Because of the variability among the cases presented in Chapters 2– 7, the committee conducted a cross-case analysis. It is valuable to compare the cases systematically to see what this small sample of incidents can tell us in terms of factors that are present in all the cases, those that are present in some cases and not others, and those that are entirely absent. Through such activities we can parlay this small number of complex cases into a more coherent pattern of understanding. Later, in Chapter 11, we consider the cases as though they were a small dataset that can be used to influence our judgments about likely causes and plausibly effective interventions. We begin by describing the committee’s analytic framework for creating and analyzing the cases and the method of inference used. We then test the plausibility of different substantive claims that are made about the important causes of these events.

As described in Chapter 10, violence can best be understood through processes operating at multiple levels of explanation, taking account of the dynamics that seem necessary, if not sufficient, to produce a violent incident (National Research Council, 1993). These levels include factors operating at the social, community, group or subcultural, family, and individual levels of society. They often change—sometimes rapidly. In addition, sequences of events, powered and guided by microsocial processes, are often important in transforming the potential for violence into

the concrete reality of an event. The ideas and cognitions that operate in the heads of offenders are important as they become agents of violent events. The aim here is to bridge these different levels of analysis.

Our interests go beyond what might have caused the individual shooting and what might have prevented it. We are also interested in the incident as a cause of both a community and a policy response. Table 8-1 is a representation of the committee’s analysis. Although lacking precision, the table is meant to convey the extreme rarity of school rampage violence within the larger picture of lethal school violence, other serious youth violence, youth violence in general, and violence in general.

In reviewing the cases, the case authors and committee members developed multiple hypotheses about what might be driving the behavior and checked them against the data collected in the six cases. For example, in one case an offender had a more successful older sibling; in another the family of the offender had recently moved into town; in another the offender knew a great deal about a previous school rampage shooting, and those attending school were organized in a large number of subcultures with few overlapping members and little interaction with one another. We then considered whether there was a plausible causal connection between the feature observed and the likelihood that the violent incident would have occurred or would have taken a particular shape. If the factor showed up in any of the other cases and seemed to be working in the same way, then there was a plausible hypothesis about an important causal phenomenon. If little such evidence was found, then the hypothesis seemed less likely to be true, or less important even if true, because its impact could not be seen across the cases examined.

We also considered some common hypotheses—for example, that the offenders had been bullied and the attack was an attempt to get back at those who bullied them, or that the schools in which the incidents had occurred had allowed cliques to form and to skirmish with one another in the school—and looked at the cases for any examples. If none of the cases was characterized by such a feature, that cast significant doubt on either the truth or the importance of that factor as a contributing cause of the violence.

These methods, although not systematic enough to confirm or refute alternative causal explanations, could be viewed as an effort to undertake the preliminary scientific task of generating causal hypotheses and doing the rough work of casual inspection that helps make some hypotheses seem stronger than others. In this approach, part of the task is to reduce confidence in any particular claim by imagining the variety of things that could be true and then ordering the claims according to some rough sense of plausibility.

Table 8-2, at the end of this chapter, lays out the details of the case studies for ease of comparison.

All seven of these incidents involved young people arming themselves, in several cases with semiautomatic weapons, and opening fire on their schoolmates and teachers, killing or seriously injuring them (mean fatalities: 2.2; mean injuries: 4.5; all but 4 killed or injured were other students). The incidents occurred in places that were supposed to be safe—the hallways and common areas of schools and at a school-sponsored event. The offenders were all young themselves—most were age 13 or 14 (range: 11–15). The offenders in six of the seven incidents were convicted of homicide in adult courts, and most were sentenced to long prison terms.

These events also took place in a society that seems to encourage or condone violence. The popular culture is tolerant of violence. The United States has the world’s largest supply of privately owned weapons (used in four of these incidents). And recently there was a dramatic increase in violence occasioned at least in part by an epidemic of cocaine use fueled and supported by violent illegal drug markets. In the committee’s view, levels of violence are influenced by such structural factors, and we cannot exclude their importance in producing the events examined, although it is hard to find direct evidence of these factors in the cases.

