Earlier today, a 12-year-old girl died from the injuries she sustained during Friday’s shooting at Debsirin Nonthaburi School in Nonthaburi, Thailand. She’s the eighth victim of this attack, and she earned that number in a hospital bed instead of a classroom, which is kind of its own cruelty.

Again, the shooting happened yesterday morning. A 14-year-old boy shot his grandparents dead at their home with his grandfather’s own gun, then walked into his school and kept firing until five teachers were dead and he decided to stop by shooting himself. More than thirty people were hurt in between.

While no motive has been officially released, a friend told police he’d been ‘under stress’ at school. Some of his relatives told Thai reporters the opposite, that they saw nothing wrong with him at all, no warning signs, nothing that would have made anyone look twice. If the stress angle holds up at all, it’s not hard to imagine it as the spark, the thing that tipped him from resentment into planning violence.

While stress could possibly explain why a kid might crack, it doesn’t explain the discipline it takes to walk into your grandparents’ house with a plan already in motion, kill them quietly enough that police didn’t find the bodies until after the school attack, then carry that same composure into a building full of people and keep firing with the kind of accuracy the national police chief himself flagged as notable.

Thailand’s prime minister called this attack “well prepared,” with “clear steps and clear goals.” That’s not the language of a kid who ‘just snapped.’ That’s the language of someone who built a plan and rehearsed it and had the patience to strike at just the right opportunity.

Again, stress from school might be true, and it might even be part of what got him thinking down this road in the first place. But the structure of what he did, the sequencing, the target selection, and the composure under fire read like something borrowed rather than improvised.

I still think the far more likely source for that structure is the same one so many of these American-style attacks trace back to, the so-called True Crime Community that turns school shooters into folklore for kids looking for a script. Stress might have opened the door, but the TCC is what probably pushed him through.

(Source)

• 12-year-old girl dies after Thailand school shooting, bringing death toll to at least 8