“The Shooter has Asperger’s”: Autism, Belief, and “Wild Child” Narratives
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Abstract
Having reviewed hundreds of press reports on school shootings since 2000, I find a consistent pattern of narrative speculation about the association of autism and more specifically Asperger’s syndrome with individuals who commit mass violence in America. In reporting the “motivation” for shootings by teens and young adults, the press typically relies on oral narratives provided by classmates and family members, rather than medical documentation. Often these reports cite odd, unusual, or asocial behavior by the individuals, sometimes prompted by bullying or engagement in game or music participation, that lead to an unanticipated violent outburst, colloquially called a “meltdown,” “breakdown,” or “losing it.” The press reports reflect, or respond to, a more general belief found in the population concerning the shooter’s deteriorating mental state since childhood and the notion that he, and the shooter is assumed to be male, had gone undiagnosed or kept his diagnosis secret in mainstream society, commonly with the suggestion that he should have been institutionalized or separated from “normal” youth. Pathologizing or folklorizing the phenomenon, observers often mention an unrecognized or suppressed “epidemic” of autism or mental illness along with speculation about environmental as well as medical reasons bordering on the conspiratorial for the contemporary rise of retributional violence by youth. Without discounting scientific attempts to understand brain function in relation to youth violence, I frame the discourse among such observers in the context of folk psychology, a term that has come into usage outside of folkloristics, but can be applied to issues of social interaction as manifested in traditional cultural practices of children (Haselager 1997; Thomas 2001). The key concept suggested by folk psychology is that people as part of their localized cultural experience
perceive, predict, and explain one another’s actions, thoughts, and motivations, often in relation to inherited norms of social behavior expressed through narrative and ritual.
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