Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings

RAMPAGE: THE SOCIAL ROOTS OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS BY KATHERINE NEWMAN, ET AL BASIC BOOKS, 399 PAGES, $27.95

I AM WRITING A book about rampage murders. These rampage murders are one of the last genuine "Made in America" products we have. America's boundless capacity for cheerful self-delusion helps to explain why this unique and entirely new crime has remained essentially unexplained.

For this book review, I decided to interview Harvard professor Katherine Newman, a co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, one of the few books so far published on the subject. The book is spotty—she and her team of grad students collected a treasure trove of evidence and interviews, thanks in part to the fact that Congress and the National Academy of Sciences funded the research.

Unfortunately, the Harvard team comes across as far too healthy to cope with the pain that they uncover—this is most comically evident when, at the end, in their policy suggestions, they propose, "Parents can teach their sons that a 'real man' is not measured by his muscles; a real man is a responsible and caring person." Moreover, their penchant for favoring sociology jargon over colloquial language suggests an almost tactless fixation on promoting their guild rather than getting to the bottom of the horribleness that produces these murders. The weakness of their suggestions as well as their inability to make sense of the flat, familiar pain that plays such a subtle yet vital role in these murder sprees is not so much an indicator of Newman and her team's work, which is impressive, as the need for an entirely different approach to understanding rampage murders.

IS THERE NO WAY TO DRAW AN ACCURATE PROFILE OF THE SCHOOL RAMPAGE MURDERER?

No, there isn't. The Secret Service was the first to come to that conclusion, and we decided that they're right about that. Because when you look at the characteristics of the people who become school shooters, they're all over the map. They're good students, they're bad students, they come from broken homes and perfectly happy homes, or what appear to be happy homes.

WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT THE CAUSES FOR SCHOOL SHOOTINGS THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN COME UP WITH A PROFILE?

Remember, we're talking about very rare events. Maybe if we had thousands of cases we could say something more definitive. But the other thing that it tells us is that the pressures that lead to this kind of adolescent despair over social failure can happen to a very wide variety of kids.

WHY DID THESE SHOOTINGS BECOME SO PREVALENT ONLY IN THE LATE 1990S?

This is a very good question, and it's the one question I feel we were not able to adequately answer. And I don't think anyone will.

YOU MENTION IN THE BOOK THAT YOU SAW SIMILARITIES BETWEEN OFFICE RAMPAGE SHOOTINGS AND SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. DO YOU THINK THE OFFICE AND POST OFFICE SHOOTINGS MAY HAVE CONTRIBUTED AS A KIND OF CULTURAL SCRIPT?

We don't have any evidence of that in the sense that the school shooters don't talk about those postal rampages. But we thought about this a lot and I think you're quite right. They are much more like postal rampages in the workplace because they represent an attack on the institution, an attack on the hierarchy. Where they differ is that rampage shootings among adults in the workplace are almost always done by individuals.

FOR ME, ONE OF THE MOST PAINFUL CHAPTERS IN YOUR BOOK DEALS WITH COMMUNITIES' REACTIONS TO THE FAMILIES AND THE VICTIMS. I COME FROM SUBURBAN HELL IN SAN JOSE, WHICH IS A "BOWLING ALONE" TYPE OF PLACE. DO YOU THINK THAT THIS COLD REACTION IS PART OF THE PROBLEM?

No, I don't think so, because I don't think it's quite the same. I think what makes the reactions to these tragedies so hard to bear is that you are looking at the rupture of relations that were very, very close. The tragedy split the community into people who really lost something very dear to them and people who were only peripherally affected. Under those circumstances they have different interests, if you want to think of it that way. The people peripherally affected want to get past it. If anything, they have a real interest in seeing the whole community move on because they don't want to see the whole community associated with this awful disaster. But the people who lost their children are never going to get past it. Never.

ONE MOMENT FROM YOUR BOOK THAT STRUCK ME WAS WHEN THE TEACHER WHO NURSED DYING STUDENTS WAS SO TRAUMATIZED THAT SHE HAD TO SKIP TEACHING CLASSES ON CERTAIN DAYS, AND SHE HAD HER PAY DOCKED, AND THEY WOULDN'T GIVE HER SUPPORT OR HELP. THAT'S THE KIND OF COLD CULTURE I GREW UP WITH.

