17-year-old behind shooting at Iowa school: Why are more adolescents picking up guns in the US?

It’s the first week of the New Year and the United States has already witnessed its fourth mass shooting. Yet another school was targeted –this time in Perry, a city in Dallas County, Iowa. A gunman killed a sixth-grade student, aged 11 or 12, and injured five others at a high school in Perry on early Thursday. It was a 17-year-old student who opened fire and then died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

The gunman has been identified as Dylan Butler, a student of Perry High School. Four of the injured were students and one was the principal.

How teenage student carried out Iowa school shooting

The 17-year-old student at the high school is believed to have acted alone. The motive of the attack was not clear, according to law enforcement officials.

Dylan Butler was armed with two firearms – a handgun and shotgun – and a makeshift explosive device when he walked into Perry High School around 7.30 am. He opened fire on the campus minutes before classes resumed.

Students barricaded in offices, hid in classrooms and started fleeing as the gunfire started. But Butler killed one and left five injured, one of whom is reportedly critical. He then turned the gun on himself.

The police suspect that Butler planned to kill many more as an improvised explosive device was found on his body.

Also read: US mass shootings have risen to a high not seen since 2006. Here’s why

What do we know about the gunman Dylan Butler?

Before the shooting, Butler posted a cryptic message on TikTok saying “now we wait” as the song “Stray Bullet” by the German rock band KMFDM played in the background. The lyrics go as follows: “I’m your nightmare coming true, I am your worst enemy,” and “Stray bullet, from the barrel of love”. The song was also infamously used on the personal website of Eric Harris, one of the shooters of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, according to media reports.

Butlter’s video appeared to be shot in the school bathroom stall as a blue duffle bag was kept on the floor, the New York Post reported quoting local media.

Investigators have also found several other photos of Butler posing with firearms.

The teenage gunman’s friends told The Associated Press that he was a quiet person who was bullied for years.

“He was hurting. He got tired. He got tired of the bullying. He got tired of the harassment. Was it a smart idea to shoot up the school? No. God, no,” said 17-year-old Yesenia Roeder.

Her sister Khamya Hall, also 17, echoed similar views alongside their mother Alita. They said that their classmate, who police identified as the shooter, was bullied relentlessly since elementary school. That escalated recently, they said, when his younger sister started getting picked on too. Officials at the school didn’t intervene, they said, and that was “the last straw” for Butler.

Also read: America’s Darkest Side: How gun violence claims 114 lives on an average every day

Are young gunmen common in the US?

A disturbing new pattern appears to have emerged in mass shootings in the United States in the past few years. The number of young assailants appears to be on the rise, a shift from earlier decades.

Some of the deadliest mass shootings in the US since 2018 were by people who were 21 or younger. In June 2022, this included six of the nine most lethal attacks. Before 2000 most such incidents were often carried out by men who were in their mid-20s to 40s, according to a report by The New York Times (NYT).

In February 2018, a 19-year-old former student killed 17 people in a high school in Parkland; in May 2018, a 17-year-old shot dead 10 at a school in Santa Fe, Texas; and in August 2019, a 21-year-old gunman targeted a Walmart in El Paso that resulted in 23 deaths.

In March 2021, there was a mass shooting carried out by a 21-year-old at a supermarket in Colorado and in November 2021, a 15-year-old opened fire at his high school outside Detroit fatally shooting four classmates and injuring six others and a teacher. He was given life in prison in December 2023.

In May 2022, the Ulvade school shooting was carried out by an 18-year-old former student, killing 19 children and two teachers, and the mass shooter at a Buffalo supermarket was a 19-year-old gunman. He shot dead 10 people.

In 2023, there were at least five shooting incidents involving adolescents. The most shocking among them were reported from Arizona and Alabama: In May, a 20-year-old man shot four men to death and wounded a woman in a 12-hour crime spree in Phoenix, Arizona. In April, six suspects aged 15 to 20 were charged with reckless murder at a Sweet16 party in Alabama that killed four and injured 32.

Only two of the 30 deadliest shootings from 1949 to 2017 involved men younger than 21 – the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 by two teenagers who killed 13 and the killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012 where a 20-year-old killed 27 people, mostly children.

There has been an increased focus on how teenagers have been driven by the urge to acquire firearms and then carry out mass shootings. The reasons cited by law enforcement and academics include bullying, aggressive marketing of guns to boys, lax gun laws in US states and federal statutes that make it legal to buy a semiautomatic “long gun” at 18, the report in NYT says. Adolescents in the US also face a mental health crisis which has been worsened by the pandemic.

According to a report in The Conversation, young shooters in their 20s and 30s “typically study previous mass shooters for inspiration and validation”.

“Younger shooters also tend to communicate intent to do harm in advance. This practice, known as leakage, is often seen as a final cry for help,” write professors James Daley and Jillian Peterson, who run the Violence Project and are the authors of “The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.”

This appears to be the case with 17-year-old Dylan Butler. Probably his TikTok post was the SOS. Sadly, no one was listening.

With inputs from agencies