What Motivates School Shootings?

Caleb Sharpe

“I always knew you were going to shoot up the school,” Sam Strahan, one of Caleb Sharpe’s classmates, said in 2017 when he saw 15-year-old Sharpe walk into Freeman High School in Rockford, Washington, with a semiautomatic rifle. It was the last thing Strahan would say before Sharpe murdered him and injured three other students. Sharpe told police he’d killed Strahan “to teach everyone a lesson about what happens when you bully others.” Before his massacre, he’d written “kill” on photographs of 26 students in his yearbook who he’d planned on targeting.