All of these events occurred in the sturm and drang of adolescent development. The youth who committed the offenses were young men trying to become grownups. They were intensely concerned with their status and power, with their masculinity, and with their relationships with members of the opposite sex. They were all vulnerable to exaggerated hopes and fears and to the perceptions and judgments of peers and adults. At this time of life, it is easy to imagine that one is under threat, or that there are certain things one has to do to gain attention or standing in the world. It is also a time of life when adult authority and norms are being contested. These processes were at work in both the inner city and in the suburban and rural areas.

An important difference between the inner-city and suburban and rural contexts lies in the coherence of the events. In each of the three incidents in the two inner-city schools, the offender had a specific reason to shoot when he did, where he did, and at whom he did. Moreover, the reasons given were comprehensible to their peers and even to the adults and officials who investigated and responded to the events. The shootings were occasioned by a very specific relationship between the shooter and some other student at school, which ripened into an unresolved dispute, in which there was a continuing, seemingly credible threat of violence

against the person who ended up doing the shooting. There were even intimate, local encouragements for the shootings to occur, in the sense that there was a youthful audience that knew about the dispute, understood the rules by which such disputes could be settled, and would have viewed the reluctance of the shooter to act as an invitation to degrade his status and make him a victim because of his reluctance to use force to defend his status and, in one case, the status of his brother.

The four suburban and rural incidents lacked this coherence and social clarity. That is not to say that these shooters didn’t have their reasons to shoot. Like the inner-city shooters, the suburban and rural shooters

were intensely interested in defending or elevating their social standing. They believed that they were being ignored, or were under attack, or had been unjustly treated. That provided much of the energy they used in preparing for and executing the attack.

Yet in the suburban and rural shootings, the shooters’ perceptions seemed to have little basis in reality, or, if they were real, they were not widely understood or shared by others. The acts were more the product of aberrant thought than of requirements of social circumstances—as reflected in the occasion, the victims, and the targets of the shooting. The suburban shooters were not being threatened with physical violence at

the time they shot. While there was often some relationship between the suburban shooters and those at whom they shot or who were in the vicinity of the shooting, they mostly did not have specific targets or hit those whom they might have been targeting. Their grievances were more diffuse, and their shooting more indiscriminate. An important finding of the committee is that events of this kind did not seem to have occurred in the inner-city schools.

A well-established tradition in sociology and criminology is to begin the search for the causes of violence in the structural characteristics of society. The idea is that violence occurs among those in social positions who are disadvantaged relative to others in society, or who are excluded and alienated from the dominant culture, or who are victims of oppression and injustice. This tradition is reflected in the inner-city cases. The case writers locate the violence exactly where this view would expect to find it—in communities that have been socially, economically, and politically marginalized. It is hard not to draw the conclusion that these factors played an important role in causing the violence observed.

What is startling, however, is that some portion of the lethal violence observed happens not in economically marginalized communities, but in ones that are relatively well off economically, socially, and politically. Paducah is not a thriving community; it has its pockets of poverty. But the other three suburban or rural communities studied were relatively affluent, and homogeneously so. Jonesboro, Edinboro, and Rockdale County were all thriving, affluent areas in which few were left behind. It would be hard to attribute the shootings in these areas to economic or social disadvantage.

The role of economic and social status cannot be wholly excluded. In one of the suburban cases, the social position of the shooter was relatively low in his community, which may suggest to some that class did play an important role in shaping the character and motivations of a future offender. And there are plenty of reasons to think that great tensions lurk beneath the surface of the apparently successful communities, that great gulfs divide adults from youth in these places, and that the places themselves are a bit unstable due to recent economic growth. An important similarity across the urban and rural and suburban environments was the presence of rapid social change in five of the six communities, which can produce instability even when the changes are positive ones.

A second idea with widespread currency is that lethal school violence is caused by a societal and popular culture that tolerates, encourages, or even demands violence. There are different versions of this argument.

In one version, a claim is made that inner-city violence seeped into pop culture, embodied in the mass media, and tended to glorify and encourage violence. The focus of the mass media on violence is seen not only as a reflection of a general enthusiasm for violence, but also as an influence that barrages American society with graphic images of violence. The important role of the mass media is thought to be particularly attractive and dangerous to youth who can spend hours viewing TV, listening to music with violent lyrics, and playing video games that feature violence.

