The Calculus of School Shootings

Another school shooting this month, and a shooting that might have been averted. In Cleveland's inner city, a chubby 14-year-old brings two revolvers to school, and wounds four before taking his own life. In a suburb of Philadelphia, another 14-year-old is taken into custody after police find guns, swords, knives and home-made hand grenades stockpiled in his bedroom. He is planning his own Columbine. What seems perplexing to people of my own generation--those who were children during the placid 1950s -- is how easily children come by guns.

In 1936, the year of Roosevelt's re-election and Jesse Owens' triumph in the Berlin Olympics, a brilliant, eccentric Williams College student named Lewis Jack Somers, Jr. killed one classmate, wounded another, and killed himself with a pair of mail order pistols. No one can estimate how many school shootings took place before prior to 1960. Such events were covered up by schools that feared for their reputations and families who wished to retain their standing in the community. The scope of the violence was limited by the technology of the weapon. To kill more then a few people, the shooter needed a semi-automatic weapon, a gun that will fire rapidly each time the trigger is depressed without the shooter having to pause to manually move a new cartridge into the firing chamber. While such weapons existed prior to World War I, they were expensive and difficult to obtain. The democratization of the semi-automatic took place in the 1960s when, as a result of violent revolutions abroad, cheap, foreign-made "assault" rifles flooded the American market.

In 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency and America discovered disco, a responsible 18-year-old named Anthony Barbaro, a resident of Oleans, New York, bought a 30.06 Remington rifle from Blumenthal's Sporting Goods Store by showing the salesman a letter of permission signed by his mother. Over Christmas vacation he set up a sniper's nest in the high school and killed three and wounded eight others before giving himself up to the police. Anthony was eighth in his class, and one of 34 Regents scholarship finalists in his region. People simply could not believe him capable of such a crime.

Brenda Spencer, on the other hand, was a teen with a history of suicidal and aggressive behavior. She lived in San Carlos, a blue-collar suburb of San Diego, and was known around the neighborhood for torturing animals. She had been arrested twice, once for shooting out windows at Cleveland Elementary School with a bb gun during the summer of 1978 and on another occasion for shoplifting ammunition from a local drugstore. For Christmas that year her father gave her a .22 caliber semi-automatic rifle with a telescopic sight and 500 rounds of ammunition. The following month she opened fire at Cleveland Elementary School again, this time killing the principal and a custodian, and wounding nine little children. What was her father thinking she would do with the gun? Decades later, during her second parole hearing, she accused her father of physically and sexually abusing her throughout her adolescence. Kip Kinkel, another deeply troubled child with a history of arrests and violent behavior, also received guns as gifts from his father. In 1998, embarrassed at being expelled from a Springfield Oregon high school for having a gun in his locker, he killed his parents and, the next morning brought the gun to school for a shooting spree.

Michael Carneal, who opened fire on a school prayer circle in 1997, in Paducah, Kentucky, suffered from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, and delusions that little people were hiding in the heating vents and crawl spaces of his home, waiting to attack him. He stole unsecured shotguns from his father's closet and rifles from the gun collection of his best friend's father. Michael knew where the key was kept. Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, perpetrators of a shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998, stole weapons from his grandfather's firearms collection. Again, they knew where he hid the key.

Eric Harris, a senior at Columbine High School, had been teased and bullied from a very young age because of his pectus excavetum, a declivity of the chest, and attended a new school every year or two because of his father's military reassignments. The combination of teasing and relocating proved toxic. When he met, Dylan Klebold, who also had a history of being bullied, he knew he had found a soulmate. Over the years they evolved a plan to get even with the world for mistreating them. They persuaded their friend Robyn Anderson, who was a year older, to buy them weapons at the Tanner Gun show, "the Rocky Mountain Region's best monthly gathering!"

The Tanner Gun Show is still held one weekend a month at the Denver Merchandise Mart Pavilion, off Interstate 25 in north Denver. You can go there and buy guns just as long as you're 18 or over. No background checks, no questions asked. Credit cards accepted.

The calculus of this problem is simple. A miserable childhood, a suicide plan, a gun, and a public venue where the shooter can express his rage at the world before going, not so gently, into that good night. Remove any part of the equation and the outcome changes. Leave them all in place and the shootings go on.

