According to Jessie Klein, the author of the new book “The Bully Society,” it’s a problem that’s only getting worse. In her excellent examination of the school bullying epidemic, Klein, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University, takes a broad approach to the subject. She first lays out the scope of the problem, before explaining how kids’ changing attitudes towards masculinity, the birth of child-targeted consumerism and the erosion of our compassionate society have all helped to create a culture in which children are increasingly feeling overwhelmed and helpless, and, in some cases, prone to violence. Most provocatively, she ties the rise of bullying behavior to America’s economic move to the right.

Salon spoke to Klein over the phone from New York about the Ohio shooting, Facebook and why the current election cycle is bad for bullying.

What is your immediate reaction to the Ohio shooting?

I think the whole controversy about whether [the alleged shooter] was bullied or not is very interesting. It’s clear he posted these rather miserable poems on Facebook that conveyed that he was unhappy and angry, and a number of kids say he was an outcast, he was isolated, he was picked on — and then others said he wasn’t. People are always arguing about what it means to be bullied. It seems clear this kid was not treated particularly well, he didn’t have a lot of friends, he was isolated, and he was unhappy. A good community would see a person who’s having a hard time and figure out ways to reach out to them and care about them. It seems less important to his experience as being bullied or not being bullied, than figuring out that he wasn’t in the middle of a social environment that was caring and compassionate.

You argue that the bullying problem in the United States has been getting worse in the last few decades.

Yeah. Between 1979 and 1988 there were 27 school shootings. From 1989 to 1998 there were 55 and then they continued to increase from 1999 to 2008 to 66, so there were 148 shootings in the three decades from 1979 to 2008. What’s most disturbing is that in the three years since 2008 there have been 43 shootings, and that’s almost two-thirds of the number of shootings that occurred in the preceding decade.

What do school shootings have to do with bullying?

I started studying the school shootings when I first heard about a school shooting in 1997. I was really struck by why he said he committed the shooting. He talked about how he had been picked on, and called gay, and harassed for being fat. And I thought that’s really not that different from what many kids experience. For the book, I interviewed kids across the country and asked them about their experiences, and I realized school shooters are really complaining about the same things that almost every American child could talk about.

We have an increasingly high depression rate, anxiety has increased among children. There are so many different ways that the children are acting out their despair — suicides, self cutting, substance abuse — and so much of it relates to school bullying. So, what I try to show in the book is that school shootings are the most horrific response to school bullying but they’re not the only response at all, and mostly they magnify what’s happening at schools. You know, most of the kids who committed shootings really wanted to tell the world that they were so miserable and they were treated so badly and this is what they felt forced to do.

What differentiates America’s attitude toward evil from that of other countries? And how does this relate to school shootings? In “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” for example, the new Lynne Ramsay film about a school shooting, the perpetrator is seen as intrinsically, almost cartoonishly evil.

There’s the way to define evil as taking pleasure in other people’s pain and feeling pain in people’s pleasure. And that characterizes a lot of what goes on in schools — kids are encouraged to be envious of other kids and if other kids get a high grade or a boyfriend or girlfriend or win a game or whatever else, they end up feeling envious and angry and hateful towards those people rather than supportive and excited and part of a community where good things are happening. When school shootings occur people like to say, “Oh that person was a psychopath.” And it’s a way of personalizing the issue and not taking responsibility as a society. As Durkheim, a classic sociologist, said in his seminal work called “Suicide,” when you see the same thing happening over and over and over again, you can’t keep blaming the individual. You have to look at the social environment and say, why is this happening over and over again? There must be something in our social environment that’s having this effect.

Most of us who grew up in North America have experienced first-hand how important social status is in high school. Many of the shooters talk about how their killings were a way of upending that hierarchy.

One of [the shooters] said he thought the shooting would make him more popular and, in prison, he said, “I feel more respected now.” These kids really were willing to do anything to increase their respect in the school. They’d been so harassed and so degraded. It was such a miserable experience that they thought if they picked up guns they would finally feel powerful and gain some respect. And I think that is a very sad statement in our society that kids get that message: To get respect they need to be dominate and aggressive and violent.

You argue that the pressure to be hypermasculine has increased in the last few decades. Why?

I think our whole society is more masculine. Capitalism as an economic system has become much more so. Our social services have been cut significantly. The media is much less regulated. They used to not be able to advertise to children, and now they advertise plastic surgery to them. There’s just so much in our society that’s concerned with how to perfect yourself, how to look, how to become as powerful as you can be, regardless of how it affects others. I don’t think that message was quite as prominent in previous decades, and all those values are related in some ways to masculinity. So what I show in the book is that masculine values of aggression, violence, dominance are not specific to men. Girls and women are increasingly pressured to demonstrate those values as well.

