Contemplate, maybe. But to actually carry them out, they most definitely do need to be disturbed.
The article is arguing that school shootings have become "normalised" or even "traditional"; there's a template to follow and kids are adopting that role, assembling a collection of grievances and weapons. It's a sort of self-radicalisation, like the Unabomber.
All we really have in response, at the moment, is punishment, hand-wringing, and band-aids over symptoms. Clearly this is ineffectual.
..but it doesn't change the fact that most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent. Given that definition, yes, I could see how "disturbed" or "mentally ill" fits. Having the mindset that committing mass murder is okay or justifiable is an aberrant thought pattern. Full stop, end of story.
Address that pattern, and you address the root of the problem.
I find the idea that "desensitiation to violence" is at all meaningful to be spurious at best. More tractable types believe the media narrative about, say, Columbine being caused by the shooters being avid fans of the FPS game Doom, but study after study can't find a link between games and real life violence.
There's also proof by inversion - the USA is famously inverse of the rest of the world, puritanical when it comes to sex, okay with violence. Therefore, you'd expect if the desensitization idea held any water, that the rest of the civilized world has a bigger problem than the USA with sexually-based crimes. I haven't seen evidence to that effect.
> most people would find the idea of picking up a weapon and killing random innocent people to be completely abhorrent.
That's how lynching used to happen; entire communities would turn out to murder some people simply because they were black.
US has been in more wars as the aggressor than any other country I'd guess, over the past couple of generations. Perhaps that mass death and resulting inpunity for people at the top contributes to these teenagers' lack of appreciation of the horror in their actions?
I agree 'conventionally disturbed' is a silly term. Hard to find one better; maybe, 'absent of any identifiable mental disorder that would likely explain their murderous actions'?
> glorify violence
> shifting focus from other problems
Blaming guns, violent video games, violent movies, etc. is just another example of shifting focus from the real problem.
Then there's the "threshold effect", which suggests that each shooter may require less emotional disturbance/aggression than the last - for just the right obsessive mind missing a few internal checks and balances, planning and executing an attack seems more and more perversely "normal".
Obsession and lack of empathy are still required though, for now. As such, ASD people are probably more at risk from the "normalization" of deviant behaviour than others. But there are many ways to de-humanize other people, and ASD is just one of them (radicalization is another one).
To me, that's the real risk of today's media landscape. I don't mean just the Internet, even mainstream media does not back away from publishing the "manifestos" of these deviants. As such, the behaviour becomes more normalized and it's worrying that the threshold lowers with each publication.
This isn't just an American thing even. We've had the shootings in Norway, stabbing of an army sergeant in England, hostage taking at the Dutch public news channel. In each of those cases, the perpetrators got more news coverage than the victims, which disturbs me. That's also why I won't provide links or names for the above, I don't want to feel complicit.
Only outside Norway. Here the focus was on NOT treating him as someone special and on providing for the victims and the future. I see Breivik's name far more often in English language media than in Norwegian.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
We are only talking about a handful of people.