It is hard to exclude this hypothesis on the basis of the evidence. All the incidents occurred against the backdrop of a popular culture that seems to tolerate if not encourage violence. However, it should be noted that the offenders in the cases did not seem to be more obsessed with these materials than the millions of kids who did not go on a shooting spree.

A second version of a claim about cultural influences emphasizes the gap between adult culture and youth culture. The argument is that if adults are not much present in the lives of youth, they will not be able to guide them toward such adult values as self-reliance, self-discipline, civility, mutual respect, patience, generosity, and empathy toward others. Without adult influence, youth culture might turn out to be particularly vulnerable to dangerous influences from the media or from peers. One extreme version of this is the emergence of a gang culture in which youth gangs perform the protecting, explaining, and socializing roles that would ordinarily be performed by families.

From the outset of our work, the committee was much attracted to this hypothesis. The inner-city cases were profoundly influenced not only by the general culture of violence in their neighborhoods, but also more particularly by youth gangs whose interactions created an important part of the social circumstances that animated and authorized the shootings—at least in the minds of the boys who fired the weapons. The suburban and rural cases also showed strong evidence that the world of youth was not very well understood by adults, especially youth who were forming their own culture supporting some forms of antisocial behavior.

In Rockdale County, a syphilis outbreak among teens caused by widespread sexual promiscuity of a particular group of kids who gathered at an unmonitored house to watch pornography on TV and imitate the acts

they saw offered strong evidence of the absence of adult and parental guidance. In Paducah as well, the case writer observed that the “social dynamics of adolescence were almost entirely hidden from adult view.”

So there is in these cases a gap between the adult and the youth culture. Communication did not flow easily across these boundaries. The adults at school did not seem to know the kids very well, or to be much present in their lives other than as administrators and teachers. These adolescents did lots of things that the adults in the communities would view as dangerous. We can also see that this gap matters, because it allows gangs, cliques, and rivalries to grow, and it lets festering disputes and grievances go unnoticed and unresolved. When information became available that should alert adults to the likelihood of a fight or an assault by one youth against another, the information often did not cross the boundary that divides adults and officials from the adolescents.

It is unclear whether the gap between adults and youth in these particular communities exists in other communities that have not experienced these tragedies. In our cases, this gap was evident in both the poor inner-city neighborhoods and the more well-to-do suburban sites—both in terms of the quality and intensity of their engagement and in terms of the substantive values they embraced. The committee discussed ways of closing this gap. But it is important to recognize that this gap can never be fully closed and probably should not be. Successful human development, and the development of society as a whole, depend on new generations being able to separate themselves to some degree from their parents and the traditions they embody.

A third version of a cultural explanation for lethal violence in schools and school rampages focuses on the pervasive presence of guns in the United States. It was not difficult for the shooters to obtain weapons, getting them from friends or stealing them, unnoticed, from family members or neighbors. And many of the shooters had some experience with guns. Three of them had gone hunting or shooting with an adult prior to the time of the shooting. At least one other had practiced shooting by himself and so had some experience with how to use the weapon. Again, it seems obvious that easy access to guns facilitated the lethal school violence and school rampages.

In sum, we cannot rule out the big cultural explanations: the distinctive American tradition of violence, the impact of the mass media, the gap between adult and youth culture, and the role of guns in U.S. society. But for purposes of scientific explanation, the potential impact of smaller, faster-moving aspects of culture and their carriers are also of interest: the special role of violent rap music and video games, the role of gangs in spreading a culture of violence among kids, and the impact of the press coverage given to the rural and suburban shootings themselves. These

things are a possible link between the inner-city violence and the rural and suburban violence.

The fact that the violence took place in schools tends to magnify its importance and social consequences. Because people expect schools to be safe havens for adolescents, when violence happens in them, the consequences are particularly severe.

Another important implication is that the schools can be seen as a platform for launching interventions to prevent and control violence. Finding ways to engage schools in efforts to accomplish this goal would seem to be an urgent task.

A third implication is that conditions inside the school may be a potential cause of the violence. In one version of this idea, one could see the failure of the schools to put in place preventive measures as an important cause of the lethal violence and school rampages—an error of omission rather than commission. Or one could see the schools themselves as “criminogenic”—the social relationships and norms existing within the schools might have actually caused the violence to occur.

