Narcissism And Violence: Two Mass Shootings Compared
I was present for one and very close to the other. The local response shows the positive difference that 48 years make; the response by lawmakers shows the difference between Canada and the U.S.
Mass shooting number one: Brampton Centennial Secondary School, Brampton, Ontario, Canada, May 28, 1975
In 1975 I was in grade nine, or, to put it in American terms, I was a high school freshman. My family had just moved from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Brampton, Ontario a few months before. I had no friends. I walked two miles to school every morning and every afternoon completely alone. I sat in classes where no one talked to me. I was an awkward teen lacking social skills.
I liked my new school because the teachers were interesting and knowledgeable. For example, we learned about the Kent State massacre in history class, which had occurred only five years earlier. Also, although no one talked to me, they didn’t bully me either, so it was an improvement over the junior high school in Newfoundland I had just left where kids bullied me incessantly and where not every teacher actually taught anything.
I had to walk two miles to school because it was the 1970s and Canadian school boards couldn’t keep up with the postwar baby boom that filled schools to overflowing faster than they could be built. I could have taken a city bus to school, but, like I said, I was a little weird and socially awkward and developed an odd paranoia about taking the bus.
So I walked alone.
May 28, 1975 was a beautiful day. I was not used to spring coming so early. In Newfoundland, it would often snow as late as May or June. I couldn’t believe that I was able to swim in our backyard pool in April of that year.
Life seemed to be changing for the better. Except for the no friends bit.
Like I said, May 28 was a beautiful day. Warm and sunny.
I remember nothing about my morning classes. I remember my third-period class. Third period was French. I remember French class in detail. I can describe the teacher: a thirty-something heavyset woman with blond hair and glasses.
No idea what my other two morning classes were or what the teachers looked like.
I also remember how hungry I was in French class that day. As I mentioned, schools in 1975 were overcrowded. This one, Brampton Centennial Secondary School, had too many students to accommodate in its cafeteria at one time. So there were two lunch periods. My lunch period started at 12:30.
That late lunch period may have saved my life.
I was counting the minutes until French class ended so I could run to the cafeteria and eat my lunch. I also had money for French fries that day, a novel treat for me.
One o’clock came. An announcement came over the PA: “Stay in your classrooms. Teachers, lock your doors. Do not let anyone leave the room.”
Something was happening two floors below. We hadn’t heard anything. French class was on the third floor.
The teacher stopped teaching. We sat mostly in silence (students tended to be well-behaved and docile in those days). We heard sirens. A few students ran to the one narrow window in the classroom to look out. They reported seeing ambulances and police cars. I did not go to the window.
The teacher said in an almost plaintive voice, “Don’t look.” I guess she was afraid we might see something traumatizing.
She was right.
Finally, after about forty minutes of waiting, the principal came back on the PA. “There has been a terrible accident. Please line up and leave your classrooms. Teachers will show you which stairs to take. Go straight home.”
The teacher standing in front of the stairwell guiding us out looked shell-shocked.
There had been no accident.
A narcissistic boy named Michael Slobodian, who was in grade eleven, had gone home at morning recess and taken two rifles from his parents’ gun locker, hidden them in his guitar case, and come back to school to get revenge on his English teacher and his physics teacher.
Their crimes? Calling home to report that he had been skipping English class and failing him in physics.
These were crimes they apparently deserved to die for.
When I say that Michael Slobodian was narcissistic, I am not saying it from experience- I didn’t know him. I had been at the school for only five months and he was two grades ahead of me.
Of course, all teenagers are narcissistic to one degree or another. Most people grow out of it if they live past the age of say, sixteen.
Michael never saw his seventeenth birthday; he killed himself with one of those shotguns he brought to school in a guitar case. Unfortunately, he also took out two innocent people and wounded fourteen others.
