a riot of 100 people, you could hypothetically have a group... each of whom had a different threshold ranging from 0 to 99. The 99th person in is my mother… if absolutely every one of her cronies from church were rioting, she might riot."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (05:32)

How School Shootings Resemble Social Epidemics

• Wickenden asks if Gladwell's earlier ideas from "The Tipping Point" could be used to counteract these acts.
• Gladwell’s view on the "contagion" model:
  • Media no longer the central vector; the internet and shooter subcultures spread the phenomenon independently.
  • It's now largely out of society’s ability to curb simply by changing media coverage.
  • Quote:

    "These days… they are participating in a subculture which is sustained by the shooters themselves. They are going on YouTube and finding the relevant videos. They are reading the online journals… They have their own unbelievably rich, exhaustive library..."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (09:07)

The Role of Gun Control

• Gladwell is skeptical about gun control as a sole solution:
  • While gun control may prevent some cases, school shootings are not a simple result of availability of guns.
  • He points out that other countries with fewer guns have experienced school shootings, and many shooters use guns that would be available under stricter laws.
  • Quote:

    "What we’re looking at here is a powerful, contagious adolescent cultural pathology that has used the availability of guns to extend its reach."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (10:34)

  • Gladwell still endorses gun control for other reasons:

    "Gun control can solve the much bigger problem of the kind of unpremeditated shootings... that claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year. That’s the reason to ban guns."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (12:16)

Parenting, Prevention, and Social Context

• Advice to parents:
  • Gladwell suggests not to panic about adolescent interests in explosives or guns; historically, such interests often lead to productive scientific careers if properly channeled.
  • He speculates that the end of compulsory military service may have removed a traditional outlet for these impulses, leading to less healthy expressions.
  • Quote:

    "Many of them went on to be great chemists… Let’s do that. As opposed to denying that it exists."
    — Malcolm Gladwell (13:31)

  • Wickenden notes her own perspective raising daughters, contrasting with the behaviors Gladwell describes as typical in boys.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On motivations of school shooters:

  "In the beginning you see these kind of florid indices of pathology. But by the time we get to John LeDoux... the longer this phenomenon persists, the more likely it is for someone who is relatively normal to participate."
  — Malcolm Gladwell (07:22–08:40)

• On the media’s role:

  "I used to believe [notoriety was the problem]. Now I think it’s nonsense.... They are participating in a subculture which is sustained by the shooters themselves."
  — Malcolm Gladwell (09:07)

• On gun control:

  "Those who say that you can solve this problem with gun control are engaging in a fantasy... It so grossly simplifies what’s going on here."
  — Malcolm Gladwell (10:34)

• On channeling dangerous curiosity:

  "This impulse can be channeled in very positive directions. Let’s do that. As opposed to denying that it exists."
  — Malcolm Gladwell (13:31)

• On the end of the draft as a contributing factor:

  "I wonder whether that this isn’t a kind of unintended consequence of the end of compulsory military service."
  — Malcolm Gladwell (14:15)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:16–02:13: Introduction of John LeDoux case
• 05:32–06:57: Explanation of Granovetter’s riot threshold theory
• 09:07–10:26: Gladwell on media, internet, and social contagion
• 10:34–12:14: Gladwell on the gun control debate
• 13:05–13:31: Parenting, adolescent curiosity, and positive channels
• 14:15–14:31: Compulsory military service and shifting outlets for adolescent masculinity

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Conclusion

Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis provides a layered understanding of the school shooting epidemic, rejecting easy explanations and advocating for social, psychological, and cultural context. Rather than simple solutions such as ending media coverage or strengthening gun laws, he urges a closer look at the evolution of adolescent pathology, the power of subcultures, and how society might constructively redirect dangerous curiosities. The conversation is sobering, nuanced, and challenges listeners to reconsider mainstream narratives.

Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

I'm Dorothy Wickenden. On today's Politics and More podcast, I talk with New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell. In a piece for the New Yorker last year, Gladwell wrote about school shootings and the psychology of school shooters. The trend of mass violence, Gladwell argues, can be understood as a slowly evolving riot on a national scale.

