Threshold Of Violence Gladwell Summary

In the article Threshold of Violence published by The New Yorker Magazine, author Malcolm Gladwell alludes to the cause of school shootings and why they transpire. Gladwell tries to make sense of the epidemic by consulting a study of riots by stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter. Granovetter sought to understand “why people do things that go against who they are or what they think is right, for instance, why typically non-violent, law-abiding people join a riot”(Granovetter). He concluded that people’s likelihood of joining a riot is determined by the number of people already involved. The ones who start a riot don’t need anyone else to model this behavior for them that they have a “threshold” of zero. But others will riot only if someone

else has initiated it; they have a threshold of one. Some rioters need to see the two people to in order to be convinced; others need to see three or five or at the farthest end of the spectrum, or even the entire society.

Gladwell implausibly suggest that we should think of school shootings as a single “slow-motion, ever-evolving riot”( Gladwell pg. 7). Gladwell concludes from this that the riot has solely caught on because boys who wouldn’t have thought to shoot up their school now have a group to join, a model to follow. However he is wrong, Gladwell does not effectively prove his claim as he constantly contradicts himself in his article, he also has a lack of logos and poor use of ethos. He does not persuade me that Granovetter's theory describes school shooting accurately, the way riots work simply does not fit the typical school shooters criteria. School shootings or bombings take meticulous planning and premeditation opposite from rioting and all the erupted sudden chaos that involves before it takes

place.
Gladwell's theory about the copycat nature of the behavior is compelling, but “riot” is an extremely strange way to describe the school shooters phenomenon.

If school shootings form an extended riot, what exactly are the shooters rioting against? What do they aim to do? Riots are mainly fueled by chaos and they involve unplanned, impulsive havoc, the terror of unaccountable, collective action. Shooters, by contrast, tend to contemplate their attacks months in advance. “ Sometime before the end of the school year, my plan was to steal a recycling bin from school and take one of the pressure cookers I made and put it in the hallway and blow it up during passing period time” ( LaDue pg 2 of article). Many shooters plan meticulously, keeping journals, studying weapons and techniques, plotting the perfect mass murder. In this regard, they are about as far from riots as you can get. One can’t plan to riot or have rioting materials ready on hand for when an incident does or does not occur. Gladwell ineffectively uses Granovetter’s theory as it clearly does not apply to school shooters. And what kind of riot spans this stretch of time and space, showing up all across the country over nearly two decades, with no end in sight. Eric Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution,” a bit of delusional grandeur, but in a sense, he did start one. The shooting phenomenon forms something like a social movement or community; it’s more enduring and more deeply entrenched in our culture

than “rioting” suggests. But if this is a kind of social movement, it’s the most mystifying movement imaginable because it accomplishes nothing except destruction. The shooters play once and they can never play again; they’re not actually rioting for or against anything.
Thinking about shootings in terms of riots helps explain their contagious spread, but it also risks dismissing the phenomenon too easily as just an instance of copycat killing. If, as the evidence suggests, most shooters aren’t profoundly deviant but fairly normal Americans gone bad, then we have to ask why they turned. “Kip Kinkel shot his parents and wounded 25 students at his high school, he had a loving family and had never been traumatized” (Gladwell pg 4). Here Gladwell contradicts himself by implementing the threshold theory. Some shooters just had no reason to do such a thing, unlike rioters who always have a motive to riot. It’s not enough to say that they are simply mimicking the true psychopaths, as Gladwell constantly suggest and supports with stereotypes. Indeed, why mimic them in the first place? What is it about life right now in America that has made pessimism such a compelling program? We overlook the root of the problem at our own risk.
Perhaps the best way to think about this is to invert the question: What would turn a potential copycat shooter away from killing? Gun restrictions would obviously go a long way in stemming the bloodshed. However Gladwell goes against that common opinion saying, “ No law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil “ ( Gladwell pg 13). But it’s also worth looking at the structures of our society. Psychologists have argued that shooters across the spectrum are driven by a desire for recognition and respect. Eric Harris wanted, in typical psychopath fashion, to prove his superiority: “Ich bin Gott,” he wrote in his school planner. (German for, “I am God.”) (Gladwell pg. 4) But others seek acknowledgement too.. John LaDue, who was prevented from carrying out his attack when police discovered his cache of weapons last year, admitted that he had never been bullied. But he liked the idea of making people look at him and say, “I never knew he would do something like that.” The author incorrectly supports his claim by not providing enough adequate examples and justifications throughout the article. Malcolm Gladwell misinterprets Granovetter's theory on the different stages of social conflicts or violent outbreaks.