School Violence: Why Johnny Shoots

Posted by permission of Dr. Thomas O’Connor. Copyright by T. O’Connor.

 

“I don’t know why we’re here, but I’m pretty sure it’s not to enjoy ourselves.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

If every mention of suicide is a cry for help, then every instance of school shooting must be a scream of rage. Nationwide, since1992, it seems (and in some places before then), students beganviolating every sanctity or taboo that existed in school decorum. It’s not just high schools and colleges, but the middle schools and elementary schools, as well, where violence is spreading. Campus crime is a special case that is discussed later. Yale professor Jerome Singer has tracked numerous problem behaviors in kindergarten through fourth grade, and surmises that some problem children have just never grown out of their “terrible twos.” Ask any teacher who has been teaching for some time, and they’ll tell you classroom discipline is a lot harder these days. Some say our school systems are out of control, and some media pundits refer to schools as “killing fields” where students, teachers, administrators, and staff aren’t safe anymore. A study by the CDC in 1995 found that nearly one-fourth of students regularly carry a weapon to school, and even though student assaults on other students are the most common type of school violence, other studies have consistently found that, in any given year, 28% of teachers are verbally abused, 15% are threatened with injury, and 3% are physically attacked by a student. In this lecture, some probable hypotheses for the phenomenon of school violence are examined, with a focus upon the psyche and mindset of school shooters and adolescents today.

It’s difficult to get a handle on trends and patterns in school violence, but that hasn’t stopped some states from trying. North Carolina, for example, attempts to analyze the data annually. The tracking system used in NC changed from fourteen reportable offenses to 17 (legally-reportable) ones sometime around 1998, and here’s a table of those offenses with the top ones for 2005-2006 marked with an asterisk:

Offense Types of School Crime and Violence

1. Assault resulting in serious injury*
2. Assault involving use of a weapon
3. Assault on school personnel*
4. Bomb threat
5. Burning of a school building
6. Death by other than natural causes
7. Kidnapping
8. Possession of alcoholic beverage*
9. Possession of controlled substance*
10. Possession of firearm or powerful explosive
11. Possession of a weapon*
12. Rape
13. Robbery with a dangerous weapon
14. Robbery without a dangerous weapon
15. Sexual assault
16. Sexual offense
17. Taking indecent liberties with a minor
18. Other offense (not legally-reportable)

A COMMENTARY ON THE SORRY STATE OF TODAY’S GENERATIONS

It’s easy to blame it on peers, violent music, TV, or computergames, but doesn’t the real problem have something to do with the sorry state ofeducation today? Or the way baby boomers dumped on the children of the 70’s and 80’s? Regarding the first possibility, it can be argued that most schools today are under-funded, poorly staffed, overlyregimented, bleak, boring places stuck on perpetuating a 18th Century model of classroom teaching complete with bells, bad furniture, forced group activities, overpriced textbooks, the joke we call cafeterias, grade inflation, clueless self-serving administrators, and teachers who can’t wait to update their resumes in hopes of getting a better job elsewhere only to be replaced by an endless stream of second-careerists and teacher-wannabes who want to take their turn at it. It can also be argued that teachers spend way too much time on building self-esteem at the expense of important content (“Great job on inventive spelling, Susie, cat really does sound like k-a-t”).

Other possibilities exist to explain the sorry state of today’s youth. It’s possible that we have over-idealized diversity and multiculturalism, a sensitive matter that deserves more open discussion. Murray (2003) argues that we have sacrificed too much of our Anglo-European heritage in futile attempts to make women and other minority cultures look like they were some of the “greats” in civilization-building. It may be true that other cultures have had their great works plundered or don’t have a lengthy tradition of named luminaries, but admitting that it was mostly white men who built our civilization up in the arts and sciences should not be considered a racist thesis. Progress is a relative term, and some things remain the same — whom to marry, where to live, what to do — while other things become easier — travel, life expectancy, global communication, home ownership for the majority — and while other things become harder —being happy, showing gratitude, alleviating anxiety. Easterbrook (2003) refers to the mental condition of today’s generations as “collapse anxiety” which means people have so much nowadays, it’s hard to expect the coming years to bring more. Instead of being happy, we fear the economy will collapse, our natural resources will run out, or some crazy act of super-terrorism will wipe out the human race. Emmons and McCullough (2004) have also conducted gratitude research and found that young people today are sorely lacking in dispositions related to happiness and gratitude.

