When kids become mass murderers

What turns an angry, alienated teen into a school shooter -- and what can we do it about it?

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Columbine, School Shootings, Education, Laura Miller, Reviews, Book reviews

Reuters / Pool

Kipland Kinkel, 15, who killed his parents and two students, is escorted into the Lane County Circuit Court in Eugene, Ore., May 22, 1998.

Sept. 10, 2008 | School shootings are an especially American form of horror show, starring several key elements from our national fantasy life: high school, the underdog's revenge (however brief and illusory), violence and, above all, guns. They rarely occur outside the U.S., and when they do, they're perpetrated by adults, not teenagers. Our adolescent massacres are, as Jonathan Fast, a professor of social work, astutely observes in his new book, "Ceremonial Violence: A Psychological Explanation of School Shootings," a type of terrorism, but we have a hard time seeing them as such. We know, or think we know, why terrorists blow themselves up in Middle Eastern marketplaces, but we can't agree on how a 14-year-old winds up toting a semiautomatic weapon to school and opening up on a crowd of classmates and teachers. In the media circus that follows, the list of purported causes is long -- lax parenting, video games and movies, child abuse, declining moral values, religious fanaticism, high school culture, antidepressant drugs, genetics, mental illness, gun worship and so on. Almost before the bodies get cold, partisans have turned to fighting among themselves for supremacy of their pet theories.

Fast, in search of a more illuminating explanation, has made an in-depth study of 13 incidents in which a person (or persons) under 18 shot two or more people on school grounds. The SR (his shorthand for "school rampage") is still a very rare crime, so it's impossible to glean any meaningful statistical information from the handful of examples. Nevertheless, Fast believes he has found some persistent themes and commonalities and lays them out in a grimly compelling sequence of case histories. SRs are, in his view, "acts of terrorism without an ideological core" or "at best there is a sham of an ideology cobbled together from books like 'Mein Kampf,' Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged,' the writings of Nietzsche, the glamorized pop-culture accounts of Charles Manson and his followers, and such movies as 'Natural Born Killers.'" It's difficult to nail down a single cause because there is no single cause; multiple factors contribute to making a Kip Kinkel or an Eric Harris. Some of those factors -- child abuse or bullying by peers, for example -- are nearly universal to all 13 cases, but as Fast points out, most victims of abuse and bullying don't go on to commit horrific crimes.

School shootings do have a few characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of violence. Most murders, for example, are crimes of passion, committed in fits of rage or fear. Mass murders, however, are "predatory": planned out in advance, with careful deliberation and an apparent lack of emotion. The perpetrators of SRs belong to the category of mass murderers known as "pseudo-commandos," people obsessed with firearms, tactics and military trappings. Fast notes that school shooters tend to take this fetishism even further by adopting sacramental paraphernalia; they wear certain outfits, use purpose-bought weapons, watch particular scenes from favorite movies (one shooter favored the Clint Eastwood film, "Dirty Harry"), recite catchphrases or quotations (Nietzsche and "Natural Born Killers" are popular) or play special music, all as part of an elaborate preparation for the event.

This is what leads Fast to describe the rampages as "ceremonial"; at times, he writes, the elaborate preparations seem like "a throwback to something very ancient and primitive, where the supplicant plays the part of a god, and indulges in a forbidden or privileged activity prior to his own execution or banishment from the tribe." The weird details, leaking out after the attack, are the stuff of whispered playground (and, nowadays, Internet) rumors, and they do make the perpetrators seem even more scary and inhuman -- and therefore morbidly fascinating, like the serial killers in movies or TV shows. Jamie Rouse, a 17-year-old who killed two teachers and a classmate in Lynneville, Tenn., in 1995, had taken to signing his name "Satan" and had carved an inverted cross on his forehead in the months leading up to the day he took his father's rifle to school. This would seem to be a dead giveaway that something was seriously wrong (his parents said they never noticed the inverted cross because Jamie combed his hair over it while at home), but many alienated teens affect menacing and "evil" mannerisms without actually doing anything evil. It's a way of asserting a strong and dangerous identity at a time when they feel vulnerable, unsure and threatened. The shooting is what makes Rouse's "Satan" signature so ominous, not the other way around.

A striking difference between adolescent school shooters and their adult counterparts, even a relatively young adult perpetrator, like Seung-Hui Cho (23), the Virginia Tech shooter, is that the adolescents almost invariably tell their friends about their intentions and even involve them in the planning. Despite their complaints of isolation and loneliness, the shooters tend to belong to a clique of misfits who encourage their antisocial and homicidal yearnings, even if only as fantasies. Evan Ramsey, who killed two people at his high school in Bethel, Alaska, in 1997, told as many as 20 of his classmates about his plans, and a small crowd of these gathered at the safe vantage point of the school's library to see if he'd really do it. On a few occasions, such as Columbine and the 1998 shootings in Jonesboro, Ark., two boys team up to commit the crime, but the informed bystanders are, if anything, just as upsetting. Combined with the creepy trappings adopted by the actual shooter, their passive sanction of the carnage contributes to the widespread fear that young people are becoming ever more callous and ruthless.

In counterpoint to the boogeyman of the Monster Teen is another popular figure, the Man-Made Monster Teen: if not quite justified in his bloody revenge, then certainly well-motivated. After the Columbine massacre, an investigative commission found that the school, whose principal was a former coach, was rife with extreme, sadistic bullying on the part of student athletes. Teachers, even those who personally witnessed the bullying, rarely intervened; some claimed that to do so would have cost them their jobs. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the Columbine shooters, were mercilessly tormented under this regime, as were any students who dared to associate with them. Fast observes that some sort of bullying is involved in nearly every case he examined in "Ceremonial Violence."

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