Examination of school shootings provides important lessons
For the handful of people like me who make a career of studying multiple murder, as well as for the millions of Americans whose fascination with the topic seems limitless, each decade has had its defining episodes of carnage. The 1960s, sometimes regarded as the onset of an age of rage in America, had Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman, student-nurse slayer Richard Speck, and the infamous Manson family. The 1970s featured the so-called "Killer B's" -- Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz, and Kenneth Bianchi -- and a new focus on serial homicide. The string of post-office massacres in the 1980s inspired the phrase "going postal," used generically for disgruntled employees and former employees who take their turn at doing the firing -- literally.
But the 1990s brought us a new kind of terror that not one criminologist had anticipated -- youngsters, barely old enough to shave, getting even and getting lots of attention by turning their schools into personal war zones. The shocking repetition of mass murder in the most unlikely of places, from rural Arkansas to faraway Alaska, gave parents everywhere new worries concerning the state of public schools.
The level of panic across America peaked, of course, when two teenagers at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo., slaughtered 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives. In the process, "doing a Columbine" replaced "going postal" on the minds of angry avengers.
The Columbine phenomenon sparked a cottage industry in books, pamphlets, and seminars on how to protect children. Most of these guides recommended foolish, worthless, and even counterproductive initiatives such as profiling students, zero-tolerance policies, and fortresslike security. Yet one book, "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings," stands apart as a reasonable, well-researched exception.
Harvard's Katherine Newman, writing with several of her doctoral students, draws heavily on two particular tragedies: the 1998 massacre of five students at a Jonesboro, Ark., middle school at the hands of two boys, ages 11 and 13, and a 1997 triple murder by a high school freshman in West Paducah, Ky. Although the book is generously sprinkled with stories and remembrances from survivors, witnesses, and victims' family members, it does not pander to the seemingly insatiable appetite among true crime readers for the gory details. Written in a semiacademic style, the pages are rich with data-driven observations, theory-grounded recommendations, and much good sense.
While social scientists are often wary of basing much on a sample of two, Newman and her associates go beyond their pair of Southern case studies. They skillfully establish parallels with dozens of other shootings and thwarted plots from around the country. They also rely on several data sets, including their own compilation of 27 shooters in 25 episodes from 1974-2002. Although not immediately apparent, one learns from the descriptive case summaries that these rampages resulted in the deaths of 52 students and staff members (not counting perpetrator suicides) and injuries to 126 others.
The authors use these data to test out their theoretical model of causation, advancing five necessary (but clearly not sufficient) conditions for a school rampage: a youngster (typically a boy) who is socially marginal (e.g., a victim of bullying), who suffers emotional vulnerabilities, who identifies with violent role models from the news or popular culture, whose problems are unobserved or ignored, and who has access to a weapon such as a gun or explosives. Though hardly groundbreaking, and not much different from what other authorities have observed, this is nonetheless a well-conceived overview of the factors underlying student disgruntlement and anger.
One of the more intriguing patterns that emerged within the collection of school massacres of the late 1990s is that virtually every one occurred in an obscure town like Jonesboro and West Paducah, locales that have since become recognizable because of tragedy. To some extent, the "it can never happen here" thinking makes it more likely to happen there, as the authors point out, because of a lack of security preparedness and alertness to students with murder and vengeance on their minds.
A more intriguing explanation, forming a core theme of the book, is that in small-town USA, where everything is everyone's business, the tendency is to keep silent about observations and concerns so as not to humiliate publicly the family's reputation. Additionally, misfits often have difficulty finding supportive peers in their small communities and therefore are more likely to feel isolated and unwanted.
Surely, too, the copycat effect is greatest among those youngsters who are similar to their cultural heroes. A 14-year-old white boy in some small town would identify more with the circumstances and plight of a rural school shooter spotlighted in the news and on the Internet than would a minority youth in a large urban setting.
It has been five years since the horror at Columbine changed the educational landscape in this country. With our collective attention averted from terror in our schools to terror in the skies, the media hype surrounding school violence has calmed.
Unfortunately, following several relatively uneventful years, the number of school-related homicides spiked once again during this school year. School administrators, teachers, school boards, parents, and others would be well advised to place "Rampage" high on their summer reading lists.
The lessons from this book may not necessarily prevent the next school massacre, but they certainly can enhance the overall school climate and well-being of millions of children.
James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. 
