Readin', writin' and killin'

The author of a new book about school shootings talks about America's pernicious cult of athletics, the dangers of small-town intimacy, and why it's impossible to identify a school shooter in advance.

By Carlene Bauer

Feb 25, 2004 | Just a few years ago, it seemed that the only sort of terrorist threat Americans had to worry about was disenfranchised young men from small-town America plotting to blow up their schools -- not disenfranchised young men from the Middle East plotting to blow up national landmarks. But elaborate schemes to take revenge against fellow students are still, depressingly, one of our national realities. In recent weeks, two such plots in California and one in Louisiana were foiled. We may be getting better at defusing potential massacres, but according to Katherine Newman, a Harvard sociologist who analyzed the causes and effects of two pre-Columbine shootings in rural communities in Kentucky and Arkansas, the real work lies in preventing kids from viewing mass murder as the answer to their problems in the first place.

In 1999, Congress, baffled by the wave of late '90s shootings, decided to investigate why they were happening in quiet, close-knit communities rather than cities. Newman was asked to contribute two case studies to the effort, and her new book, "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings," grew out of that research. Newman and a team of four Harvard graduate students conducted more than a hundred interviews with kids, parents, teachers and mental health workers in Heath, Ky., where in 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal opened fire on an early morning prayer group at his high school, killing three students and wounding five others, and in Westside, Ark., where in 1998 Andrew Golden, 11, and Mitchell Johnson, 13, fired 30 rounds of ammunition at teachers and students on a school playground, killing four and injuring 10.

Newman and her colleagues concluded that we can't blame guns or Marilyn Manson for these unthinkable acts of violence. In fact, some of our all-American values may be the poison in the well. The closeness of small towns, she writes, often socializes its residents into silence because they don't want to risk offending their friends and neighbors by bringing up unsettling information. And, she argues, we need to be more understanding of kids that can't or won't be shiny, happy conformists. She reminds us that for teenagers, hell definitely is other people -- especially if you're a boy who isn't a jock.

The school shootings you studied took place in rural communities. How does the structure of these communities make for trouble?

In a small town the kinds of connections people make are highly overlapping -- your teacher may be your Scout leader, who may also be your neighbor. These multiplex ties are really important, and they create a density not just of social relationships but also of information. We argue in the book that this density has many positive features, but also negative ones. It will lead people to worry a lot about the consequences of losing a friendship if they come forward with information that's regarded as damaging or poorly motivated.

There's data in the book showing that out of the 25 school shootings that have occurred in the U.S. since 1974, three-quarters of them have taken place since the early '90s. Why has there been this increase?

I don't think we have a good handle on why these shootings began to increase. But we do know that there's a copycat phenomenon in later shootings. We can see that a kind of script was born for this sort of violence and it began to be taken up by young boys. And by "script" I mean media representation of shootings as a way of establishing manhood -- of becoming a man, of showing that you're physically dominant and powerful. This image of a glorified or notorious shooter is something we see in popular media. But we can see that in action films from the '70s like "Superfly" and "Shaft," so it's not as though [this image] has suddenly increased.

In the Kentucky high school, the kids you talked to said the worst thing they can think of is to be called gay. But with hunting and sports so entrenched, is it possible in these small communities to give boys an alternative definition of masculinity?

Sports culture has many positive virtues -- I don't want to sound like I think every football player's a horrible person. And in fact sports often do unite the community and provide a way for the generations to speak to each other about the things they care about in common. However, it's more difficult in small communities to have alternative pathways to manhood. But it doesn't seem to me that it's impossible. These boys in these towns actually have many different models in front of them -- they've got fathers who become plumbers or doctors and lawyers and technicians. It's not as though they look at every male that's in their social orbit and think "Oh, he's respected because he's sporting a gun." They aren't. But in the fantastic culture of the media, you don't see the father who becomes a plumber as an image of masculinity. You see these sawed-off shotguns. And these schools have debate teams; they have science programs. There are other activities that young men can participate in. But they are not usually as publicly valued. Kids [in non-sports activities] we interviewed would say, "You didn't see a pep rally for us." Even when the school tries to combat this, by holding a pep rally for the band, everybody knows that it's a conscious effort. But I do think that's something we could change if people recognize just how much potential damage it does to have just a single way of defining success and manliness.

Would you say that this is a particularly American problem, then, our beloved jockocracies?

This is a problem that doesn't derive so much from the size of these communities as from a general American disdain for intellectual [excellence], a sort of populism that's common in the culture. In Japan, for instance, if you are a failing academic high school student, you are in deep trouble. But you're really not in deep trouble in the United States. It's a curious thing, because we all know that this is damaging to society as a whole, to not value [academic] achievement. Unless you are a glitteringly successful sports star or movie star, most of the rest of us are going to come to the good life through higher education and professions which heavily favor people who are gifted in the mind. But in adolescence we load our status system up with the absolute opposite values. Quite a few kids expressed resentment at this. One Westside girl, complaining about how the football players got out of class on game days to watch "Remember the Titans," said, "We don't get any privileges like that ... We bust our tails and we don't get anything for it." A boy at Heath said even though their football team was terrible, they still got all the attention. "Our choir was really good. We sent the most people to all-state and higher-state. Nobody said a word about it. Smart kids -- they didn't care about the smart kids."

When people get older, of course, they can look more critically on their high school days and come to grips with what they meant or didn't mean. But when you're in the middle of it, it's your whole world. It's everything. And if you're in a small rural community, it might feel like it's your whole world forever, because you don't see many examples of people getting up and leaving. The two schools we studied both sent a majority of their students to college -- but where do they go? They went to the local community college or state colleges. They often don't leave at all --- they live at home if they go to college, and even if they do go away, they come back. In the graduating class at Heath the year of the shooting, only three or four kids actually went away to college.

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