1. School Shootings Why Terrible Things Happen in ‘Perfect’ Places
Katherine Newman
Johns Hopkins University

2. Definitional dilemmas
What is a rampage shooting?
Refining the problem
Multiple victims
On school property
Committed by a member or former member of the institution
Random selection of targets or radiating circle
One of the first tasks we faced was delimiting the nature of the phenomenon these cases represent.
There is one existing data base, prepared by the Centers for Disease Control that takes one cut at this issue. They include all homicides committed on school property or involving students and personnel on their way to or home from school.
This means that instances of gang violence, drive by shootings, and so forth are all recorded in their data base.
Wider definition than we wanted. The kinds of shootings congress was interested in had particular characteristics that set them apart from personal disputes that happen to spill over into school property.
Instead, we tried to narrow the definition to what Congress had in mind: rampage shootings in schools.
Features.

3. We have evidence of these kinds of shootings for about thirty years, but as this graph shows, they were few in number until the 1990s.
We then began to see a spike in the 90s that reached its height in 1998 with the horrible episode in Columbine High School.
For reasons that I will go into later, after Columbine the numbers began to fall, but not the near-miss plots.
Red line shows you the number of plots uncovered by the police before they got to the shooting stage, but where there is credible evidence that a rampage shooting was in the works.

4. Figure 10.1: Location of Rampage School Shootings, 1974-2002
Moses Lake, WA * *
Springfield, OR
Lewiston, MT * *
Notus, ID
Great Barrington, MA
Olean, NY * *
Olivehurst, CA *
Edinboro, PA * *
Littleton, CO
Manchester, MO
Grayson, KY * * *
Las Vegas, NV
Goddard, KS
* Virginia Beach, VA * *
Paducah, KY
Jonesboro, AR *
Lynnville, TN
Santee, CA * * *
Fort Gibson, OK
* El Cajon, CA *
Stamps, AR
Conyers, GA *
Blackville, SC * *
Pearl, MS *
Bethel, AK
Initially, journalists and pop psychologists pointed to a “southern culture of violence” as an explanation for the eruption of rampage shootings.
In the book, we go systematically through various causal theories and show that they don’t quite account for the patterns.
What emerged in the south spread very quickly. There is very little evidence for regional clustering of rampage school shootings, which is not say that geography is unimportant.
Rural and suburban communities account for about 95% of the cases in the graph. These incidents virtually never occur in urban areas.

5. Westside, Arkansas and Heath, Kentucky Three sociological questions:
Two case studies:
Westside, Arkansas and Heath, Kentucky
Three sociological questions:
What motivates the shooter?
Why was the school unable to see the catastrophe coming?
Why was the community in the dark?

6. Jonesboro, Arkansas Population: 55,000
Case #1 occurred in a rural school district about twenty miles outside of Jonesboro, Arkansas. Jonesboro itself is a small town of about

7. The Bible Belt

8. Bono, Arkansas
Population: 1000+

9. Cash, Arkansas
Population: 280

10. Egypt, Arkansas
Population: 112

11. The Shooting

12. Westside Middle School
6th and 7th grades
250 students
Middle Class, Christian and white
No background violence
Excellent reputation
1/3 of students qualify for free lunch

13. March 24, 1998 Johnson steals family car Johnson and Golden steal guns
Firing position on hillside
Andrew pulls fire alarm
Students and teachers file out
Shooters kill 5 and wound 10
Police arrest Andrew and Mitchell

14. The Shooters

15. Mitchell Johnson Father verbally abusive Sexually assaulted
Tense divorce
Frequent moves, but Jonesboro was positive
Good student (As and Bs)
Model child, swaggering bully
This “cover’ was made for him by the school.

16. Andrew Golden 11 years old, 6th grade “Solid Family” “Golden Child”
Avid hunters and gun enthusiasts
Average to good student (As and Bs)
No real disciplinary history
Unnoticed at school; menace in the ‘hood

17. Heath, Kentucky Rural and west of Paducah, KY
Farming economy gives way to services
Rural working class old timers
New professionals and managers
Small and “tightly knit”
Economically diverse, racially homogenous
Bible Belt

19. Not everyone has fallen on hard times though, and in fact the Paducah area, particularly the former farming areas that are now developing into suburbs sport quite a bit of divergence in family income and occupation.
You see McMansions like this.

20. More modest houses like this.

21. And trailer parks like this where the poorest residents live
And trailer parks like this where the poorest residents live. In the outskirts area where the shooting took place, all of these homes are inhabited by whites.

22. The Shooting

23. Heath High School Center of small town life 60% college bound
No major discipline issues
No violence prevention in place

24. The Shooting: Dec 1, 1997 Shooter: Michael Carneal
Locale: prayer group in school lobby
Eight shots, eight victims
Shooter drops gun and surrenders to principal
MC had stolen a total of 9 weapons in the two months preceding the shooting (1 pistol and 2 shotguns from his father, and 1 pistol and 5 rifles from a neighbor’s garage); thousands of rounds of ammunition
Brought one gun to school and showed it to fellow students
Smuggled the weapons into the school through a side door; disguised them as an English project and hid the pistol in his backpack

25. The Shooter

26. Michael Carneal Age 14, freshman Stable family Jokester; prankster
High IQ
Minor Discipline Problems
Schitzotypal personality disorder

28. Background events Mitchell Past events -- Molestation Proximate events
-- Left stranded in Chicago
-- Sex-talk phone calls
-- Father threatens to take him from his mother
-- Kicked off basketball team
-- Dumped by girlfriend
Andrew
-- No evidence of precipitating events
-- Threatens suicide or to harm others
Psychologists emphasize individual factors of this kind and they are not unimportant. They are quite real.
However, a sociological perspective on adolescence is, I think, a more productive framework for understand why these kinds of background incidents led in the direction of a shooting rather than a suicide or some other response.

29. Mystery #1: What motivates the shooters?
Failing at manhood
Frictional marginality
Magnification of slights
Problem solving
Reputational reversal
Escalating commitments

31. Mystery #2: Why Schools are in the Dark
Structural secrecy
The Clean Slate
The Perils of Confidentiality
Mixed Signals
The Jekyll-and-Hyde problem
Information Fragmentation
The liabilities of loosely coupled systems
Squeaky wheels
Why kids don’t tell

32. Mystery #3: Why the community did not see this coming…
Residential stability
Inter-generational closure
High levels of social capital
Gossip and reputation
Below the radar

33. The Underbelly of Social Capital: Why Terrible Things Happen in ‘Perfect’ Places
Consequences:
Concealment games
False confidence in surveillance systems
Misinterpreting signals
Conflict avoidance & information restriction
Blame the messenger

34. Conclusions -- Why the sociological perspective matters
-- Adolescent problem solving
-- Organizational deviance
-- Liabilities of social capital
-- Necessary, but not sufficient conditions
-- Prediction impossible
-- Tipping the odds via interdiction
Other kids with thiis profile don’t all become shooters.

35. Michael Carneal, Age 19 Kentucky State Reformatory

36. The Westside Victims
5 dead
10 injured