A fourth implication is that the school, as the largest and most common social setting for adolescents, is the most likely setting for interpersonal violence among them. And because it is the most common social setting, it also serves as the primary public arena for acting out. In most of the rural and suburban cases examined, the school served not only as a convenient place to commit violence, but also as a public stage on which to perform and to be seen.

In considering these hypotheses in light of the cases, the committee sees evidence for the first claim—that the location in school makes the social consequences of the violence worse, regardless of where the school is located. There is also evidence that the school was considered an important place to launch efforts to prevent future incidents—not only in the places that experienced the violence, but also in communities across the country.

It is much harder to determine whether the schools were an important cause of the violence—through either omissions or commissions. The schools successfully constructed a protective boundary that separates them to some degree from conditions in the community; generally speaking, kids are safer in schools than in other locations. The difficulty is that the boundary is not impermeable. The violence of inner-city communities can reach into the schools, and the impulses associated with rampage shootings like those we have seen in workplaces can come into schools as well. In hindsight, it seems that there might have been some things that

the schools could have done to prevent and deal more effectively with the violence when it occurred.

While evidence is scarce that the schools somehow generated the violence as a consequence of the way they were structured and administered, the sense of community between youth and adults in these schools, which research has shown is protective against crime, was lacking. In the worst example, the school allowed a school newspaper to print an article that humiliated one of the students who became a shooter. The adults involved may have been too distant from the students to prevent some social processes leading to the potential for violence or resulting in an intolerable humiliation for some particularly vulnerable youth.

In order to prevent violence from occurring, the adult culture and the school’s administration and faculty may have to find ways to successfully engage the youth culture, to make every student feel valued, and to keep the youth culture in the school from becoming lethally dangerous. In hindsight, the schools in the cases may have been insufficiently preventive. But they do not seem to have been criminogenic in themselves.

Another tradition in criminology focuses attention on the more or less stable individual characteristics that make some individuals more likely to offend than others. In these respects, there may be important differences between the cases of violence in the inner city and the rural and suburban areas. Many social pressures—large and small, durable and transient—led toward the incidents of lethal violence observed in the inner-city schools. In the suburban and rural schools, the social pressures leading to violence seem much less visible. This may leave more to be explained by individual-level factors.

The shooters had some characteristics that, based on evidence from research, would place them at high risk for serious offending: being male, having mental health and, in one case, substance abuse problems, and having previous minor behavior problems. Most had recently begun hanging out with delinquent or more troubled friends and had a recent drop in their grades at school. All had easy access to guns (see Farrington and Loeber, 1999).

Of special note is how young all the shooters were. None was older than 15, and the youngest was 11. At least two important aspects of this age period have implications for what occurred. First, it is during early adolescence when peer relations and finding one’s place in the social order of the school become most important. Second, during this period, cognitive abilities, including perspective taking, are developing. Young

adolescents’ ability to make accurate judgments, especially about social relationships, may be lacking.

Most of the shooters did not have either records or reputations that would link them to violent crime, but there are some important differences between the inner-city and the suburban and rural incidents. Two of the three offenders in the inner-city cases had previous arrests for serious crimes and were known to the police. One of the inner-city shooters and all of the suburban shooters had no previous arrests for serious crimes and were largely unknown to the police. However, we cannot conclude from these facts that the underlying level and seriousness of criminal offending was different in the inner city and the suburban cases, or that the inner-city kids had more experience in committing crimes than the rural and suburban kids. One had committed an undetected felony-level theft, one had stolen and sold his father’s gun, and one had molested a two-year-old child. We can say, however, that the urban teens were more likely to have previous records of offending than the suburban kids, who essentially had none.

The shooters’ records of school performance were similar for five of the boys. In the two inner-city cases, the offenders had good records until 8th grade, when their performance began to slip; that shift was attributed either to the fact that receiving good grades was seen as a sign of weakness or that the offender became involved with a gang culture. In the committee’s view, this shows the influence of local subcultures in the schools that were powerful influences on young, impressionable adolescents beginning their high school careers and their developing hostility to “good” performance. In the rural and suburban cases, two of the offenders struggled in school. For the others, their grades ranged from average to good until around 8th grade.

Disciplinary records in school were similarly varied. At least one of the inner-city offenders and two of the suburban offenders had disciplinary records; the others didn’t. The offenders could not be said to be notorious “bad actors” in their schools. They seemed to be adolescents struggling to make their way academically and socially in the competitive environment of gangs and cliques that characterize most junior and senior high schools.