What’s most fascinating to me about your book is what you describe as the “bully economy” — the idea that economic conservatism is fostering this epidemic of bullying.

George Ritzer wrote a fascinating article about how the economy affects our social relationships. Now, when you go into a store there’s a scripted relationship. Somebody is going to say, “Is there anything that you want?” And you say, “No thank you.” “Do you have everything you need?” “Yes I do.” And that kind of conversation is organized so you won’t have a long personal conversation that will prevent you from buying things. Telemarketing is the same way. So that even when people come together and could have a human experience, they’re prevented from having that experience by these kinds of scripted conversations. Sales people actually get docked in pay or punished if they deviate from these scripts. And I think those kinds of new dynamics have had an effect on our social relationships. And what’s fascinating is that social isolation has increased. It’s tripled since the ’80s, and depression and anxiety statistics are extremely high. These are, I think, indicators of what’s going on in our society more generally.

In the book, you argue that much of this can be traced back to Reagan and the Reagan era. Why?

He came to power talking about deregulating capitalism. There are many people who do believe that the more you help people, the less they will work, the more lazy they will become. There became an entire culture against people on welfare. Even Clinton after Reagan developed this program called Welfare to Work, where even if you were disabled or had six children you were forced to find some way to work 20 hours per week. And I think since then society has gotten more and more harsh in that way and I think people feel strongly in our country that that’s the way to get ahead. We’re the only country in the industrial world that doesn’t have a paid leave for women who have children, whereas other countries in Europe go out of their way to make sure there’s a long paternity leave. There are countries that help families to stay home for 3 years and they’ll pay 80 percent of the salary. For the most part, people here believe that if you make money you’ll get support but if you don’t make money, you’re pretty much on your own. And I think that’s what kids in schools feel. A lot of the school shooters said, “The principal wasn’t doing anything, the guidance counselors weren’t doing anything, so I had to take things into my own hands.” And that’s pretty much the message that people get, whether you’re an adult or a kid.

You also take a very pessimistic view of Facebook and the Internet.

With Facebook, with a lot of social media, there’s a lot of harassment. The whole cyber-bullying phenomenon is just awful because people don’t even necessarily know who’s harassing them. A lot of the people I’ve interviewed say as the technology developed the harassment has gotten worse. And there are so many ways we use technology to disconnect from one another and to have relationships that are only in cyber space.

But isn’t the Internet also a tool for kids to escape isolation — gay kids, for example, can connect with each other over the Web in ways they never could before.

Technology isn’t necessarily evil — it can be used towards very constructive ends by people who are very isolated. There are ways technology can be used to help connect people and hopefully you have face-to-face connections following that. But I think because so much of our social relationships have become commodified, about getting ahead and having status and having popularity. Many relationships are almost entirely implemented on the Internet and people have few face-to-face relationships. Studies have shown that kids today don’t even necessarily know how to have face-to-face relationships anymore. People see people in cafes and they’re sitting right with each other, texting with other people. Friendship has decreased. In the ’80s, the average person had three confidantes. It’s down to two. At the same time we’re finding out that for mammals it’s actually organic to develop friendships and to care about other living beings. Our social and economic environment is undermining us.

In the book, you looked at bullying in both upper-middle class and working class schools. How do those environments compare?

What I’ve found is that it’s pretty bad everywhere. There are different products that people are pressured to buy. In suburban areas it’s Louis Vuitton, in urban areas it’s Nikes or Michael Jordan sneakers. People often feel that unless they purchase them they’ll get bullied. And parents are in this terrible position where even if they don’t believe in branding or buying these commodities, they worry rightfully that their kids might get bullied if they’re not wearing the right clothes or sneakers or have the right cell phone. And of course there are companies that actually go into high schools to try to get kids to wear their clothes or items so that other students will want to buy them.

If you’re tying bullying to deregulation, how does America compare to other countries where the economy is far less deregulated?

It’s an interesting question. We have more school shootings and violence than anywhere in the world. Certainly there are much less school shootings [in industrialized European countries]. They do have a big bullying problem, and I think in some ways America has become globalized — there is a McDonald’s in every country. But most of what they try to do in response to school shootings is not the zero tolerance policy that we have of suspensions, expulsions. It’s much more about, how do we build relationships among people? How do we create communities?

The cultural dialogue around school shootings seems to have shifted in the last decade and a half. When Columbine happened, video games and violent movies were really being blamed. This doesn’t really seem to be the case anymore. It’s more about bullying.

