Lockdown High. Annette Fuentes
WE ALL COLUMBINE?
Columbine provoked not only a crackdown on students but a spate of philosophizing on the causes of youth violence. President Bill Clinton, the figurative patriarch of the national family, said “perhaps we’ll never fully understand it,” and opined, “St. Paul reminds us that we all see things in life darkly . . . We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger . . . with words, not weapons.” The Littleton district attorney called for “a national soul-searching mission to stop the culture of violence,” which he blamed on “a society with too little respect for life . . . schools with too few rules . . . movies with too many murders and . . . video games that glorify too much gore and mayhem.” Experts proffered their two cents on what motivated Harris and Klebold, with psychologists blaming depression, isolation, and aggression and others dragging out the usual suspects: youth culture and its violent, nihilistic bent. News coverage segued from reporting on the particulars of Columbine, its victims, and the assailants to articles depicting an epidemic of hand-wringing among students, teachers, and parents who wondered: Could it happen here?
Columbine High School’s principal, Frank DeAngelis, would tell them unhesitatingly yes. “If you had asked me April 15 of ’99, ‘Could a Columbine shooting occur?’ I would say, there’s no way, not in this community,” DeAngelis says during an interview in his office in May 2008. “I can’t tell you the number of people who e-mailed me, or called me, or that I run into who said, ‘Your school is just like our school, your community is just like our community.’ And for anyone to state it could never happen is an inaccurate statement.” DeAngelis is compact, a Joe Pesci lookalike who has spent three decades at Columbine High, more than a dozen as principal. “If you look at school shootings, there is not a profile. They have occurred in rural communities, they’ve occurred in a suburban area, upper-middle-class, middle-class communities. They’ve occurred throughout. To say they only occur in inner cities, or they only occur in large high schools—there’s not one set profile.” DeAngelis calls what happened during his tenure a “wake-up call” to communities around the nation, even the world, and says he still doesn’t understand why Harris and Klebold did what they did. “That’s what is scary. That’s why people are afraid. If you could pinpoint it, then there’s a chance you could stop school shootings from occurring,” he says. “If you could state the reason—it was video games or it was the music. But you can’t! There are millions and millions of kids who played the game Doom, which Harris and Klebold played. Or millions of kids who listened to Marilyn Manson. Why did Klebold and Harris go off and these other kids didn’t?”
DeAngelis has a vested interest in claiming that what happened in his school could happen anywhere, and that Harris and Klebold behaved like millions of other teens. After all, he was a defendant in lawsuits that held him partly responsible for what occurred; his defense has been that he was clueless about two students in his charge or of the pecking order in his school. But facts indicate that a Columbine does not and will not happen just anywhere. There is less mystery and more clear information about where such incidents occur and who the likely perpetrators are than is generally acknowledged. Columbine-style violence has specific race, sex, and class characteristics, which are usually ignored or glossed over. The majority of school-shooting incidents with multiple victims have been committed by white, male teenagers and they have occurred in rural or suburban settings.5 There has never been a Columbine in a public city school. Yes, gun violence occurs in public city schools, but the school shootings that have grabbed headlines, what the sociologist Mike Males calls “rage killings,” have common characteristics: “All involved males, none poor, nearly all white, nearly all wielding guns (or more rarely, bombs), nearly all motivated by generalized rage.” These middle-class or affluent boys are motivated by rejection by girlfriends or school suspensions, Males found, and are not drug or alcohol users. They usually spend months or years planning their assaults and often amass arsenals of weapons.6 One reason that Columbine was spread across headlines and TV newscasts was that it shocked a nation that believed communities like the Denver suburb were supposed to be safe from extreme violence. Those sentiments were on display in news articles that quoted stunned Columbine residents saying, “This can’t be happening at our school,” and “I just can’t believe it is happening at my school.” Implicit is the idea that it would be believable and even expected for a shooting incident to occur at some schools. Which schools is made explicit in one New York Times article published two days after the incident, quoting one student’s mother: “As for safety, Mrs. Staley said she had never worried about violence at the school. ‘It’s a big deal when someone throws eggs at your house on Halloween,’ she said. Metal detectors? No one even thought about installing them at Columbine, she said. They were for urban schools.”7
If Columbine was a big story because it wasn’t supposed to happen in an affluent, white, suburban school, violence in urban schools with Latino or black victims and perpetrators isn’t news at all. In his analysis of school killings and news coverage of them, Males found that race and class played a role in what rated attention. Less than two months after Columbine, two Latina teenagers were shot to death outside their Southern California high school, rating a brief article inside the paper. Similarly, when a thirteen-year-old Latino boy shot and killed a thirteen-year-old Latina girl in a New Mexico middle school, it made no headlines. Yet a March 2001 shooting of two teens by another student—all three white—at a high school in Santee, California, was a national story. If high death tolls determined newsworthiness, several ignored school shootings had as many or more victims as well-publicized incidents in Springfield, Oregon, and Pearl, Mississippi, among others, Males noted. Why, then, did the media, as well as politicians, treat the white, suburban student shootings as more alarming than those involving minority students at urban schools? “To ask the question is to answer it: in the crass logic of reporters and editors, things like that are ‘supposed to happen’ to darker skinned youth,” Males argues.8
The alarms sounded over teen terrorists at school reached far beyond suburban Denver to Washington, D.C., where elected officials had to respond to their fretting constituents. What Harris and Klebold had done was seen as a threat to national security, demanding an investigation worthy of a terrorist attack. In June 1999, the U.S. Secret Service teamed up with the Department of Education to study “targeted violence in schools.” The Safe School Initiative, as it was called, examined thirty-seven previous incidents of violence at schools between 1974 and 2000 to understand the behavior and planning of students involved. The goal was to identify risk factors and threats in order to prevent future Columbine-type events. The Secret Service applied the same framework it had developed for an earlier study of assassination attempts against public officials.9 After three years, the joint task force issued a report, which offered few surprises and little solace to those in the Columbine community like DeAngelis who believe that the attack was unforeseeable. Among the key findings were:
• Incidents of targeted violence at school are rarely sudden, impulsive acts.
• Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s idea and/or plan to attack.
• Most attackers engaged in some behavior, prior to the incident, that caused concern or indicated a need for help.
• Most attackers were known to have difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Many had considered or attempted suicide.
• Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack.
• Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack.
The report, while culling these commonalities, asserted that there was no one useful profile of a school shooter, making prevention a highly individualized challenge for school districts. In a follow-up report, the Safe School Initiative provided a detailed guide to threat assessment that, surprisingly, called it just “one component” in a wider strategy to reduce school violence. The best prevention strategies, the guide asserts, “create cultures and climates of safety, respect, and emotional support within educational institutions . . . environments [that] emphasize “ ‘emotional intelligence,’ as well as educational or intellectual pursuits.” But a public panicked about crazed student terrorists would not be mollified by recommendations