[Narrator/Interviewer]

Malcolm Gladwell probably needs no introduction. He's the author of the Tipping Point and Outliers and other books, most recently David and Goliath. He has an entirely unique approach to journalism that's informed by sociology, psychology, social psychology, and at this point, there's a legion of Gladwell imitators on the shelves. Recently he turned his attention to a truly awful subject, the rise in school shootings in America. He wrote a piece called Thresholds of Violence and talked about the issue with the New Yorker's Dorothy Wickenden.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There was this case of a kid named John LeDoux in a little town about an hour south of Minneapolis who is caught by police by sheerest chance. The police happen upon him in his rented storage locker, where they find all of the ingredients for explosives. And they take him in to the police station and he confesses that he was planning to essentially blow up his high school to create the biggest school massacre ever. And he's not mentally ill. He wasn't abused or traumatized or bullied. He is an honor roll student. He's on the spectrum. He's a kid with what we used to call Asperger's, but he's in no way. I think this sort of speaks volumes. His parents are incredibly alarmed because he's in police custody and they don't realize that. And the cops haven't called them. And the reason they're alarmed is it's past 9 o' clock and he. He's never out past 9 o'. Clock. He's that kind of dutiful a child.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And they had no idea he was compiling weapons and bomb making materials.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They knew that he made bombs, but then.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And that didn't cause alarms.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

But wait a minute.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

That's not normal behavior.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's totally normal behavior.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

It is normal behavior.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Kids had been making little bombs. He made little bombs, not big bombs. Kids had been playing with chemistry stats and making bombs for as long as there have been chemistry sets. I can name to you editors of the New Yorker, and you can probably guess who they are.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Please do.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Who made bombs as kids. This is a normal thing for adolescents to do, to experiment with explosives. You know, there's especially adolescent boys.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So his parents really thought he was completely normal. There was no problem.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

He was a science geek, which is what he is. He was. In fact, in. What comes clear in his confession is that his interest in killing other people is minimal. He has barely even thought about that.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So what motivates him? And he also, by the way, did differentiate himself very clearly from Adam Lanza. He just said like this, I am not Adam Lanza.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, no, no, no. He had. No. Well, he wasn't. To my mind, it's unclear whether he even would have gone through with it had he not been caught. He got obsessed with the technical question of what it would take to. To blow up a school successfully. And he was particularly obsessed with Columbine. And he, as he points out, Columbine is a failure. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold intended to blow up their school in Littleton, Colorado, and Columbine High School and failed. And that's why they started shooting everyone. Right? So in his purely kind of narrow, obsessive way, he's just trying to solve the technical problem that has bedeviled his predecessors.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Could you talk a little Bit about this sociologist you wrote about who studied riot behavior as a form of social contagion. And you apply his theories to the evolution of school shootings. What do they have in common? You know, a riot builds among a number of people in one time and place. These are the acts, almost always, of solitary geeks, as you say, who are working through their own obsessions. How do you compare those two phenomena?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, Mark Granovetter is the name of this, one of the great, if not the greatest American sociologists of the last 50 years. And he had a theory about riots. Which is the mistake, when you look at a riot, is to assume that every rider has the same set of motivations and that every rider is identical. Imagine we've got one person who's a bit of a radical, and he's really upset about something, and he throws a rock through a window. He doesn't need anyone else around to do that first. He's willing to act on his own as the first guy. He has what Grenber would say, a threshold of zero. He requires no other person to go before him to do a radical act. Someone else might watch this and say, oh, I'm going to join in. That person would never have acted if they were the first. But they'll act if someone else goes first. They have a threshold of one. Then there's someone else who's a little more conservative. They would never be the first in. They would never even be the second in. But they would be the third in. Threshold of three. And he goes all the way up. If you have a rite of 100 people, you could hypothetically have a group of 100 people, each of whom had a different threshold ranging from 0 to 99. The 99th person in is my mother. Right. She's the person. My mother would not be the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. But if absolutely every one of her cronies from church were rioting, she might riot.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Have you told her that? I don't think she'd be happy to hear that at all.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

No. Well, actually, my mother would probably say she was in the 70s, but that's a really very different way of understanding a riot. So when I read that, I thought, oh, this is really interesting, because we see the same thing with school shootings.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

How so? That's what I wanted to pin you down at. Like, take one of these school shooters. Where do they fit in this paradigm?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So, John, adieu. When we compare John Ledoux, the kid I was writing about last year, to the kids who were doing school shootings, in the early 90s, it's night and day. If you take a look at the list of the first six major school shootings in this country or the ones leading up to Columbine, what you see are kids with profound psychosis. Kids who had the most brutal childhoods in imaginable. I mean, you just cannot imagine, you know, how bad they're. Or kids who are fit the clinical definition of psychopathology. Psychopaths. Eric Harris is a textbook psychopath. I mean, there's nothing normal about that kid. So in the beginning you see these kind of florid indices of pathology. But by the time we get to John Ledoux, as we get so he's.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Like number three, who would be joining the riot.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