In 1997 I wrote an article about how people were blaming single parents [for shootings], and I think that was really interesting because at that time in almost every school shooting at that point the perpetrators came from families with two parents, often a stay at home parent. They blamed the violence in the media — and there’s a lot of data that shows it increases aggression but not that it necessarily causes violence. And of course the gun control issues were big. Right now people are looking at the bullying issue instead of looking at external symptoms, but I don’t think that we can discount them. Media violence is part of the deregulated society we have today. There used to be many more limits on what kind of things you can show in movies, what kind of advertisements you can have. Everything is much more sexual, more violent, more callous.

I think many parents these days are being faced with a lot of conflicting messages. On one hand, they shouldn’t be helicopter parenting. On the other hand, they should be very concerned about whether or not their kids are being bullied at school, and monitoring them for signs of distress.

Those are very interesting, important issues. People want to blame somebody. Teachers are getting blamed. Parents are getting blamed because they’re not raising their children correctly. Certain students are getting blamed because they have the profile of a bully. These are all distractions because it’s not about individuals doing a certain thing it’s about a socioeconomic environment where people are pressured to act in particular ways. Parent get so little support for navigating a very cruel and scary world — if kids are going to school and getting shot, why wouldn’t a parent want to coddle their child and make sure that they don’t meet such a horrible end? We have to look at a much broader level to think about how do we change a society that’s become so cruel and callous and dangerous.

Well, even under Obama, the American economy is still extraordinarily deregulated, and will continue to be so. We’re going through this election cycle in which, once again, welfare recipients are being demonized, and the GOP primary has become a race to out right-wing Mitt Romney. Given what’s happening in America right now, do you see any hope?

I do actually feel hope. I feel like people are really concerned about these issues. I think schools could become leaders in a movement to make change in our society. At a minimum, they could create a reprieve from the harsher environment that kids have to deal with outside of schools, and if schools are successful, different kinds of people will come out of them. Right now kids are trained to be heartless and pursue success at any cost. If schools really worked to create community and to help children value themselves and one another, different kinds of people would come out of those schools, and I think different leaders would end up leading the country.

I think people can create change on a very interpersonal level by refusing to be objectified, by refusing to be defined by their brands, by their shoes, cars, clothes, bags, by refusing to identify other people in terms of what they’ve bought, and to be present with other human beings, emotionally and intellectually.

Police initially reported that three people were shot and the shooter was at large.

Numerous law enforcement agencies responded to the shooting at the 2,400-student campus located in the city of Los Angeles adjacent to the city of Gardena.

Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast said a teacher called 911 at 10:41 a.m. and Gardena officers initially responded. The investigation was being turned over to Los Angeles city and school district police.

A handful of frantic parents rushed to the school after hearing about the shooting on the news. They paced nervously as they waited behind police tapes for word from their children.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” said Thomas Hill, whose 16-year-old and 18-year-old children attend the school. “You’re going to have confrontations between kids but never this.”

A mother who was waiting to hear from her 14-year-old son, Michael, said the school has a reputation for gang violence. Lupe Contreras said she has been trying to get her son out of the school.

Cynthia Cano, 15, said she was in a Mexican-American social studies class when an announcement was made that the school was in lockdown.

“We heard someone got shot. Everyone was freaking out a little,” she said in a telephone interview from inside the campus.

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Associated Press writer Christina Hoag, Greg Risling, Daisy Nguyen and Sue Manning contributed to this report.

Van Etten says the shooting was not “spur of the moment.” Police also found anti-government paraphanelia in Duke’s home.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — An ex-convict calmly held a school board at gunpoint, complaining about taxes and his wife being fired before shooting at close range as the superintendent begged, “Please don’t.”

Minutes earlier, the room had been filled with students accepting awards, but no one was hurt except the gunman, who shot himself Tuesday after exchanging fire with a security guard, police said.

“It could have been a monumental tragedy,” Bay District Schools Superintendent Bill Husfelt said. “God was standing in front of me and I will go to my grave believing that.”

Video of meeting shows 56-year-old Clay A. Duke rising from his seat, spray-painting a red V on the wall, then waving a gun and ordering everyone to leave the room except the men on the board. They dove under the long desk they had been sitting behind as he fired at them.

Duke’s motivation was still murky Wednesday. He rambled to the board about tax increases and his wife, but also apparently created a Facebook page last week that refers to class warfare and is laced with images from the movie “V for Vendetta,” in which a mysterious figure battles a totalitarian government.

The school board was in the midst of a routine discussion when Duke walked to the front of the room.

