Was the Tennessee Church Shooting A School Shooting ?

The shooting also drew my attention because, as a professor at a school of social work, I devote much of my time to the study of violent incidents. Having recently completed a book about school rampage shootings, I found myself comparing Adkisson to the adolescent shooters whom I had been studying. Was he cast from a similar mold despite the difference in age? I argue in my book that because the school shooters were adolescents, they were involved in that psychosocial crisis which the psychoanalyst Erik Eriksson referred to as "identity formation versus identity diffusion." They decided to commit an act of violence against themselves (and others) because they saw no future in the adult world. Adkisson was 58, in the middle of the stage which Eriksson called "Middle Adulthood," whose psychosocial crisis he defined as "generativity versus stagnation." By generativity he meant not simply having children but contributing to the establishment and guidance of the next generation. Such work might involve teaching, leading a youth group, or serving on the board of a not-for-profit. Stagnation might refer to a worker who remains in a job that has lost all meaning, or a wife trapped in a loveless marriage.

Adkisson was a man for whom life no longer seemed worth living. School shooters reach this state after years of being bullied and abused, abused physically or sexually, and rejected by peers and girlfriends. Social awkwardness, psychiatric problems and learning disabilities further aggravate the situation. Adkisson had failed in relationships (he had recently been divorced by his fourth or fifth wife) and failed vocationally (he had lost his job and could not find another.) His food stamps had been terminated, making survival difficult. According to some sources, he was alcoholic and subject to lingering dark moods. Alcoholism is often associated with getting developmentally "stuck," at the age when the drinking began.

Second, he wanted revenge. School shooters long to get back at the kids who tormented and excluded them, and teachers who treated them unjustly. Adkisson was enraged at those whom he perceived as having taken away his adulthood. The eminent criminologist Park Dietz has spoken of the danger inherent in this situation:

When somebody has so little to lose, so that it all seems meaningless to them, then they're likely to consider revenge as having considerable value. They may think of suicide as an escape from it all. That's a terrible combination, being suicidal and wanting revenge. That's at the heart of most of the workplace and school mass murders of the last 20 years. (Park Dietz, as quoted in The Hook, December 4, 2003)

Third, Adkisson had created a "sham ideology," a theory to support the violence he was prepared to commit. For school shooters, this usually consists of some garbled "philosophy" justifying homicide. It is usually compounded from a misreading of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, and too many viewings of the Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers. Adkisson's manifesto, a four page letter left in his SUV, explained how Liberals were responsible for much of the country's woes. Those of us who have followed the Bush administration's unraveling of the safety net and re-allotment of the Federal budget to corporate welfare and the war in Iraq found ourselves scratching our heads. The news that Adkisson's most recent ex-wife had once been a member of the congregation he had attacked provided a clue to how these antithetical ideas might have become conflated.