The journalist Tom Nichols was, as far as I know, the first writer to identify the narcissism of boys like Michael Slobodian. In a 2015 article in TheFederalist he noted that,
Although mass killers understandably seize our imaginations and dominate the media, and not all dysfunctional young males are violent and not all of them gain the publicity they crave. Some are terrorists, others are murderers, and some are merely vandals. A few are traitors and deserters. What they all have in common is their gender (male), their race (most are white), and their youth (almost all under 30 at their peak destructiveness). Beyond this, they seem to share little beyond a stubborn immaturity wedded to a towering narcissism.
Michael was male, white, and well under thirty. His suicide note, found later that day at his house, depicts his “stubborn immaturity” and “towering narcissism” to a breathtaking degree:
To Whom It May Concern: My life is now gone to pot. I am going to eliminate certain people from this world. Those people are: Mrs. Wright, Mr. Bronson and any other sucker who gets in my way. I am then going to kill myself so as not to be imprisoned. I am not insane but just strictly fed up with life. I am not getting anywhere and it’s my fault. I love my parents and my family and I know that they love me. Michael Peter Slobodian.
He was personally fed up with life, so people had to die. If his life was bad, then other people should suffer too. That kind of reasoning makes sense to a narcissist.
When I left school that day I still didn’t know what had happened. “What was the accident?” I remember thinking. My question was almost immediately answered by a hysterical girl who had witnessed the atrocities. In answer to a comment from a friend she was walking with, she suddenly screamed, “Yeah, but you didn’t see him blow his fucking head off!”
I was confused. Someone had blown his own head off in my school? Why?
I walked the rest of the way home in a daze. I walked past the junior high school my younger sister attended. She tells me that she saw me walking home. Apparently, I was crying and didn’t notice her. I have no memory of this.
I got to our house. No one was home and the door was locked. My mother was at work. Luckily, most middle-class mothers in those days were housewives, so the lady next door invited me in. I told her why I was home early and she turned on the radio.
Then I found out what had happened while I was innocently sitting in French class.
After Michael arrived at school around 11:30 am, he entered a boys’ washroom, changed into military-style clothing, and loaded his rifles. A boy in grade thirteen (Ontario high schools went up to grade thirteen until 2003) surprised him in the washroom. The boy, John Slinger, was his next-door neighbor. He shot him point blank and killed him. He also wounded two other boys who made ill-timed visits to the washroom.
He then went searching for his English teacher, Margaret Wright. She was in the art section of the building which was just down the hall from the boys’ washroom because she taught art in addition to English. He entered her classroom and shot her to death, wounding two students in the room with her. She was twenty-five years old and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband were planning to move to Nova Scotia at the end of the school year.
Her future was wiped out in an instant because of a phone call home about skipping classes. She was doing her job (I know because I had the same job- high school teachers are required to phone home when students skip class or fail to turn in assignments).
Apparently, she had also ridiculed his writing in class. This was an unfortunate practice when I was growing up in the sixties and seventies. Teachers often felt entitled to humiliate students in front of other students in order (presumably) to shame them into doing better or even into quitting school (a teacher I had in Newfoundland literally told a working-class boy in my class to “give up” and get a job in front of a group of sniggering, mostly upper-middle-class adolescents). It was not a great pedagogical practice. But this woman was very young. Possibly she would have rethought her teaching methods if she had been allowed to live long enough to become a seasoned teacher.
Humiliating a narcissist can have devastating results. Especially if the narcissist is a young male and the one humiliating him is a woman.
After he had left Mrs. Wright dead, he walked down the hall toward the school cafeteria shooting at random students. After he had killed two people and wounded fourteen others, he turned the gun on himself and did what the hysterical girl screamed about a few minutes later.
This is what I learned from listening to the radio report with my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Crawford. There were more horrific details that I won’t go into. If you want to know more about what happened, you can read about it here and here.
Needless to say, it was a day that shattered my innocence.