Jonathan Fast is an Associate Professor at Wurzweiler School of Social Work, at Yeshiva University, where he teaches research courses and abnormal psychology. He has written a number of articles on aggression and crisis response for scholarly journals and the mainstream press. His book on school rampage shooting, Ceremonial Violence: Understanding Columbine and Other School Shootings, will be published by the Outlook Press in August of 2008.

Comments

[JScott]

And it's not just school shooters. If you look at the past of some dictators (Saddam) and terrorists (Osama) you see they all had similar upbringing.

[RSP]

"To kill more then a few people, the shooter needed a semi-automatic weapon, a gun that will fire rapidly each time the trigger is depressed without the shooter having to pause to manually move a new cartridge into the firing chamber. While such weapons existed prior to World War I, they were expensive and difficult to obtain. The democratization of the semi-automatic took place in the 1960s when, as a result of violent revolutions abroad, cheap, foreign-made "assault" rifles flooded the American market."


Mr. Fast, I appreciate and listen to all arguments. I'm not closed minded. But as someone with an interest in firearms history, I'd like to make a few quick points that give lie to this argument:

1. US-made M1 Garand semi-automatic rifles in the powerful .30'06 calibre were relatively common in the US during the 50's after their extensive use and mass production during WWII and the Korean War. They use eight-shot, rapidly reloadable en bloc clips.

2. Browning's A5 semi-automatic shotgun was patented in 1900 and extremely successful. This was a 12-gauge weapon of impressive close-range firepower.

3. The infamous 'Tommy Gun' was first sold early in the 1920's, and reached its peak in terms of nonmilitary use with its 1928 iteration. This was a select fire [full and semi auto] weapon that fired .45 calibre ammunition from 20, 50, or 100 round magazines. It was not regulated until the 1934 NFA, which required a $200 transfer tax on machine guns.

4. Semi-automatic pistols were largely experimental in the 1800's, being bulky, complicated and unreliable. But by the early 1900's the design and capabilities of autoloading pistols had for the most part plateaued. Available in, for example, the year 1935 were such designs as as the German Luger P08, feeding from an 8-shot magazine of 9mm, the American M1911A1, with 7-shots of .45 calibre ammunition, or even the FN-Browning GP35 'Hi-Power', a 9mm semi-automatic feeding from a 13-round magazine.

[RSP]

All of these magazines were detachable and easy to change rapidly. Notably, the M1911A1 still remains among the most popular types of semi-automatic pistols in the USA and beyond.

5. Assault rifles, select-fire weapons in 'intermediate' calibres like the Soviet AK47 (1947) in 7.62x39mm, the German MP43 (1943) in 7.92x33mm, and the American M16 (1957) in 5.56x45mm (known as .223 Remington at the time), are not to be confused with semi-automatic weapons like the ones described here. Assault rifles use lower-powered cartridges than other rifles, which makes them easier to control when fired fully automatic. The 'neutered' semi-automatic versions of these - like the Romanian WASR-10 or the Colt AR-15 - which are available widely today are essentially underpowered semi-auto hunting rifles dressed up in scary-looking clothes. It's easy to get confused.

In conclusion, I'd like to point out that it may seem like we have more guns around, or that they are easier to obtain than in the 'good old days'. In fact, gun laws were much looser back in the 1920's, 30's, 40's and 50's, and even fully automatic weapons like the M1928 Thompson were available to the general public without significant difficulty. Today, gun laws are far more restrictive. The Thompson can't be bought for under $20,000, since the sale of machine guns manufactured post-1986 to civilians is illegal (i.e. all Thompsons on the market are classic antiques and thus very expensive). The Browning Hi-Power's 13-shot magazine was banned from 1994-2004. Guns are registered and items like the Striker shotgun, a double-action affair that fires one shot for each pull of the trigger and has a 12-shot magazine, are now classified as destructive devices. Yet we still have shootings in schools and between gangs. This indicates to me that gun control measures have failed.

I would be interested to read your side of the story concerning this.

[DMeadows]

"The calculus of this problem is simple. A miserable childhood, a suicide plan, a gun, and a public venue . . ."

Not just any public venue, but so-called "gun-free" public venues have been prominently targeted by these kinds of killers. Knowing that there are convenient places with disarmed victims unable to defend themselves makes these deranged individuals even more prone to lash out. Add "gun-free" zones to the list of things to be removed.