In considering the causes of these offenses and potential points of intervention, a crucially important question is the extent to which the shooters can be considered mentally ill. For events that seem largely unaccountable (as in the suburban cases), and when there are no apparent powerful social factors shaping conduct (as in the suburban/rural cases), it is tempting to seek the explanation not just in individual characteristics, but in mental illness. Such an analytic move should be suspect, even though it may seem objective and logical. One reason is that such diag

noses are difficult to make objectively after the fact in cases like these. Moreover, in young adolescents, it can be hard for nonprofessionals to distinguish the early stages of mental illness from the ordinary confusion that kids tend to have about the world.

Only two of the shooters (both suburban/rural) had any diagnosis or clear sign of mental health problems prior to age 12. One of these had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in grade 4, and the other, the 11-year old shooter, had shown signs of conduct disorder, noted by the case study authors. After the events occurred, three other offenders (one-inner-city, two suburban) were diagnosed with mental illness. Another, one of the youngest shooters, had molested a two-year-old child. In addition, two of the offenders made an explicit suicidal gesture during the shooting, and one of these (later diagnosed with schizophrenia) repeatedly tried to commit suicide once he was in custody. Suicidal thinking was a prominent feature in all of the suburban and rural shooters studied.

A common legal standard for finding people not guilty by reason of insanity is that they are not aware of the consequences of their actions at the time they took them. None of these cases rises to that standard. In fact, there is evidence of both premeditation and rational calculation. In all the cases, the offenders made preparations to commit the offenses: they acquired weapons. They made plans for the shooting. They warned their peers that something big would happen. All this adds up to strong evidence of a kind of rationality that exposes the shooters to harsh judgments of culpability.

At the same time, in the cases of the rural and suburban shooters, the worries that prompted the shootings appear to be exaggerated, as were the hopes that attended the shootings. The circumstances were not well judged, the purposes were obscure, and the means were inappropriate to the ends. This sort of thinking does not provide a legal excuse for the action, but it is important to recognize it in adolescents in making a just and effective response.

The information gathered on the family background of the shooters included not only the basic structural conditions, but also something about the family interactions and the ways in which they were changing over time. We expected to find a significant amount of family pathology and a low degree of parental involvement in the lives of their children. There was some evidence of this, but it was by no means a universal pattern across the offenders. Two of the three inner-city shooters and two of the five rural and suburban shooters lived in intact, stable families at the time of the shooting. In two rural cases, the case writers found evidence of parental conflict. In one case, a videotape of the interaction between the mother of the offender and the offender suggested to the case writer an

astonishing degree of distance in the relationship. There was no evidence either of family violence or child abuse and neglect in any of the cases examined. The parents seemed to remain involved with their children and vigilant of their conduct. Relationships within the family did not change markedly in the period leading up to the shooting.

The case writers also gathered information about the social standing of the offenders and the quality of relationships they had with their peers. Although the expectation was that the shooters would be isolated loners, this was true of only one suburban shooter—the one diagnosed with attention deficit disorder before the shooting and who attempted suicide shortly after the incident occurred. All the others had a status that could be described as marginal. The urban youth were members of marginal groups, and the rural youth seemed to be on the periphery of many groups rather than firmly at the center of any single group. One theme was that the offenders were the kinds of youth who sought to draw attention to themselves through practical jokes or joking around. Often, their humor seemed inappropriate to others. This may suggest the importance to these youth of their standing in their peer community, and that they were struggling with a significant gap between their desired status and the status they actually experienced.

More interesting and important is that, in six of the seven shootings, the offenders had recently changed their relationship with their peers. The only case in which this was not true was the case involving the loner. Also of importance is that in the three suburban-rural cases, the shooters had a recent experience of being rejected by a girl. This supports the idea that one of the factors fueling these shootings was a struggle to find status, understand masculinity, and develop relations with members of the opposite sex. When these desires were frustrated and there seemed to be nowhere to turn, a dramatic, violent act may have provided an attractive avenue of expression.