If you were born between 1965 and 1984, then you belong to the Hip Hop Generation (if you’re black), and to Generation X (if you’re white), at least according to Kitwana’s (2002) demarcation of those generations. If you were born after those dates, then you are a 13th Gen (Strauss 1993). If you were born before those dates, then you belong to the “Superfly” generation (if black) and the baby boomers (if white). The defining features of the Hip Hop Generation are anti-intellectualism, irresponsible parenthood, immense wealth, power, and glorification of criminal lifestyle. The defining features of Generation X (that are shared with the Hip Hop Generation) are bitterness, a tendency to avoid personal responsibility, a tendency to play the blame game, and a tendency to demand fairness in outcomes rather than work the process for achieving fairness in outcomes. All of these characteristics are typical, and easily predicted, of any post-segregation population in any postmodern society that has moved beyond its Civil rights stage of development. Some of these characteristics explain why students seem to resist learning and why they often behave in such mystifying ways toward teachers. Even students who apply themselves to learning may be letter-perfect in a school subject and still fail spectacularly in transferring that knowledge from the classroom to the real world, and conversely, success in the real world is no guarantee of success in school (Gardner 2003). Almost all the literature suggests that employers who hire recent graduates report more disciplinary incidents of unruliness and workplace violence (Baron & Wheeler 1994).

Turning to how previous generations have “dumped” on today’s generations, consider that 22 percent of children under the age of eighteen live in poverty, not relative poverty, but absolute poverty. That’s just one of the impacts of a +50% divorce rate (Wallerstein 2001). A known fact in criminology is that adolescents from lower socioeconomic status (SES) families regularly commit more violence than youth from higher SES levels. An upwardly mobile family system has always been the best way to multiply capital, and the secret of generational success has always been having a steady family who works at moving up together year after year, not some part-time serial parent who works at making ends and reinforces some get-rich-quick scheme. The latter tends to produce over-idealistic, go-it-alone dot.com millionaire fantasies with cause a strain toward crime. Families not only pass on money, but important values like love, honor, obedience, responsibility, accountability, honesty, commitment, loyalty, respect, and work ethic. When it is said that today’s generations have it tougher than previous generations, what is primarily meant by this is that, today, there are more extreme conditions of declining social morality and family commitment to social mobility than the generations before. It also doesn’t help that today’s generation grew up with nothing but sound bites instead of reasoned discourse about social problems. Many of them learned, the hard way, from AIDS that sex kills, that their brains on drugs sounded like frying eggs, that they should always wear a condom and can get one from the school nurse, that making a video for MTV produced a quick buck, that superjocks celebrities could get away with crime, that the service sector would be the fastest growing part of the economy but that this consisted mostly of low-paying McJobs, and that Social Security would run out soon. The worst news of all was that they would be the first generation in American history to do worse economically than their parents. In the meantime, they spent a lot of time eating junk food and watching TV, 19,000 hours of it, in fact, by the time they finish high school, twice the amount of time than all their classroom hours put together since first grade. By eighteen, they will have seen 200,000 acts of violence, including 40,000 murders, not including the additional 10,000 murders solved by CSI and the like which provide, from one perspective, a guide on how to better plan and get away with murder.

