The First Modern School Shooter Feels Responsible for the Rest

[DonViejo]

Michael Daly

She uttered the infamous ‘I don’t like Mondays.’ Some 35 years after she killed two and wounded eight in a California schoolyard, Brenda Ann Spencer faced her victims in a parole hearing.

In a prison two-and-a-half hours from the scene of the UCSB murders sits the killer who started it all, with the first high-profile school shooting more than three decades ago.

“With every school shooting, I feel I’m partially responsible,” Brenda Ann Spencer told the parole board back in 2001. “What if they got the idea from what I did?”

Spencer was 16 on Jan. 29, 1979, when she opened fire with a .22 rifle on Grover Cleveland Elementary School across from her home in San Diego, killing the principal and the custodian while wounding eight youngsters and a police officer.

“I don’t like Mondays,” she famously replied when asked her motive.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/30/the-first-modern-school-shooter-feels-responsible-for-the-rest.html

[KurtNYC]

1. It seems like these shoot-everyone-types are very self-absorbed -- It's all about THEM.

The current psycho likely knew absolutely nothing about Brenda as he was so obsessed with the movie "Chronicle" that he wrote his manifesto as a screenplay and imitated the life of one of the main characters of Chronicle by recording himself on video.

These types seldom cite other shooters as their inspiration as they all convince themselves that they and they alone are God. My friend worked the intake at St Vincents psych ward on an Easter weekend. 3 guys came in all claiming to be Jesus Christ -- 2 of them got in a fist fight over which of them was the real Jesus.

ETA: I note that Brenda and the author of that article fail to aknowlege all the school shootings that happened in the 3 years before hers so it would seem that Brenda Mondays was likewise NOT inspired by other shooters and still does not aknowledge that she is just another psycho with a gun:

Brampton 5/28/1975 -- 3 dead
Ottawa 10/27/1975 -- 2 dead
Winnipeg 10/1978 -- 1 dead, shooter said the victim insulted the band KISS
Lansing MI 2/28/1978 -- 1 dead, others injured, shooter was self-proclaimed Nazi
Austin Texas 5/17/1978 -- John Daniel Christian, son of Lyndon B. Johnson's former press secretary George Christian, shot to death his English teacher, Wilbur Grayson, 29. He was not prosecuted and is now a practicing attorney in Austin, Texas

[tblue37]

2. Adam Lanza kept reams of data about mass shooters and their "scores" in his

room. He felt it was a kind of competition, like a videogame, where the highest score wins.

So I am sure you are right that they don't compare themselves with other individual shooters exactly, and they do not know *her* specifically, but the media circus that makes shooters into stars does seem to have some influence, and there is a chain of influence since hearing so much about one might be a factor that leads to the next, then the next, then the next.

I read a very good book some months ago that links mass school and workplace shootings to the mean turn in society ushered in by the Reagan election. The book (_Going Postal_) points out how much pressure (both economic and social) and bullying increased after Reagan and the RW Republicans yanked our society toward nastiness on steroids.

[brush]

3. No, the first one was in 1966 . . .

at the University of Texas? Charles Whitman killed 13 and wounded many others from the UT tower.

[sinkingfeeling]

5. My exact thoughts.

[Atman]

4. But she is responsible for one of the best songs of the 70's.