“We could tell by the look in his eyes that this wasn’t going to end well,” Husfelt told The Associated Press.

Husfelt was calm as he tried to persuade Duke to drop the gun, but Duke just shook his head. The only woman on the board, Ginger Littleton, had been ordered out of the room too, but she sneaked back in behind him and whacked his gun arm with her large brown purse.

“In my mind, that was the last attempt or opportunity to divert him,” Littleton said.

Duke, a large, heavyset man in a dark pullover coat got angry and turned around. She fell to the floor as board members pleaded with her to stop. Duke pointed the gun at her head and said, “You stupid b—-” but he didn’t shoot her. She’s not sure why.

“I think the ‘you stupid’ part, I thought at that point, probably, you’re right. I was pretty stupid,” Littleton told NBC’s “Today” show early Wednesday.

After several minutes, video showed Duke slowly raising the gun and leveling it at Husfelt, who pleaded “Please don’t, please don’t.”

Duke shot twice at Husfelt from about 8 feet away and squeezed off several more rounds before district security chief Mike Jones, a former police officer, bolted in. He exchanged gunfire with Duke and wounded him in the leg or side before Duke fatally shot himself, police Sgt. Jeff Becker said.

Somehow, no one else in the small board room was injured in the clash that lasted several minutes. Husfelt said at least two rounds lodged in the wall behind him.

In Duke’s brief exchange with the board, he said his wife had been fired from the northern Florida district, but never told Husfelt or the board who she was or what she did. Members promised to help her find a new job, but Duke just shook his head. Husfelt told Duke he didn’t remember his wife but would have be responsible for her dismissal, so the board members should be allowed to leave.

“He said his wife was fired, but we really don’t know what he was talking about,” Husfelt told the AP at his Panama City home. “I don’t think he knew what he was talking about.”

Video of the meeting shows Husfelt telling Duke: “I’ve got a feeling you want the cops to come in and kill you because you said you are going to die today.” Later, the head of more than 30 schools in the district that includes the beach tourism and Air Force town of Panama City said he was sure someone was going to be killed.

Tommye Lou Richardson, the school district’s personnel director, was at the meeting and called Jones a hero. As Duke lay on the floor, colleagues comforted the shaken man, who said he had never shot anyone before.

SWAT officers then stormed the room and ordered everyone onto the ground. School officials told them that Duke was shot and appeared dead. His feet could be seen near the board’s seats.

People gathered at Duke’s home Tuesday night asked reporters to leave. On a Facebook page under his name, the only dated entries are from Dec. 7 and 8. The page shows a cryptic message in the “About Me” section.

“My testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V) … no … I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95 percent of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats … same-same … rich … they take turns fleecing us … our few dollars … pyramiding the wealth for themselves.”

His Facebook profile picture is the red V symbol he spray-painted on the wall during the meeting, and his page includes photos from the film version “V for Vendetta,” which was also a graphic novel.

He quotes billionaire Warren Buffett, who told the New York Times in 2006: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war and we’re winning.”

Duke was charged in October 1999 with aggravated stalking, shooting or throwing a missile into a building or vehicle and obstructing justice, according to state records. He was convicted and sentenced in January 2000 to five years in prison and was released in January 2004. Records show Duke was a licensed massage therapist before his arrest but it wasn’t clear if he was employed.

Attorney Ben Bollinger, who represented Duke during his trial, told The News Herald of Panama City that Duke was waiting in the woods for his wife with a rifle, wearing a mask and a bulletproof vest. She confronted him and then tried to leave in a vehicle, and Duke shot the tires. He said that as part of his sentence, Duke was required to complete psychological counseling. Bollinger did not immediately return a phone message from the AP.

“The guy obviously had a death wish,” district spokeswoman Karen Tucker said of Duke.

Trapped in their classroom with a student gunman, a group of terrified Wisconsin high schoolers worked desperately to keep their captor calm by chatting and laughing with him about hunting and fishing.

The 15-year-old gunman eventually shot himself as police stormed the room at Marinette High School hours later Monday evening, and he was in a grave condition early Tuesday.

The teenager allowed five of his hostages out after about six and a half hours, and finally all 23 and their social studies teacher Valerie Burd emerged unharmed. Student hostage Zach Campbell said the gunman seemed depressed, but he didn’t think he meant his classmates any harm.

“I didn’t know really what to think. I was just hoping to get out alive,” Campbell said Tuesday on CBS’ “Early Show.” “He didn’t want to shoot any of us.”

Campbell told The Associated Press that six of the gunman’s close friends were in that class.

Authorities also said they did not know what might have motivated the boy who made no demands or requests during the standoff.

