Newman, Katherine S., Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth. 2004. "Rampage:. The Social Roots of School Shootings, " Basic Books (February 2004) ISBN 0465051030 Price $27.50.
Copyright The Washington Post Company Feb 17, 2004
RAMPAGE
The Social Roots of School Shootings
By Katherine S. Newman
Basic. 399 pp. $27.50
Even before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's horrifying 1999 assault on their Littleton, Colo., high school turned "Columbine" into a virtual synonym for such acts, school shootings were the signature social ill of the 1990s. Indeed the initial shock of these incidents drew a whole host of collective fears and anxieties in its wake: new agonies over "lost boys," amoral teen culture and the broader sense that American youth were vanishing into a nihilistic world of their own.
In her admirably thorough and clear-eyed study of school shootings and their aftermath, Katherine Newman patiently sorts through these and other alarmed reactions to the '90s school rampages, and finds most of them wanting. In 1999, the House of Representatives appointed Newman and a team of researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she teaches social policy, to conduct a detailed study of school shootings. Teams of interviewers went to the sites of two infamous shootings: Westside, Ark., where, in 1998, 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson pulled a fire alarm and then shot at 89 teachers and faculty at Westside Middle School, killing five people and wounding 10 more; and West Paducah, Ky., where, in 1997, 14-year- old Michael Carneal opened fire at a prayer group meeting at Heath High School, killing three students.
Newman's research team gave due weight to the familiar theories of what triggered these crimes -- all too ready access to guns in the home, excesses in youth-centered media, AWOL parents and community support systems -- but they ultimately found a more tangled, if less flashy, set of social dynamics behind the shootings. Far from marooning kids in a wasteland of anomie, Newman argues, the communities of Westside and Heath were too tightly knit. And the schools in particular -- which were, as in nearly all such incidents, the symbolic target of the shooters' wrath -- operated so as to avoid acknowledging the troubled and marginal boys who became vicious sociopaths seemingly overnight.
This dynamic was painfully clear in the Heath shooting. Michael Carneal was an awkward social misfit who tried desperately to win the approval of Heath's Goth clique. Like many shooters, he frequently announced his intentions among his peers, even warning friends to stay away from school that fateful Monday because he was planning "something big." A year before his rampage, an item in a school newspaper gossip column alleged that Michael was in a homosexual relationship with another student -- which predictably led to "an avalanche of bullying, teasing, and humiliation." Michael also turned in one disturbingly graphic essay for an eighth-grade writing assignment, recounting how a pair of misfit boys tortured, maimed and killed a group of "preps" and how one of them delivered their corpses to his mother as a birthday present.
A teacher at Heath received less graphic but still disturbing essays from Michael that displayed a fascination with suicide. Yet as Newman observes, these writings drew no attention from counselors or disciplinarians, in part because Michael had just come to Heath as a freshman out of middle school, and authorities at Heath, as at many other high schools (especially in smaller towns), overwhelmingly favor a "clean slate" policy, in which reports of infractions or behavior troubles from a prior school simply are not passed on. "The only information ninth grade teachers at Heath receive about their incoming freshman class are, according to one teacher, 'Mother's and father's name, home phone number, address, and their schedule. . . . As a consequence, most of the staff at Heath High School knew nothing about Michael Carneal's rocky experiences in middle school and had no reason to pay him closer heed."
Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson likewise telegraphed a range of warning signals to family members, peers and school authorities. Andrew reportedly killed neighborhood cats, harbored a strong fascination with guns (as the media reported after the Westside shooting, he received a rifle for his 6th birthday) and threatened harm to himself and others. Mitchell had been sexually abused by a neighborhood boy in Minnesota, where his family had lived; and on a visit to his father the summer before the shooting, he had been charged with molesting a 2-year-old girl. His father was so abusive, both verbally and physically, that his tirades would leave Mitchell physically ill. Before the rampage, he had been caught using a credit card to pay for phone sex, and his mother and stepfather talked about sending him back to Minnesota to live with his belligerent father. Against this backdrop, small setbacks at school - - getting cut from Westside's basketball team and dumped by a girlfriend -- were magnified into a consuming rage.
Yet no administrator, counselor or teacher at Westside had anything more than the faintest inkling that Mitchell Johnson -- a polite and deferential child in most classroom settings who would perform with church vocal groups at nursing homes -- carried any of this psychic baggage. His Minnesota juvenile arrest record was sealed, and most of the bouts of fury and anger he indulged among his peers never really penetrated Westside's protective bureaucratic husk. In part, these oversights grew out of the well-known adolescent codes of silence stigmatizing anyone who informs on his peers to adult authorities. But mainly, Newman argues, "the culture and social structure of American public schools leads to information loss, which in turn obscures the pain and anger inside some students -- emotions that, in rare cases, boil over into school shootings."
Newman puts forward a number of proposals to undam some of the channels of school communication, going beyond the dubious present vogue for enhanced security systems and often obtusely conceived and implemented "zero tolerance" behavior codes. She proposes a cohort of "school resource officers," outfitted like peace officers but charged with fraternizing among students, as they monitor disruptions and disturbing behavior. She also proposes campaigns to curtail rampant bullying, through educational and disciplinary measures alike, and to beef up counseling and psychological services generally. Of course, all these proposals cost money in schools that are already often strapped for cash. But as the course of events in Paducah, Westside, Littleton and scores of other places has grimly shown, the costs of institutional inertia can be far greater.
Less seriously...
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1350.cfm SCHOOL SHOOTING MAP MAY BE A HEXAGRAM EXTENDING FROM CANADA TO THE TIP OF SOUTH AMERICA! THE NORTH CENTRAL POINT IS HOPE, ARKANSAS!
Subtitle: In NEWS1344, we showed you a map gotten off a website bulletin board frequented by a former Satanist that depicted six of the school shootings as being located along two lines intersecting in Hope, Arkansas. The 120-degree angles were intriguing to us, as they suggested a Satanic hexagram. We have now confirmed this likelihood, suggesting Black Magick is being used at highest levels of the Clinton Administration.
The New World Order is coming! Are you ready? Once you understand what this New World Order really is, and how it is being gradually implemented, you will be able to see it progressing in your daily news!!
-- Michael Pugliese