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Motivations For Targeted School Violence: Examining The Influence Of Social Rejection And Violent Video Games On Aggression, Maxwell R. Christensen

Honors Scholar Theses

This Thesis Project investigates putative causes for mass-casualty violence in America’s schools. Both popular and scientific literatures suggest a variety of factors to explain these events, including violence in media such as movies and video games, gun culture, social constructions of masculinity, as well as social isolation, rejection, and disaffection among youth. Whereas such factors are not present in every incidence of mass violence and have yet to be demonstrated as explicitly causal variables, significant evidence points to social rejection in the form of bullying experiences and consumption of violent media such as first-person-shooter video games as representing key driving …