The case study method allowed the committee to explore whether important contagion mechanisms were operating to spread and elevate the violence. While we cannot say much about whether such mechanisms were at work in spreading lethal violence in inner-city schools, or the extent to which inner-city violence seemed to have leapt out of the inner city and touched off the increase in lethal violence in the suburban and rural areas, we can address the extent to which contagion mechanisms seemed to elevate and spread school rampage shootings.

It turns out that only some of the suburban shooters were aware of other shootings, and in only one case (the one involving the loner) were the

other shootings accorded a significant role. In that case, the offender was powerfully influenced by the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. He knew about it, studied it, and took inspiration from it. In the committee’s view, that counts as a copycat incident. Although that offender might have done something else hazardous to himself and others if the Columbine incident had not occurred, it seems clear that Columbine had a very large effect on the shape his actions took. In another case, the shooter showed a high interest in the Jonesboro shooting, which occurred exactly one month previously. In that case the shooting incident itself was very different, so it is not clear whether he was copying the Jonesboro incident; his general behavior might have been inspired by it, however. Given that these are rare events, even one copycat shooting makes contagion an important contributor to the kinds of shooting sprees that occurred in the rural and suburban cases.

The committee analyzed the communities’ responses by looking at how they learned about and formed interpretations of the events; the role of the local and national media; the role of community leaders; and the policy responses made by the communities: what they did to deal with the grief and anxiety that spread in the aftermath of the events, what they did to improve security in schools, how they handled the offenders, and what lessons they drew from the experience. There was significant variability in the responses as well as some common elements.

Media attention created enormous difficulties for the communities in which these events occurred. In the cases for which information was collected, the media coverage of the event was considered to be inaccurate by the community and turned out to be so inaccurate that the case writers could not rely on it. It is also clear that the media coverage was experienced as destructive and unhelpful to the communities and the schools. This was particularly true for the suburban and rural schools that experienced shooting sprees, which attracted huge, sustained national media coverage. The reports from Paducah, Jonesboro, and Rockdale County indicate significant local hostility to the national media and their negative impact on the local communities. In Chicago, the media coverage was so intense and so inaccurate that it caused the case writer to conclude that the case had been decided in the press before the trial was conducted, distorting the facts and limiting the dispositional options.

The communities varied a great deal with respect to the creation of local forums for discussing the meaning of the events and the appropriate responses. All the communities responded in the immediate aftermath of the shootings with more or less elaborately organized efforts to provide grief counseling to those who were victims or eyewitnesses or who were swept up in the emotions following the events. While this was a common response, there was an interesting difference between the inner-city neighborhoods and the suburban neighborhoods beyond the immediate reaction.

Both inner-city communities responded with antiviolence marches and rallies organized by informal and formal community leaders. They developed new programs for strengthening the relationships among students of the school, adults in the school, and adults in the surrounding communities. Both communities succeeded in engaging the interest and commitment of elected leaders and the appointed heads of the school system. In short, the inner-city communities reacted through widespread mobilization.

In contrast, the response of the rural and suburban communities was more sporadic, ad hoc, and less political. Only in Jonesboro and Edinboro was there anything resembling community rallies and meetings. In Jonesboro, a ministerial alliance was formed, but there was little evidence of its impact on the community. In Edinboro, a series of meetings were held, but they did not involve many citizens or have much impact on the policy and programmatic responses of governmental organizations. In Paducah and Rockdale County, there was essentially no community or political response; the actions taken were all official ones, as the schools made professional responses to the problem.

The processes of reacting to, trying to understand, and making a just and effective response to the events led the communities to two quite different interpretations. In both inner-city cases, the community appeared to arrive at a diagnosis that attributed the lethal school violence to a generally violent atmosphere, to the presence of gangs in the schools, and to a wide communication gap between adults and youth about the danger in general, but particularly the youth involved in a gang culture. In two of the rural cases (Paducah and Jonesboro), the communities join the inner-city communities in attributing the violence to a lack of communication between adults and youth. They saw this as both a general contributing cause of the violence and as a specific problem that pre

vented threats made by the shooters in advance of the events from being heard and taken seriously by adults. In the other two suburban cases (Edinboro and Rockdale County), the problem was not attributed to a general community problem but instead was seen as the result of a single troubled kid growing up mentally ill in a troubled family. None of the suburban communities attributed the violence in their communities to violence in American society, perhaps because they felt insulated from the violence that was happening elsewhere. Nor did they attribute the violence to gangs, because they did not see the cliques that formed in their schools as gangs that created occasions for or supported violent acts. The adults and youth in these communities may have been influenced in some ways by the violence of the wider society, but if they were being so influenced, they were not much aware of it.