Also to be considered is the prevalence of abuse in schools, particularly sexual abuse. Not only are schools places where “bullying” occurs between students, sometimes so bad, the victim commits suicide, and Marr & Field (2001) call this “bullycide.” Bullying is something that goes on in almost all workplaces with backstabbing coworkers and megalomaniac bosses, but in the school context, it is manifested in some rather strong ridicule rituals. However, it is the changing relationship between teachers and students which is most interesting. Teachers don’t seem to physically or mentally abuse students as much as they used to. Instead, there has been a sharp increase in sexual abuse, often reported in the media as “sexual trysts” where the sex was presumably voluntary. Church-school sexual abuse cases are not uncommon, especially at the hands of abusive priests, but what is not as well known is that public schools have a fair amount of sex going on between employees and students. In 2004, the Education Dept. commissioned a study into educator sexual misconduct, and the lead investigator, Prof. Charol Shakeshaft, found that 10% of students through K-12 have been targets of sexual attention by school employees, the most common group of offenders being teachers, followed by coaches, followed by substitute teachers, followed by bus drivers. At the college level, the prevalence may be even higher than 10% as numerous chat rooms and so forth on the Internet have proliferated a “Sex for an A” culture and college professors typically feel a little more invulnerable than other educators. In sum, schools today are vastly different places than the idyllic centers of learning that many officials think can do the job of delinquency prevention if given the chance.

THE ADOLESCENT PSYCHE OF SCHOOL SHOOTERS

School violence is unlike workplace violence. The offender doesn’t “snap” and suddenly go wild. Instead, they plan, acquire weapons, and frequently tell others what they are planning. A lot of kids in schools carry out such planning and announcing. The Secret Service, which has studied assassins extensively, says with school shooting, there’s no profile or checklist of warning signs to differentiate the planners from those likely to carry out their plans. Some of those who go all the way are straight-A, ideal, all-American students from stable and good families. Some are children of divorce and loners. A few of them write poetry, songs, or drawings that show some fascination with death. Some of the things they say to their friends are: “I think it would be cool to kill people” or “I think I could get away with killing people,” but again, neither the extent of planning nor the extent of announcing are reliable indicators.

School shooters don’t usually suffer from any sort of mental illness, although many are described as desperate and depressed. The most common attribute is a sense of disconnectedness – from society, and from wanting to end some generalized sense of unjustness or unfairness of it all. Homicidal urges develop out of a sense of being overwhelmed with the mundane details of life, as opposed to suicidal urges which more likely arise from the stressful, extraordinary events in life. The following are some typical comments made by school shooters when interviewed after their shootings:

• “I’m not insane. I’m just angry and miserable because people like me are mistreated every day” [Luke Woodham]

• “I’m just full of rage. Everyone and everything it seems, is against me” [Kip Kinkel]

• “My hatred for humanity forced me to do what I did” [Eric Houston]

• “It wasn’t that I particularly disliked anybody. I just wanted to kill people” [Scott Pennington]

A common theme in the school shooter’s psyche is a sense that life’s not worth fixing, and this is NOT the same as a sense of life’s not worth living. In most cases, the shooter has not withdrawn from life, but the responsibility for exerting any effort at achieving any changes or chances for achievement in life anymore. In this sense, school shooting is similar to celebrity crime, or crimes by the wealthy and famous, for what does one do when they’ve reached the top? This makes sense when we consider that some of the school shooters were straight-A success stories in their schools. The most significant question to ask is Why the school? Why do shooters choose the school as the place to carry out their acts? The answer that one typically gets back from a school shooter is “Because that’s where most of my pain and suffering was” or “That’s where the people were.”

HYPOTHESES AND MODELS OF SCHOOL VIOLENCE

Violent school shooters aren’t freaks or geeks with problemsin anger management. Surely a few have beenbullied by cliques or classmates, but the more typical school shooter perceives somegrievous injustices being done all around them. Such people are typically introverted andself-conscious types. Columbine’s shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, whokilled themselves after their rampage, seem to fit a had-it-with-educationmodel. Their planning and announcement cycles were clearly aimed at the school environment as both the problem and solution for their troubles.

Frequently, 13 and 14-year boys (the typical age and sex of shooters) all seem to say the same thing — “I was angry, and I killed them becausethey mistreated me every day.” That’s exactly what was said by Evan Ramsey, for example, an Alaskan 1997school shooter nicknamed”Screech”, after a geeky character in the TV show, Saved by the Bell. The theme of being mistreated before going on a killing rampage is a theme that comes up again and again in the anecdotal evidence, and, indeed, the peer mistreatment model seems to be a popular layexplanation of school violence.

