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

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

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