Not only was there little understanding of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in 1975, Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder was not yet a thing. The way the students at Brampton Centennial Secondary School were treated after this tragedy shows that with crystal clarity. First of all, we were not given time to process the trauma. The shooting occurred on a Wednesday, and classes resumed the following Monday. As I walked the halls that Monday morning, I noticed brown smudges on the floor in front of the boys’ washroom where John Slinger had been killed and others had been wounded. Were those blood stains? My mind wanted to deny this, but it was confirmed years later that not only were the blood stains not all removed, a few bullet holes remained in random desks and other locations in the school that had been missed by the clean-up team.
I also found out that both Michael Slobodian and John Slinger lived on my street next door to each other, right across from my sister’s junior high school. In another case of supreme irony, John Slinger’s and Slobodian’s pictures were next to each other in that year’s school yearbook.
Mass shooting number two: Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America, February 13, 2023
This shooting took place in Berkey Hall on the sprawling (5200 acres) campus of Michigan State University, a school with over 50,000 students. It may be an odd mass shooting for me to choose to compare to the one I experienced as a fourteen-year-old in 1975, but there are numerous similarities.
First of all, I have a connection to the school. My father graduated from MSU in 1965. I remember living there in a small apartment in a housing complex for married students known as Spartan Village in the early sixties. Also, my husband teaches there. His class at Berkey Hall ended at 2:00 on the day of the shooting.
The most important similarity, however, is not my personal connection to the university, but the narcissism of the shooter.
In a January, 2023 article in the Atlantic, Tom Nichols goes into more detail about the narcissistic qualities of mass shooters:
the commonalities among these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret. They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace right-wing-extremist conspiracies.
Who was the shooter at the MSU shooting? His name was Anthony McRae. He was 43 years old. He had a history of unstable behavior as well as gun-related charges. He had been living with his father in Lansing, Michigan for over a year, mostly living in his bedroom and nursing resentments against former employers. He had no connection to MSU except for a rejection from a department at the university where he had applied for a job.
McRae’s father, Michael McRae, described his son as a “Mama’s boy” who had no friends and had never recovered from his mother’s death in 2020.
Like the typical violent narcissist described by Nichols above, McRae went mostly unnoticed until he exploded in a torrent of violence that killed three MSU students and wounded five others.
There were of course hints that he might act out, but those hints mostly look significant in hindsight. When he was charged with felony possession of a firearm in 2019, his case was pleaded down to a misdemeanor, so he was able to legally purchase the firearms he used on the victims at MSU. He shot a gun in his father’s Lansing back yard, but police did not press charges.
An important difference between McCrae and the typical mass shooter was his age. But like adolescent and young adult shooters, he was a case of arrested development, incapable of maintaining friendships, romantic relationships, or steady employment.
Like Michael Slobodian, he left a self-pitying suicide note explaining his resentments and determination to get revenge. He was apparently also angry at his firing from a Meijer warehouse and resented his co-workers there.
When McCrae’s suicide note was released on March 10, his resentments became clear: people hated him, they paid no attention to him, and he hadn’t had sex in ten years.
Yes, his grievances were about as serious as those of a high school student angry at his teachers for calling home or failing him in a class.
The administrative response: Brampton Centennial 2/10, Michigan State 10/10
As I shared above, my high school’s response to the tragedy of a mass shooting killing three people and wounding fourteen others, was to quickly and somewhat carelessly clean up the school, replace a few locker doors, and pretty much call it a day.
Every Monday there were announcements about the progress of the fourteen students, most of whom remained at Brampton Civic Hospital for several weeks, some for months. We were otherwise just supposed to get over it and do our school work as if nothing had happened.
Future generations of students at Brampton Centennial were not told of the events of that horrible day. If they asked about it, they were told that the shooting was a myth.
It seemed to those in charge as if erasing history would make all the evil go away.
The trauma stays within.
Twenty-three years after the trauma of Canada’s first school massacre, The Toronto Star newspaper ran a retrospective article on the events of that day. I remember reading it at age 37. I was married with a twelve-year-old daughter. I was a high school English teacher like Margaret Wright.