It's not a perfect. You know, you can't do the perfect sequence like Venavetter has. But I think you can observe in a very general way over time the fact that the longer this phenomenon persists, the more likely it is for someone who is relatively normal to participate.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

You know, because it's interesting, in Tipping Point, all those years ago, you began sort of talking about some of these ideas and the subtitle of that was How Little Things Make a Big Difference. So it made me wonder whether there's a way, when you're looking at a mass psychosis like this that repeats itself over and over again over time and you begins to have this pattern. Is there a way that you can apply the Tipping point to correcting social epidemics?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This one is weird. So, for example, there has been a school of thought with respect to school shootings for some time that says the problem is the press glamorizes these kids. If we stopped glamorizing them, we stopped writing about the perpetrators, we stopped making a big fuss about them, we would diffuse the contagion. I used to believe that. Now I think it's nonsense. And the reason it's nonsense is it's a pre Internet age notion of the media's influence. These days these kids aren't. They're not reading the New York Times about the previous school shooter and getting clues or watching the 6 o' clock news and getting clues. They are participating in a subculture which is sustained by the shooters themselves. They are going on YouTube and finding the relevant videos. They are reading the online journals of so and so. They have their own unbelievably rich, exhaustive library of cultural materials which they are drawing from to sustain this epidemic. That's why I say it's out of our. I don't know what you Do. Do you shut down the Internet? I don't know. I mean, it's. This is why I have run out of possible means of remediating this epidemic.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

How big a problem is the availability of guns? Oh, this is such a huge part of our political debate.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, you know, those who say that you can solve this problem with gun control are engaging in a fantasy. Can you prevent some cases of this by locking up all the guns? Sure. Is that politically possible in the near term in the United States? No. My problem with the gun control argument is that it so grossly simplifies what's going on here, that this is, you know, we had tons and tons of guns in this country and no school shootings for a long time. So school shootings are not a necessary or inevitable consequence of having lots of guns. What we're looking at here is a powerful, contagious adolescent cultural pathology that has used the availability of guns to extend its reach. But, you know, there have been school shootings in Germany and Norway and Canada and places where there aren't a lot of guns. So I don't know. And if you look at the cases of these kids, in many of these cases, they got access to guns that would still have been available even in the presence of much more draconian gun control measures. They're just taking their parents guns now. How do you. Or their neighbor's guns or they're building.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Bombs with homemade materials.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Doesn't solve the. You and I can go online and buy all the materials we need to make a bomb that can do serious damage. So it just seems to me people are looking for an easy solution here. Now, let me say one crucial thing here. This should in no way undermine the importance of gun control.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

There. That's what I was waiting for.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This is a gun control can solve the much bigger problem of the kind of unpremeditated shootings done in the heat of passion or drunkenness or drug use that claim the lives of tens of thousands of Americans every year. That's the reason to ban guns. School shootings are a wholly separate and more complex phenomenon. Let's not muddy the waters by trying to extend an incredibly powerful and important social initiative to this specific, difficult issue of school.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So what do you say then to mothers and fathers of teenage boys who might be interested in building little bombs or who have an obsession with guns? That, too, is a very common phenomenon. Is there nothing to do to alleviate the contagion, to bring it down, bring it back?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Well, I do think that we should explore ways of making experimentation with bombs and guns socially safe. So instead of stopping it, you should do the opposite. In other words, you reacted with alarm when I talked about how adolescent boys like to make bombs.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I have two girls. That's why.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That's right. But our response should be the opposite. It should be like, this is a phase that many adolescent boys go through. They're genuinely and legitimately fascinated with these. And by the way, the people who built, played with their chemistry sets and blew things up as children, many of them went on to be great chemists. Great chemists. They contributed to some of the greatest scientific successes of the 20th century. So, you know, this impulse can be channeled in very positive directions. Let's do that. As opposed to denying that it exists. I will also say that, you know, if you were a 17 year old in the United States, anywhere from, you know, the First World War through to the end of the draft in the early 70s, your desire to play with guns as an adolescent was satisfied when you got drafted and that ended. And I'm not. I wonder whether that this isn't a kind of unintended consequence of the end of compulsory military service.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Interesting. Thank you so much, Malcolm.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Thank you.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

That was New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I want a shark that.

[Katie Drummond]

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.

[Katie Drummond]

Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

False.

[Katie Drummond]

Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

From. Prx.