You know, it's one of those things where it's not intended to be cold. You have regulations in a health insurance plan, so you get X number of days for this, that and the other thing. It's not intended to be cold, and it's not built for an extraordinary tragedy either. Part of the problem is that the boilerplate provision of medical insurance or something is not built for a tragedy that takes years to recover from. I think it's a bureaucratic response to how an insurance policy should be written.

I HAVE NOTICED THAT KIDS ALL ACROSS AMERICA FIND THE SCHOOL SHOOTERS, ESPECIALLY THE COLUMBINE SHOOTERS, TO BE KIND OF ANTI-HEROES. DID YOU RUN INTO THAT IN YOUR RESEARCH?

We ran into it in the following way. The accounts we collected of school shooters other than the ones we studied—that is, the ones that were in the newspaper accounts that we followed closely—do make reference to this anti-hero stature. In New Bedford, for example, which was one of the near-miss cases that we detailed at some length, it was very clear that those boys were looking to become more notorious than the Columbine shooters. They were explicit about it—that they were going to make Columbine look like child's play. So there's no question that this has become a kind of anti-hero motif.

And I think that it was bound up with the goth darkness that some of these kids find very attractive. And that by itself is an anti-hero kind of style. Because they're not trying to blend in with the crowd. They are trying to get attention. I have pictures that I don't put in the book because these people were never indicted, and I feel it's unethical to identify them. But when you look at the pictures of the un-indicted co-conspirators—the kids that Michael Carneal [who killed three and wounded five at Heath High School in West Paducah, KY] was trying to impress—there's no way that those kids are trying to blend into the scene. They look dramatically scary and notorious, and they were trying to look like that. They were trying to attract attention. They were definitely setting themselves up to be charismatic figures.

BUT THE GOTHS ARE NEVER THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY SHOOT. THEY SEEM TO BE LETTING OFF THE STEAM BY BEING GOTHS.

Goth-wannabes are [shooting]. Klebold and Harris [the Columbine shooters] were goth wannabes. And the shooting in Heath certainly involved someone who wanted to be, but was not really. Goths are actually a really interesting group, and I don't know if anybody has ever done any research on them. But they tend to be high-functioning, bright boys who are kind of tired of the conformist culture around them. And so, very often around them—and if you interview school principals as I have about the goths, they'll say, look, these guys are harmless. There's nothing really seriously anti-social about them. They're striking a pose. They're the high-functioning intellectuals who are disaffected. They may be the computer geeks at the same time as they're dressed in black and painting their fingernails.

ARE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS JUSTIFIED ON SOME LEVEL?

They could never be justified. In fact, the shooters themselves would never justify this conduct with the value of hindsight. They are not very happy about what they've done. But there's a difference between understanding and justification. Understanding is there for the purpose of explaining why something happens without saying that it was justified. I think there's a big, big distance between those two ideas. I think it's critically important to understand the dynamics of the situation.

Let's face it—millions of kids all over the country face bullying and social exclusion, and they don't shoot people. So there's no way that you can turn it around and say that this is the natural, normal response to such a situation. And most of these kids [who shoot] have serious mental disorders. People who are in their right mind are not happy if they're tormented socially. But they don't shoot people. Really, the mental illness angle to this cannot be subtracted. It's there. It's so unfortunate that it's so hard to recognize beforehand. These boys are almost never diagnosed and are very rarely being treated for any form of depression, or in Carneal's case, the early stages of schizophrenia. So it's a tragedy that we find it so hard to recognize what that looks like at the age of 13 or 14…

BUT ALL KIDS AT THAT AGE ARE ESSENTIALLY MENTALLY ILL—

It's really hard to know. We know what this is going to look like at the age of 25. Really hard to know what it looks like at 13. So when we ask the question, "Justified?" No, these people are clinically insane, they're losing their minds. Just slowly. And they're in the early stages of it. And it's going to become more evident as they get older. But I would never, ever say these things are justified. I would say that the task of the social scientist is to reach for explanation.