Andrew Vachss,attorney who represents only juveniles

There are two kinds of school killings. One is attachment disorder, a sole individual with an inability to bond, and the other is folie à deux. Here it's probably a form of folie à deux, a situation where none of the parties acting alone would have done it. The more isolated the players feel and perceive themselves to be, the more they look toward one another. One element of this is cluster suicide. These kids who clearly entered the school with the intention of dying, I think in some way were motivated by the attention and focus that others got for similar acts, but lacking the perception to see what it would cost in real terms.

Any expressed interest in an extermination philosophy such as Nazism is enough of a warning sign for anybody. Nazism has always appealed to inadequates and defectives, because it always explains all their problems. It wasn't a Jewish school, it wasn't heavily populated with people of color, so they did what a lot of disturbed people do with Nazism, morph it a little bit. "We're superior, the rest of these people are defectives. They're oppressing us because of our superiority. They need to be exterminated."

I'm not convinced that any new get-tough measures would have had any effect at all at Littleton. Here's a paraphrase of a quote: "Juvenile criminals are a new breed today. They're monstrous. They seem to care nothing about human life. They represent almost a feral, predatory creature for which we need new interventions." That's from 1948. None of those waves of get-tough juvenile legislation, which began in the '50s, have ever had crime-cutting effects. Once you're at a point where your own life is part of what you're anteing up, I don't believe get-tough does much. What you need to talk about is preventing that deadly flower from reaching full bloom. When you come across the extermination philosphy, I think you have to step in right then. It would be a confrontative intervention. Although there's a First Amendment and people can say whatever they want, it's not difficult to engage young people to the point where they're going past speech.

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Lynn Ponton, M.D., author of "The Romance of Risk" and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco

Teenagers are really pissed off now, because they feel like Goths have been mischaracterized. For the past two days, every single one has said it in my office, including my own daughter. I have worked with hundreds of Goths. This is not a Goth splinter group. The fact that kids wear black and maybe listen to Marilyn Manson doesn't identity them as Goths. Goths for the most part are isolated or independents; if they direct violence, it's usually toward themselves, self-mutilation type of behavior. This is more of a fascist group, if we're going to characterize them at all. Because we really don't understand the teenage groups very well and it's easy to look at somebody and say, because they look like them, they're from that group. This does damage to our communication with them.

This cycle of exchanging insults between this group and the jocks should have been interrupted early by the school. Schools can have intervention when they see violence. They can have consulation around gangs in the school. They can survey their students and try to find out what the problems are. They can have open days to discuss cultural and ethnic differences. They can use the tribe model where they divide kids, despite racial and ethnic groups, into tribes and try to make them feel an affiliation in that particular way.
salon.com | April 27, 1999

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