The Violent Religious Beliefs Of School Shooters

School shooters defy easy categorization, yet they share one unmistakable trait: they choose the most horrific target imaginable—defenseless children, full of promise and hope. This choice is no accident; it reveals something deeper and darker, a unifying thread that ties them together beneath their apparent differences. They all follow the same religion of darkness.

Over the past few months, I dove deeply into the phenomenon of school shooters, searching for the patterns behind their descent into evil. My investigation brought me to several dark places. I studied the Columbine shooting and other well-known school shootings. I studied the mental illnesses behind these actors, and I looked for the patterns in their lives and in their writings.

Many school shooters leave behind many pages of writing, telling us exactly why they did what they did, and what I found is what I can only describe as a religious belief system. This belief system is present among many different shooters, including those in different social circumstances and with different mental illnesses afflicting them.

These shooters eventually develop the belief, through either a series of bad social interactions, distaste for authority, or through suffering, that the world is evil and irredeemable. They begin to believe existence itself is evil. This “knowledge” for them becomes a central part of their identity. They begin to write more and more about what they hate or how existence is evil, and their knowledge of this makes them wise and even “god-like.” Eventually, they come to the natural conclusion of their own logic. If existence itself is so evil, arbitrary, and irredeemable, why not destroy it?

To understand how this belief system makes itself manifest over time, we need to look at some passages from the manifestos and writings of these shooters. But first, let’s briefly go over school shooter types and the several common mental illnesses affecting them. This will show how consistent this pattern of thought is across school shooter types and how it underlies all of their thinking.

Psychologist Peter Langman, who has made a career out of studying school shooters, found three different types of school shooters in his studies. He found that there were psychopathic shooters, psychotic shooters, and traumatized shooters.¹

Psychopathic shooters are those who are unempathetic, hateful, and callous. They also, by definition, were psychopathic, which contributes to the aforementioned characteristics. These shooters have no remorse or guilt for their actions. Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters, allegedly told a girl to “quit your bitching” after shooting her, for example.²

Then, there are psychotic shooters who are experiencing psychosis during their act. Psychosis includes things like delusions, hallucinations, and a general break with reality.³ Psychosis tends to affect people who have schizophrenia⁴, delusional disorder⁵, and schizotypal disorder⁶ (which you can think of as schizophrenia-light). Kip Kinkel, the Thurston High School shooter is an example that comes to mind here. During his interrogation, which is quite brutal, he cried and told the officer that the voices told him to do it.⁷

Finally, there are traumatized shooters. These are kids who experienced an unfortunately violent and chaotic upbringing. They have the type of upbringing you might expect a school shooter to have. This eventually results in them taking it out on the world.

A throughline runs through all of the shooter types and is present in school shooters with every single type of mental illness presented here. This includes psychopathy, schizophrenia, schizotypal, delusional disorder, and even depression and anti-social personality disorder, which were not listed. This makes it a dead giveaway and possible warning sign that could be used by psychologists or law enforcement in identifying someone who could possibly commit an act like this.

Let’s now examine the evidence within the journals and manifestos of these school shooters.

We have three primary beliefs to cover:

• the belief that the world is evil or irredeemable

• the belief that understanding this makes them special or even divine

• the belief that because the world/Being is evil or irredeemable, it must be destroyed

Let’s start with one of the leading figures of this religion of death: Eric Harris, who Dr. Langman classifies as a psychopathic shooter, and has been said to be psychopathic, narcissistic, and depressed.⁸ He and Dylan Klebold committed the Columbine massacre.

Harris exhibited the first two beliefs in the very first sentences of he journal. It reads “I hate the f*cking world, too much god d*mn f*ckers in it. Too many thoughts and different societies all wrapped up together in this f*cking place called AMERICA. Everyone has their own god d*mn opinions on every god damn thing and you may be saying “well what makes you so different?” because I have something only me and V1 have, SELF AWARENESS.”⁹

He goes on further in this next journal entry, “Well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘K*LL MANKIND’ no one should survive. We all live in lies. People are always saying they want to live in a perfect society, well utopia doesn’t exist. It is human to have flaws. You know what. F*ck it. Why should I have to explain myself to you survivors when half of this sh*t I say you shitheads won’t understand and if you can then woopie f*cking do.”

