Among the most painful stories in the massacre is the death of Isaiah Shoels, a popular athlete and one of only six African-American students at the school of nearly 2,000. Harris and Klebold reportedly chased Shoels and called him "nigger" before shooting him. At first, many were confused by the assassins' apparently contradictory intentions to kill both jocks and minorities (there is even new evidence suggesting that the boys targeted Jewish students, although one is a descendant of a Jewish philanthropist). Yet experts in criminology and teenage behavior say that the outcast boys were searching for power, and that there is no contradiction in their targets.

While their motives remain complex, their bloody revenge was carried out with weapons that, in America, are easy to obtain: semiautomatic weapons and homemade bombs. The magnitude of their arsenal has prompted a cry for stronger gun-control laws, in particular laws that would prevent concealed weapons and the sale of guns on the black market. In a 1993 Justice Department survey of juvenile inmates in maximum security prisons, more than half of those polled said they obtained guns on the black market, while 17 percent said they stole the guns from houses or apartments.

In the wake of the attack, the National Rifle Association has kept a relatively low profile, though Charlton Heston, the president of the NRA, told reporters that he blamed the parents of the shooters, and that "every school is going to have to have armed security guards." (The NRA declined comment for this story.) Another alternative offered by the Sunday New York Times suggested a "dramatic expansion in the use of metal detectors" in American schools. But will making schools more like prisons really prevent children from acting like criminals? After all, there was an armed security guard at Columbine High, and he was unable to stop the attack. Still another proposed solution is to crack down on teenagers who act out, and to treat cliques of alienated teenagers who dress in black or unusual clothing as gangs. Harris and Klebold's group, the Trench Coat Mafia, has even been connected to the Goth subculture, although Goths across the country deny any similarities between the two.

Salon asked several experts on teenage behavior and psychology to address the question: What lessons can we learn from Littleton?

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Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute, a research and public policy organization in Washington

It's nuts to think that kids are any crazier today than they ever were before; I think they're just better armed. I was on MSNBC the day after the shooting with Pat Buchanan, and he was going on a diatribe against America's youth, calling them "godless" and "an immoral generation adrift." I know he's running for president, but running on the back of this tragedy is outrageous. Our kids are not schoolhouse assassins. They're the kids on the other side of the yellow tape, weeping over the deaths of their classmates just like the rest of us did. There are 20 million high school and junior high school kids in America. It's no more right to depict all students as killers than it would be to depict all adults as Timothy McVeigh.

Since 1994, there has been a 45 percent decline in juvenile homicides in America. It's not a godless society. It's a society that's replete with guns. Twenty-five percent of all homicides by kids occurred in just four cities -- New York, Chicago, L.A. and Detroit. Suburban and rural crime gets a lot of publicity because of the fact that it's unusual. A lot of people want to make it seem as though it's a trend. It simply is not a trend. There are no more school shootings today than there were in 1992; in fact there are slightly less. [And] 99.4 percent of the times a kid is killed in America, they're killed outside of a school.

In Colorado today, the remaining members of the Trench Coat Mafia could carry shotguns and rifles and the police would be powerless to do anything about it, because it's legal for kids under the age of 18 to have them. California passed a one-gun-a-month law last week, and I think that's great. Why does anybody need to buy more than one gun a month? The only people [who lose] are people who want to sell guns on the black market and gun manufacturers.

There is a way to help kids teach themselves how to mediate disputes without violence, without shredding the Constitution and unnecessarily searching our kids. If we're going to start letting police randomly search people, we should let them randomly search adults on the street, because that's where most of the killings occur. But nobody would say we should do that, because we would never want to give the police power to randomly search us. Nor would it be a good use of police time. The same exact thing is true in our schools.

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