[RaisingAwareness]

Click on the second link to see what Michael Moore has to say about this issue. It's not the guns he's blaming.



HTTP://WWW.SSRISTORIES.COM/INDEX.PHP


HTTP://WWW.DRUGAWARENESS.ORG/HOME.HTML

[Spookcatcher]

What exactly are your personal convictions about the U.S. Constitution and the right to bear arms? Are you so perfectly sure that if there were no guns in America no troubled teens would kill anybody? In a population of 300,000,000 and only 2.2 million in prison, most of which are there for nonviolent crimes, and many who have committed violent crimes are let out early to make room for more nonviolent offenders, I find amazing. Common sense tells me that in an unabashed capitalism like we have that we are on borrowed time for more a more violent population, and it has nothing to do with guns, and more to do with Leaders, educators, social agencies, institutions, and an economy that divides our society, plus a more agressive and tyrannical government. Teens that kill and retaliate are recorded throughout man's history. Some cultures even today teach their young to kill as a right of passage. Billy the kid was 12, when he first killed someone. It is not okay for these tragedies to occur, just that mankind does not ever live in a perfect world of behavior, the tools and technology may change but the numerical odds are always in play.

[Newfycrat]

The point is that when guns can kill more people, one troubled teen can turn a fight into a massacre.
"No one can estimate how many school shootings took place before prior to 1960. Such events were covered up by schools that feared for their reputations and families who wished to retain their standing in the community. The scope of the violence was limited by the technology of the weapon. To kill more then a few people, the shooter needed a semi-automatic weapon, a gun that will fire rapidly each time the trigger is depressed without the shooter having to pause to manually move a new cartridge into the firing chamber. "

[OhgReaTone]

The proliferation of guns has corresponded to the proliferation of errant crazy crime. This is a case of technology outrunning ethics, or perhaps it is an economic agenda or religious fear that is outrunning ethics. In any case, there are two central problems - flawed education systems that are not tolerant of the unusual, and the availability of guns. The only thing worse is when these children gather their guns together in gangs.
Ohg.
http://thefireside.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/define-gang/

[DMeadows]

There are many facets to the problem which can be defined, but "the availability of guns" is vague and poorly articulated. Guns must be available to law-abiding adults, because our country rightfully recognizes that there are individual liberties which require them. The legitimate liberties are many, but two chief examples are the right to self-defense and the right to armed opposition against tyranny.

So, can you more precisely differentiate between the good things versus the things that need improvement when it comes to gun availability, and present those things that you think need improvement for us to discuss?

[jeskiley]

I think you have your math wrong, which is probably unavoidable being that you work within an institution that provides diagnoses, yet some how manages to avoid diagnosing itself. And since your lifeblood relies on statistics within closed systems, you feel victimized by the few options at your disposal. You might even hate your mother. A miserable homelife can be assuaged by a delightful school life, a suicide plan can be averted with something worth living for (a delightful school life). A long-term plan for life, lived IN the world, is more than (not equal to) the rather pitiful offerings of a compartmentalized education, fracturing the view of the whole. The key change is to inject some hope. Such worthy visions may cause said-student to replace thoughts of gaining power through guns with thoughts of more conventional ammunition, like pencils and pens. Recommend removing animal from the cage, and continuing further study in a more natural habitat. A public venue for expression is the common denominator for all, but the element of choice versus forced surrender is lurking in the shadows. The determinant of whether rage or joy is expressed, is the factor we are looking to manipulate. Keep playing with those numbers, teacher, and don't forget your eraser.

[Newfycrat]

I agree with most of what you have said, but I disagree on the bully information about Harris. The bully meme, started by the media and not let go of because of how sensational it sounded, was not true.
http://www.slate.com/id/2099203/

[Misanthrope2]

The common denominator in most school shootings is that the shooter is a hunter. That is they like to sneak around killing animals for fun. Why is it hard to see that somebody who kills animals for fun will kill human animals when mad or frustrated?

Hunting is cruel, stupid and should be outlawed.

[DMeadows]

Hunters kill prey-animals as quickly as possible and then eat and use as much of what they kill as possible.

There are some people who kill animals for fun, but they are not hunters, they are criminals guilty of animal cruelty.

Your definition of hunting is not credible. Therefore, your general credibility suffers.

[1will]

Do you have a link to back up your hunter/school shooter theory?