Other experts say the most recent spat of school shootingsstarting in 1997 hallmarked the contagion model set by Luke Woodham, a 16-year old in Mississippi who killed his mother and two classmates,wounding seven others. Woodham told the police who took his confession, “Iguess everyone is going to remember me now.” Serving multiple lifesentences, he has since expressed remorse. Nathaniel Brazill, the 13-year old who killed his language-arts teacher in Florida said “I guess I’m going to be all over the news now.” Obviously, some sort of copycat effect or imitation is going on, consistent with contagion models.

Another proximate factor in many of the shooters’ lives, afactor they have in common with perpetrators of workplace violence, is agirlfriend relationship gone bad, some kind of teen romance model.Jacob Davis used a magnum bolt-action rifle to shoot his girlfriend’s ex-loverat his Tennessee high school in 1998. At the time, he also received news of acomputer science scholarship to college. He had been brooding for over threemonths on his girlfriend’s disclosure that she slept with another boy beforehim. The problem with this model is that, of course, not all school shooters hadromantic problems.

Another proximate factor is a decline in the quality of communication with parents and adults. Parents seem to be the more important factor here, in relation to a shooter’s perception of their peers. What this means is that when peer communication declines, the youth wants to be able to talk to his parents (in compensation for a loss of communication with peers), but cannot, and therefore generalizes some sense of disconnection across settings. The transmission and consistency of aggression across settings (such as the home and school) is the person-environment model. This model integrates children’s family functioning with their relationships with peers outside the home.

Psychiatrists stake their claim on the possibility that school shooters are sufferingfrom mental illness. Prosecutors stake their argument by saying shooters are justunredeemable psychopaths. Medical professionals commonly diagnosedepression with psychotic features. Others experts say shooters have schizophrenia or its precursors. Sixty percent of school shooters are taking some type of prescribed medicationat the time of their shootings, something for insomnia, sleep disorder, orattention deficit disorder.It’s easy to blame Ritalin for family andschool problems, and genetics for motivational problems, but doesn’t someoneneed to ask about what conditions prompted the need for medication and/ortherapy?

Of course, access to guns has come uptime and again as a factor. A survey conducted by the Institute of Ethicsestimates that one in every five males bring a weapon to high school. Like drugs, the availability of guns falls into an enslavementor escalation model. Some researchers seem to be saying no child canresist those shiny, easy-to-fit-in-the-hand toys that just beg to be pointed atsomeone and have their trigger pulled. Does the finger pull the trigger or thetrigger pull the finger? The extent of the latter is the enslavement model where kids are caught up in a fascination with guns and that trigger seems to just need pulling. Onthe other hand, school violence may be the final escalation in a series ofprecipitating events, the equivalent of heroin after experimentation withgateway drugs.

THE POLICY VACUUM FOR COUNTERING SCHOOL VIOLENCE

On August 10th, 2001, the CDC (Center for Disease Control)released its study of school-related killings from 1992 to 1999. Overall, theyfound a steadily falling trend of rare events. Less than 1% of homicides andsuicides happen at school. A school-related killing was defined as happening oncampus, at an off-campus function, or on the way to and from school. Februaryled the months of such happenings, with one school shooting every four days.September followed with one every six days. December and June were the quietestmonths. Overall, there is one school shooting every seven days in America.Anyway, the CDC epidemiologists concluded that school shootingsare highest after calendar breaks, during the stressful start of those semesters when students are adjusting to new teachers, classrooms, topics, andclassmates.

There have been many suggestions on what to do, and they fall easily into conservative, liberal, and bureaucratic ideas. The knee-jerk conservative reaction involves armed guards and metal detectors. Metal detectors and weapon searches may add insult to injury. A similar recommendation is more regimen and student uniforms, such as white shirts and black slacks. Strict No Weapons enforcement has resulted in some ridiculous instances of children sent home (and even prosecuted) for small keychain knives and extra-sharp pencils. Strict No Name-calling enforcement has been proposed and implemented in some jurisdictions. Some suggest forbidding TV to cover school shootings, as if the media would honor these kind of gag orders.