“As far as what caused this, it seems to be a mystery,” Marinette Police Chief Jeff Skorik said early Tuesday. “We have not been able to identify anything that precipitated this incident.”

Skorik said the suspect fired three shots immediately before police entered the room, but he had also fired at least two or three shots before that. He shot into a wall, a desk and equipment in the room, but he was not aiming at any students, Skorik said. The shooter was carrying a 9 mm semi-automatic and a .22 caliber semi-automatic, and he had additional ammunition in his pocket and a duffel bag with more bullets was found at the scene, the chief said. A knife was also found in the room, he said.

A bomb-sniffing dog was brought in to check the building for explosives and none were found, the chief said. He said it was not clear where the boy got the weapons or how he sneaked them into school.

Speaking on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” student Austin Biehl said the teacher asked the gunman why he was holding them hostage.

“He just said ‘no,’ that he didn’t want anything, didn’t want any help,” said Biehl, who was so scared that his legs were shaking.

The gunman was taken to a nearby hospital. Authorities have declined to release his name. Skorik said it was his understanding that the boy was in grave condition Tuesday morning.

“The information that I’ve received is from officers on scene,” the chief said. “There was quite a bit of medical treatment going on.”

The shooter entered the classroom, where he was a student, at around 1:30 p.m., Skorik said.

Marinette Schools Superintendent Tim Baneck said the student started class without any weapons. He asked to use the restroom, and when he returned he was carrying the duffel bag containing the two guns and ammunition, Baneck said.

It wasn’t until the end of the school day, more than two hours later, that the principal learned that neither the teacher nor any of the students from the class had been seen, Skorik said. He went to investigate and was threatened by the shooter to “get out of here,” Skorik said.

Campbell said the class was watching a movie when the gunman shot the projector, then fired a second round. He had two handguns and refused to let anyone leave, Campbell said. He demanded everyone dump their cell phones in the center of the room. When the gunman’s own cell phone rang, the boy snapped it in half, Campbell said.

He wasn’t interested in talking with the teacher and told her to be quiet, Campbell said. But the gunman chatted with his fellow students, who tried to keep him talking about how he hunted and about fishing. Students even got the gunman to laugh, Campbell said.

The gunman refused to communicate with officials during the standoff, Skorik said, but allowed the teacher, Burd, to speak with them by phone.

“The teacher was nothing short of heroic,” Skorik said. “I think she kept a very cool head. She was able to keep the suspect as calm as possible. I heard that she took the responsibility of trying to assure the other students they were going to be OK. We really give that teacher a lot of credit for being able to keep a cool head under a stressful situation.”

Choral teacher Bonita Weydt said she was talking with a teacher in another classroom at the end of the day when Principal Corry Lambie came in.

“I said, ‘Corry, what’s going on?’ and he said, ‘Get out of the building,’” Weydt said.

Firefighters kept people away from the school. Anxious parents met throughout the evening with officials at the county courthouse.

After about seven hours, the boy let Campbell and four other students out to use the bathroom. Police outside the classroom whisked them to safety.

About 20 minutes later, Skorik said, officers heard three shots and broke down the door. The gunman, who was standing at the front of the classroom, shot himself as officers approached, the chief said.

Students were taken by bus to the courthouse, where they were reunited with their parents.

Keith Schroeder, a former Marinette middle school teacher, said he had the gunman as a student and also knows the boy’s teacher well. He said the teen’s family is extremely involved in all their boys’ lives.

“He’s a fine young man, and I’m totally taken aback,” Schroeder told The Associated Press. “Surprised, flabbergasted to say the least because this is a great family. It doesn’t fit any of the things or the molds that you read about people. I couldn’t say enough good things about the family.”

Skorik said the district attorney was reviewing the case and would decide whether to file any charges.

Marinette, a city of about 12,000 people, lies about 50 miles north of Green Bay on the border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. About 800 students attend the high school, according to its website.

Baneck noted the community went through an emergency response training exercise last year.

“So the local law enforcement officials as well as the educators were all involved in a mock shooter situation, so it is actually very fresh in our minds in terms of the training we just went through,” he said.

City Councilman Bradley Behrendt said the district spent “a whole bundle of money” on classroom doors to make them more secure, but the school doesn’t have metal detectors.

Authorities said the school would be closed Tuesday. District officials said they planned to offer counseling for students.

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Associated Press writers Colin Fly and Carrie Antlfinger contributed from Milwaukee; writer Scott Bauer and photographer Mike Roemer contributed from Marinette; writers Kristen De Groot and Jacob Jordan contributed from Atlanta.