When I say that these school shooters seem to hate the nature of Being, reality itself and the world, I mean that they see the structure of reality as evil. That structure includes things like society, culture, religion, and any social structure with a form of hierarchy. These shooters are hardcore individualists. This is illustrated by another passage from Harris.

He says, “Human nature is smothered out by society, job, and work and school. Instincts are deleted by laws.”

This theme of describing a rabidly individualist mindset persists across school shooters and seems to define how they talk about their belief that reality and Being itself are corrupted. Consider this passage from Adam Lanza, who is said to have had autism, schizotypal personality disorder, and anxiety.¹⁰ Dr. Langman considers him a psychotic shooter. Lanza committed the Sandy Hook shooting.

Note, this is taken from the transcripts of YouTube videos that Lanza recorded and were not discovered until 2021.

He says that “life propagates itself and culture is an artificial imposition of suffering because suffering is life-affirming and someone who is not suffering isn’t going to be propagating.”¹¹

He continues this line of logic throughout these recordings, with the word “culture” appearing 157 times in the transcript. The word “society” appears 52 times. The clear throughline between each of these instances is his distaste for both things.

“How does culture propagate if not by the imposition of delusions onto children who have absolutely no say in the matter?” he asks, questioning the validity of culture itself.

Lanza makes it clear that his distaste is not even for culture or society, however. His issue is even with value, meaning, and life itself.

“Even if there were Paradise tomorrow, and there were no suffering forever in the future, I would still be advocating this position because I ... you can sum me up in one sentence: I have a vendetta against value. So instead of an Efilist I’m more of a ... eulavist. Eh, I only oppose life because life is the source of value and it’s value that I really hate,” he says. (Efilists hold the philosophical position that bringing new life into existence is morally wrong because existence itself is inherently full of suffering. As for the term, Eulavist, this appears to be made up by Lanza.)

This further snowballs to him eventually believing that because he hates value, he will achieve enlightenment by eliminating it.

“A lot of people like Buddhists and Stoics, however they define enlightenment, they believe that enlightenment can be achieved in life. That you can overcome what they call ‘suffering,’ but I, my value leads me to hate value because well, [laughter] what you said. It’s incoherent and I think the problem about that is that I can’t free myself from value and still be alive. So, the enlightenment, which I use very, very, very loosely, my enlightenment lies in death where I, I do not have any value,” he says.

This is incredibly interesting in a very morbid fashion because there are echoes of existentialist philosophy here, except it’s flipped onto its head.¹² He stops at the “life is suffering” realization of many existentialist philosophers. I won’t get into this in this short article, but many of these shooters are interested in existentialist philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. I plan to explore this topic in a chapter in the book I am currently writing.

These themes of death and destruction run all the way through to the last type of shooter, the traumatized shooter. We see this in the writings of Luke Woodham, who Dr. Langman has described as a traumatized shooter. He appeared to be depressed and anti-social. He committed his crimes at Pearl High School.

His first journal entry expresses his hatred of humanity and Being itself.

“I am the hatred in every man’s heart! I am the epitomy [sic] of all Evil! I have no mercy for humanity, for they created me, they tortured me until I snapped and became what I am 2 today! My advice to any man who has been tortured by humanity is this: Let these words ring through our our heart, mind, and soul! Hate humanity! Hate humanities! ... Hate what humanity has made you!”¹³

He very quickly goes on to say he will commit his act of vengeance in order to get back at the world, or reality itself.

“But I shall tell you one thing, I am malicious because I am miserable. The world has beaten me. Wendsday [sic] 1, 1997 shall go down in history as the day I fought back.”

As we’ve seen, this belief system appears to run through the minds of many school shooters of all types. When digging deeper, I found this framework in many others, including mass shooters like the 2017 Philadelphia supermarket shooter and Jared Holmes, the Aurora movie shooter. An analysis of their writings revealed to me that this belief system extends to them as well, and it may very well extend to other types of killers.

This belief system may be the key to understanding how and why school shooters do what they do, and the hope is that through understanding this, we can avoid these incidents in the future.