Liberal ideas include doing away with compulsory secondaryeducation all together and expanding the options for home schooling. Othersuggestions involve minor tinkering like the establishment of 24-hour toll-freehotlines where students can phone in tips. Some advocate doing away with thecelebration of achievements based on strength or beauty, such as athletics andcheerleading.

The most grandiose bureaucratic idea is building more schools, smaller schools. Taxes would have to be raised, of course, but smaller schools should have more warmth and security. If you look around, the whole trend in school construction is to build big, and corrections learned its lesson about this during the 1980s. Another bureaucratic idea is expansion of the parental responsibility laws by making the parents responsible unless the child is in counseling or the parents can prove they were making efforts. This recommendation involves immunity under both criminal and civil law if parents are acting responsibly. Currently, parents don’t have to be criminally liable to be sued in civil court, and by making the two compatible (a tort reform that would be difficult to do, since criminal and civil law have their own traditions and principles) with clearly established liability guidelines and escape hatches, families would apparently pay notice to these legal incentives.

A FOCUS ON COLLEGE CAMPUS CRIME

With campus crime, the policy problem is different. Instead of a void or vacuum, political leaders have a tendency to throw legislation at the problem without looking into the criminology of campus crime (Fisher & Sloan 1995; Nicoletti et. al. 2001). No less than three (3) major pieces of legislation were passed in the 1990s:

• the Campus Crime and Security Act of 1990

• the Campus Sexual Assault Victims Bill of Rights of 1991

• the Higher Education Amendments of 1998 (the Jeanne Clery Act)

The cause of campus crime, according to most criminological expertise, is the campus culture itself. Many things that college students regard as “cool” are criminal behaviors, and college students are typically independence-oriented and more prone toward vigilantism than crime reporting. Campus crime is facilitated by an ethos of “binge drinking” and a certain mentality of sexism and racism that is widely tolerated. With rape, for example, government studies, such as those conducted by the OVC, have shown that more than 50% of college females who have been raped are likely to “redefine” it as not-rape. The federal and state governments have consistently had the hardest time getting colleges to accurately report murder and manslaughter on campus as anything other than “miscellaneous incidents.” Campus security is perceived as a joke on most college campuses, and legislators are reluctant to grant teachers, staff, or campus security personnel exceptions to Gun-Free Safe School Zone provisions, as if simply insisting schools be gun-free makes them so. Instead of real, practical, security measures which address the causes of campus crime, most places chase after the funding sources which are readily available for fairly meaningless things like victim-related commemorative observances such as National Crime Victims’ Rights Week, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Sexual Assault Awareness Month, National Drunk and Drugged Driving Awareness Week, Mock Court Alcohol Awareness events, Rophynil and Date Rape Awareness Day, etc. The really sad thing is that government funding is plentifully available for criminologists and researchers to evaluate these futile awareness programs. This diverts scholarly attention away from real problems and solutions, and schools never quite become safer places, but the recipients of funding get to say they received a grant.

In addition, there is a serious, unrecognized mental health problem on college campuses involving a doubling of rates of depression and a tripling of rates of suicide since 1988 (Kadison & DiGeronimo 2004). More college students than ever before are suffering from serious and life-threatening emotional conflicts and mental illness, and the crisis pervades campuses at every level, size, academic status, and geographic location. Mentally ill college students desperately need detection, early intervention, and ongoing treatment precisely at a time when there has been a dramatic decline in financial or administrative support for such services. The causes of college mental illness appear to be developmental issues (such as relationship, sexuality, and roommate problems) combined with academic pressures (rigor for the sake of rigor, extracurricular demands, parental expectations, and diversity issues) combined with financial problems (how to pay off college bills and plan for employment or graduate school). More and more people are getting into college who couldn’t have done so before because they are on anti-depressant medication which allows them to do the minimum necessary to stay in school. Not all people with mental illness are potentially violent and dangerous, but some are, and developing adequate safeguards and protection for this admittedly low-risk threat should not be sacrificed for the cause of eliminating the stigma of mental illness.

REFERENCES
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Kitwana, B. (2004). Why White Kids Love Hip Hop. NY: Basic Books.

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Online Resources