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"White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris"
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Farnsworth: So you had some understanding of the kind of anger that Klebold and Harris had.

Glore: I do. Because it rips people up differently ... Something had to be going on there that really, really pushed the right buttons, you know, to get them to do this, because you don't just one morning wake up and say, hey, I'm going to go shoot my classmates; I'm going to go pipe-bomb up the school. You don't just wake up one morning and figure that out. Something has to develop over years and years and years. That leads up to something like that.

For Kyra Glore, the slow accumulation of hatred from childhood cruelties was responsible. But she was only one of millions of experts, family members, pundits and ordinary people who were trying to figure out how such an explosion of human ugliness could erupt in so seemingly benign a setting. The national obsession with the hows and whys of juvenile crime quickly morphed into a litany of blame: Guns. Hollywood. The Internet. Parents. Goth. Doom. In the two months since the shootings, we have trotted out all the same arguments that our culture has been debating -- with little progress -- for decades. Does technology desensitize us? Are parents abdicating their responsibilities? Have children grown crueler as our media tastes have become increasingly gruesome? Has the availability of guns made it too easy for children's violent fantasies to become a reality?

Roger Masters, a retired professor of government at Dartmouth, has a more concrete theory. Masters, a maverick researcher with no formal scientific training who has been studying the link between pollution and violent crime, argues that metal toxins in the brain can lead to murders, rapes and robberies -- including the one at Littleton.

"Nobody makes the connection between metals, brain chemistry, behavior and crime," Masters says. "There's the broader issue of how chemicals are affecting the brain and the things we do. It goes beyond the idea that watching television causes crime."

Study of the dangers of heavy metals and their effects on the brain has been going on for some time. The effects of lead exposure, suspected since antiquity, are probably the best known of all metal poisoning; the first study linking lead poisoning and violent behavior appeared in 1943. In 1979 Herbert Needleman, then a Harvard Medical School professor, did a groundbreaking study showing that kids with higher lead residues in their teeth performed worse on IQ tests and had poorer attention spans and less-developed language skills. His article helped lead to the banning of leaded gasoline. Since then, studies have shown that exposure to toxins like mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can play a role in developmental disabilities such as intellectual retardation, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism.

In 1997 Masters found that counties with releases of lead and manganese and high rates of alcoholism-related deaths had three times more violent crime than areas with no releases and few deaths from alcoholism. (His study controlled for factors like poverty and family disintegration so that he could more accurately test the effects of environmental poisons.) Masters argues that the interaction of pollution with brain chemistry, poverty, family disintegration and poor diet can put some people at risk for "sub-clinical toxicity" -- a condition that can interfere with impulse control, lowering the mental barrier between thinking about killing someone and actually doing it.

Suggesting that toxins can affect the brain and, therefore, behavior is one thing, but it would seem to be a stretch to apply the thesis to an assault so calculated and specific and one so statistically rare. But Masters, who has an unusually avid appetite for conjecture, cites neurological data and little-known facts about southwest suburban Denver to speculate that Harris and Klebold were affected by long-term neurotoxicity.

Next page | Do toxic wastelands make toxic minds?