I had not thought much about the shooting in the intervening years, but the images in the paper and the recounting of the events hit me like the massive recoil from a T-Rex rifle. I began sobbing uncontrolably. I looked at the face of Michael Slobodian from his yearbook photo and felt an unbelievable sense of pathos for this lost boy. His face was handsome and sweet, belying the undeniable evil and selfishness behind it.
Of course the evil didn’t go away. There was another mass shooting at a school fourteen years later, the shooting known as the Montreal Massacre, also perpetuated by an aggrieved, narcissistic young man. After that, Canada’s gun laws changed. No one tried to sweep this shooting under the carpet. It became very difficult to buy firearms in Canada. Most of the firearms used in crimes in Canada to this day are illegally smuggled from the United States.
Michigan State’s response
Michigan State University president Theresa Woodruff immediately cancelled classes after the February 13 mass shooting. She assured students that Berkey Hall classes would be moved to other locations on campus. Professors were advised to cancel assignments due the weeks of and immediately following the tragedy. Students could also take a grief leave if they chose. All students were offered counselling services by the university. Vigils were held. Flowers piled up on campus. People could process their grief.
My husband showed a movie in the first class after the event and brought popcorn for his students.
Only a few of them showed up. Attendance was not taken, and, needless to say, nobody lost any participation marks.
The Political Response
Michigan’s Democratic govornor Gretchen Whitmer immediately called for commonsense gun laws for the state and was supported by her party. Michigan Republicans, who are in the minority, Tweeted sympathy for the victims, but, predictably, did not mention changing any laws. Gun shop owners argue that changing laws “Won’t do any good.” While I disagree with them, I have to admit that the culture of violence in the United States is even more to blame for mass shootings than lax gun laws. And people’s obsession with their individual rights over their responsibilities to society as a whole does not bode well for the future.
Things are not exactly changing very quickly. The MSU mass shooting was only one of more than a hundred in the first three months of 2023.
The answer is far from clear.
I don’t pretend to know the solution to this massive societal problem. Less narcissism would probably help. Perhaps more emphasis on mental health. Also more cooperation and more empathy. But this is not the American way. It is not even the Canadian way, much as I would like to tout my native country’s alleged superiority. Cooperation and empathy are perhaps not even the homo sapiens way. As a species, we sometimes exhibit these characteristics, but violence and demonizing of enemies always seems to win out over compassion and nonviolence.
And it only takes one narcissist to destroy the lives of the countless many.
Your insights here add to the strength if the comments you made shortly after the MSU shooting.
I had no idea you'd lived through a mass shooting. Although back in 1975 that had to have been a ridiculously unusual event. The only thing I can think of prior, that would have been only very vaguely comparable, was Charles Whitman shooting students from the University of Texas tower in the 1960s. That, was, like, an outrageous event as I understand it, and I think he was suffering from some kind of brain tumour. I don't remember this story; I was living in Florida at the time but in May 1975 my family probably didn't pay attention because we were under a lot of stress; my father was about to get laid off from work and we didn't know what would happen next.
I do vaguely remember Polytechnique although I don't think I paid much attention at the time because by 1989, mass shootings had become so common in the US we called it 'going postal'. Back then they were often due to workplace frustrations (I have a book on them here at home).
Now I'm absolutely disgusted at how commonplace they've become. I have no idea of what has happened to my people; but the cult of individualism and of course the NRA gun cult have a lot to do with it. Funny how they can do something about abortions they don't like, but their hands are tied when it comes to mass shootings, even in the schools. Sandy Hook happened about 45 mnutes from where I used to live in CT; if baby brains splattered all over a classroom walls (sorry to be so graphic) weren't enough to pull Republican heads out of their asses, nothing would.
I am so, so glad I live here now. I hope you and your hubby stay safe in Michigan; I have a bad feeling about living *anywhere* in the Ignited States.