School shootings and other attacks that indiscriminately target victims pose special challenges for explanation. Their rarity, enigmatic psychology, and media appeal make it difficult to define the phenomena-to-be-explained in ways well suited for discovering persuasive etiological processes. Here theory in criminology has an especially valuable role to play. Working from general principles for interactively defining the problem to be explained and for developing explanatory hypotheses, I offer an explanation of ‘intimate massacres’ as the upshot of three contingencies: the pursuit of a point of no return; a project of destroying one’s personification in a given place; and a compelling desire to transform emotional chaos into a crystallized line of irresistible action. Once the motivation in the foreground of intimate massacres is understood, the relationship of these events to biographical and social ecological background factors will be comprehended in ways that contest the associations often suggested by folk sociology.

Theory is about starting points. Research usually relies on theory to justify starting with pre-commitments to independent variables, background factors, or structural conditions that will explain historically and geographically varying phenomena, which are treated as dependent, fungible, superficial upshots, or otherwise secondary and essentially inferior. I propose that we start by trying to describe the phenomena to be explained as they exist for the people living them. For this, we need theory of another sort, a theory of social ontology that indicates the lines of inquiry required to produce a complete description. If we start research by describing the nature of social phenomena as they are experienced, it will make a difference in structuring data gathering; in developing a research craft capable of seeing practice, interaction maneuvers, and tacit embodiment; in shaping a research agenda; and, ultimately, in where we end substantively.