These different interpretations of the events did not lead to different criminal justice responses to the shootings. All except two of the shooters were tried as adults on the most serious charge that the evidence would support, usually first- or second-degree murder. All those charged with murder in adult court eventually pleaded guilty to lesser offenses that recognized mitigating circumstances. In two of the inner-city cases, the mitigating circumstance was either “acting under extreme emotional distress” or “acting in self-defense.” In two of the rural/suburban cases (Paducah and Rockdale County), the mitigating circumstance was mental illness. Four of the shooters received very long sentences: 45 years for the Chicago offender; life without parole for 25 years for the Paducah shooter; 30–60 years in prison, eligible for parole at age 45, for the Edinboro youth; and 60 years of custody, including 40 years of probation, for the mentally disturbed adolescent in Rockdale County. The two New York shooters received somewhat more lenient sentences: 3–9 years in prison, part served in a youth facility for one, and 6–20 years in prison for the other (of which only 5 years were served, but the offender remains under supervision in the community for the rest of his sentence). The juvenile offenders from Jonesboro got the maximum sentence allowed under the juvenile law—an indeterminate sentence to age 21. The fact that the Jonesboro offenders will be getting out of jail relatively soon has created great concern in that community.

Only one victim of the inner-city shootings chose to pursue civil litigation against the school board. In three of the four suburban shootings, civil litigation was also initiated by the victims against the shooters, the shooters’ families, and (in two cases) against those who were the source of weapons for the shooting. In Paducah, the suit also named high school

officials and the producers of the video games and pornography that were found on the computer of the shooter. It is not clear that these legal processes have done justice or brought an emotional sense of closure to these communities. They seem to come too late and to be too disconnected from the community to be of use in helping restore a sense of self-confidence or peace.

The communities all made what might be considered localized, school-level responses to prevent the occurrence of lethal violence in the future. Not all were well considered, however. All the communities except Rockdale County (the community in which a mentally disturbed loner was the shooter) made some kind of technical or security response to the school shootings. The two inner-city schools turned to heavy reliance on metal detectors in the school. The use of metal detectors, long a policy in New York, was intensified in the wake of the school shootings there. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley seized on the school shooting to institute a citywide policy mandating the use of metal detectors; the case authors note there have been no subsequent lethal shootings in Chicago schools since the adoption of this policy.

The rural and suburban schools did not go for metal detectors but rather built fences around the schools and instituted the use of nametags to identify faculty and students. Such measures are designed only to keep those who are not members of the school community out of the schools. Yet in all the cases in which these measures were installed, the shooter was a member of the school community and would not have been kept out of the school by them, so such preventive measures may be of questionable effectiveness.

Four communities supplemented the technical security arrangements with the redeployment or hiring of new security personnel. New York instituted a policy of more intensive police patrols inside and outside the schools. Chicago hired new security officials from the local communities to enforce a zero tolerance policy for weapons carrying and fighting in the schools. Both Paducah and Jonesboro also hired community resource officers to provide a regular presence in the schools and to educate students and enforce rules about weapons, fighting, and violence. Edinboro and Rockdale County did not put additional security officials in schools.

Finally, all the communities also made some sort of programmatic effort to strengthen relationships between adults and youth in the schools and among the kids themselves. They increased the adult presence in the schools and encouraged the adults to engage more closely with the students. Much of this took the form of closer supervision and monitoring

by school officials, but additional help was provided to students who seemed to be in trouble, and some more general programs focusing on character education and leadership were provided to encourage the students to assume more responsibility for establishing an appropriate normative environment or moral order in the schools. In East New York, a special program of retreats involving adults and youth was initiated by a powerful city councilwoman. There is little evidence from the cases about the impact of these programs on the character of school life, the degree of security that individuals felt, and so on. But undertaking such initiatives was clearly important to these communities, at least as an expression of concern if not something that was instrumentally effective in protecting them from what was a very low-probability event.

TABLE 8-2FOLLOWS ON PAGES 266-283