School Shooter

School shooters are a kind of spree killers/mass murderers who commit violence with firearms at an educational facility, such as a high school or a university. The term is to be distinguished from shootings committed by law enforcement near schools against students or intruders, such as the Kent State Massacre.

Pathology
School shooters commit their sprees and are “set off” for a number of different reasons. One can be that they have recently gone through a very emotional romantic breakup. Another can be an academic failure. Sometimes, school shooters might be inspired by more recent school shootings. They might also have suffered a lot of bullying. Some personal traits listed by the FBI in their text "The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective" are:
 * Almost always male, with few exceptions
 * Easily frustrated
 * Poor coping skills
 * Signs of depression
 * A lack of trust towards people
 * They might lose interest in activities they were previously very involved with
 * They might be narcissistic and have a high sense of self-importance, sometimes to mask feelings of unworthiness or insecurity, and feel entitled to special treatment.
 * They might have feelings of alienation, isolation, sadness and/or loneliness.
 * They might have difficult relationships with their parents who accept their unusual behavior and aren’t intimate.
 * The student has access to weapons, often owned by the family.

Modus Operandi
As with most spree killers, school shooters, by definition, use firearms during their massacres. Some of them, such as the Columbine shooters, may also use home-made or easily accessible explosives (though the Columbine shooters’ devices were all duds).

Real-Life examples

 * Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold: Committed a large school shooting at their high school, Columbine High, on Paril 20, 1999. Their original plan, inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing, was to scare students and faculty members out of the school by detonating home-made bombs inside and then open fire on them with automatic weapons when they were gathered outside the school. When their bombs failed to detonate, they went inside and started shooting at them in there. After killing 13 people and injuring 24, they committed suicide. The shooting is currently (January 2011), the fourth deadliest school shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest such at a high school.
 * Charles Whitman, aka The Texas Tower Sniper: The perpetrator of the University of Texas massacre on August 1, 1966. On the night before the attack, he killed his mother by stabbing her in the heart. In the morning, he went to the university, where he was once a student, entered the university’s tower with a collection of rifles and handguns, killed three people inside and started taking shots at random people outside. He was eventually cornered by the police and shot and killed. During Whitman’s autopsy, it was discovered that he'd had a brain tumor which reportedly caused excruciating headaches. He killed a total of 16 people and injured 32.
 * Pekka-Eric Auvinen: The 18-year-old perpetrator of the Finnish Jokela school shooting on November 7, 2007. He entered the school and started shooting students and faculty members with a .22 semi-automatic handgun. At one point, he attempted to set the school on fire with gasoline, but failed. On another occasion, the school principal tried to convince him to surrender, but was shot seven times and killed in front of the students. Prior to the shooting, he had posted a number of threatening videos on YouTube under the username Sturmgeist89. In one of them, he showed off a gun and wore a t-shirt with the text "Humanity is overrated". The shooting apparently inspired a similar, more deadly school shooting in Finland less than a year later.

On Criminal Minds
To date, only one episode, Elephant's Memory, of Criminal Minds has featured a school shooter. The UnSub, Owen Savage, was a school shooter of the "Injustice Collector" type who began a vendetta against people he felt had wronged and bullied him, including his father and his girlfriend's father. He was different from traditional school shooters in the sense that he didn’t attack a school since he had something to live for. The Columbine shooters were also referenced in The Perfect Storm and Jump Cut and Charles Whitman was written about by Max Ryan.