When the children of a society start pointing guns at each other, confining the discussion only to the security measures at the school gate is talking about the result and missing the cause.
The incident of a 15-year-old student shooting at his peers with a pump-action shotgun in Manisa's Turgutlu district was discussed at first glance under the headings of access to weapons, school security and peer violence. However, the school attacks that have occurred repeatedly in Turkey and around the world in recent years bear the traces of another social transformation that operates more deeply.
The language of violence is changing.
And one of the scariest words in this new language is visibility.
The findings reflected in the investigation after the attack in Manisa are remarkable. It was reported that the suspect had shot the rifle he used in the attack about a month before, that he had deleted the correspondence on his phone before the attack, and that there were notes on different ideological movements and texts considered as manifestos in his room. These alone do not explain the reason for the attack; However, it also makes it difficult to read the incident as just a sudden outburst of anger.
Moreover, Manisa is not an isolated case.
In the indictment regarding another school attack in Kahramanmaraş, it was revealed that the 14-year-old attacker had thoroughly researched past school massacres in different countries of the world. It was reflected in the file that he compared the previous attackers in terms of the number of people they killed, described one of them as his "favourite" and tried to position his own action within this dark history.
Why does a fourteen-year-old child investigate massacres committed years ago in other countries?
Why does he know the name of an attacker?
Why does he calculate the number of people he killed?
And why does he compare himself to her?
These questions take us out of the school gate and into the culture of the age.
Because the digital world has not only changed the way we communicate. It has also transformed the meaning of being recognized, valued and even existing.
For the first time in human history, an ordinary individual can be seen by millions of people within a few hours. Visibility is no longer just the result of the artist, politician, scientist, or public achiever; It has become a value that must be obtained in itself.
To be followed.
Being watched.
To be shared.
To be talked about.
Going viral.
The visibility economy of the digital age sends an extremely strong message, especially to the younger generations: If you are seen, you exist.
Opposing this culture are children who feel invisible in their family, school, circle of friends or society.
This is why it is insufficient to explain the contemporary form of school attacks solely in terms of individual anger. Because in some attacks, violence is no longer just an expression of anger; At the same time, it can become a means of emerging from invisibility, producing an identity and declaring oneself to the world.
Academic literature has long discussed this phenomenon.
In studies examining mass attacks in the USA between 1966 and 2018, "fame-seeking" is considered as a separate motivation category. Perpetrators associated with the pursuit of fame appear to be more likely to target schools and receive greater media visibility following the attack than other perpetrators.
An extremely dangerous cycle emerges:
The perpetrator wants to be visible. He resorts to violence. The media is spreading the attack as part of its duty. The perpetrator becomes visible.
While society thinks that it has condemned the attacker, sometimes it produces the reward he desires with his own hands.
After an attack by a young man, his photo appears on millions of screens. His childhood is being investigated. Photos of his room are published. Social media accounts are scanned. The texts he wrote are examined line by line. The symbols he uses are being analyzed. His name remains in the headlines for days.
Thus, a person who has felt invisible throughout his life can achieve global visibility with a few minutes of violence.
The problem starts right here.
Because the digital age does not only make the attacker visible; He leaves a scenario to the child who will come after him.
This is why the phenomenon discussed in the scientific literature as "contagion", that is, the contamination effect, is important. Studies conducted in the USA found that after a school attack, there is an increase in the likelihood of other attacks within a certain period of time. This finding does not mean that violence is simply imitated. However, it does show that the intense circulation of the attack may offer a model of action to some individuals who are already vulnerable.
The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 was one of the most striking examples of this.
Images, diaries, videos, clothes and life stories of the attackers have circulated digitally for years. Over time, a subculture formed around the attackers. References to the Columbine perpetrators have emerged in some school attacks in other countries of the world.
A massacre was thus no longer merely a crime that occurred in the past; It has turned into a cultural reference that can be reproduced in the memory of the digital age.
Therefore, it is not an ordinary detail for a 14-year-old child in Turkey to investigate school attacks carried out in other countries of the world, to know the perpetrators by name and to compare them based on the number of people they killed.
We are no longer faced with childhood violence that can only be explained with the sentence "he got angry and took up arms."
We are faced with a digital generation that can trace the history of violence, recognize its perpetrators, access its images in seconds, and place itself within that dark narrative.
At this point, blaming social media alone would be oversimplifying the issue.
The real problem is the broader cultural transformation on which social media is based: the transformation of visibility into value.
We offered children a world that rewards being noticed before success, exhibition before production, and interaction before depth.
Attention is the currency of this world.
And in the attention economy, the boundary between positive and negative visibility is increasingly eroded.
It may take years for a person to reach millions of people with scientific success. It can take years for an artist to be recognized. It is a long and difficult journey for a young person to establish an identity for himself through education, sports and production.
However, in a few minutes, violence can provide the visibility that all these cannot provide.
Herein lies the dangerous paradox of our age:
Man is more visible than ever before; The child can feel more invisible than ever.
Therefore, it is not enough to discuss school shootings solely in terms of higher walls, more cameras, metal detectors and security guards.
Because you can put a metal detector at the door of the school.
But you can't pass through the device the invisibility ingrained in a child's mind.
You can make it harder for him to reach the gun.
But unless you change the culture that gives fame to violence in return, you will only obstruct the tool.
So now it's just "Where did this kid get the gun?" It is not enough to ask the question.
We have to ask one more question:
Since when was this kid invisible?
And then perhaps we should ask ourselves the most difficult question:
Are we informing the society when we keep the name, face, life story, writings and images of an attacker in circulation for days? Or are we reproducing the visibility promised by violence?
This debate is precisely behind the emergence of journalistic approaches around the world that advocate against highlighting the names and images of attackers unnecessarily.
Because when the reward of violence is visibility, everyone who makes it visible has to rethink this cycle.
Of course we have to take the guns away from the children.
But it's not enough.
We also have to take fame away from violence.
