School shooters elude profiling, easy answers
RUBÉN ROSARIO
The scenario is chillingly familiar: A troubled youth walks into his school, dressed in black and well armed with weapons and a pent-up rage thirsting for a violent release.
Deliberately stepping across the same line of morality and conscience that keeps most of us in check, he guns down two fellow students. A third victim is one of his teachers, the same one who weeks earlier wrote "a pleasure to have in class'' on his A-filled report card.
At least eight students knew — as far back as a year — of the shooter's intentions. Some were even consulted on where to obtain ammunition. None told an adult or authority. The boy complained to school officials of being teased, and he wrote poems filled with thoughts about death and violence.
This was not Jeffrey Weise, the 16-year-old Red Lake, Minn., youth who gunned down five students, a teacher and a security guard at his high school before taking his own life March 21.
The shooter was Barry Loukaitis, 14, a boy from Moses Lake, Wash., whose 1996 school shooting spree is among 37 school shootings since 1974 studied in a 2-year-old report conducted by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Education Department.
It's a must read, given recent events, for law enforcement officials, school educators, parents, students and the knee-jerkers who want to arm teachers and turn schools into armed campuses.
The report confirms some perceptions and shatters others, including that virtually all were planned and not random or impulsive acts:
• Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker's idea or plan to attack.
• Most shooters did not threaten their targets directly prior to the event.
• There is no accurate or useful "profile" of students who engage in targeted school violence.
• Most attackers gave out warning signs in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.
• Most shooters had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many considered or attempted suicide.
• Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.
• Most attackers had access to and had used weapons before the incident.
• In many cases, as is suspected in the Red Lake shootings, other students were involved in some capacity.
• Despite prompt police responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.
Also, most shooters were doing well in school at the time of the attack, generally receiving As and Bs in their courses, and two-thirds of the attackers came from two-parent families.
Although the report points out that stopping a determined shooter is nearly impossible, it offers suggestions to reduce the likelihood of such events. None advocates arming schools, still statistically a far safer place for a child to be than either the streets or even a home. In the first half of the 1997-98 school year, 2,500 children in the United States were murdered or committed suicide. Less than 1 percent of those deaths, including those from multiple-victim homicides, occurred at school.
Improved communication between children and adults — not arming teachers or turning campuses into armed camps — is perhaps the key solution cited by the study's researchers. Another is encouraging students who know of a fellow student's expressed intent to report their suspicions to authorities.
Other recommendations include:
• Adopting a "strong but caring'' stance against the code of silence.
• Prevention of, and intervention in, bullying.
• Involvement of all members of the school community in planning, creating and sustaining a school culture of safety and respect.
• Development of trusting relationships between each student and at least one adult at school.
Study researcher William Pollack, a Harvard assistant clinical psychology professor and a consultant to the U.S. Secret Service, notes that all the school shooters studied were male.
He advocates more attempts at listening to and communicating with boys that are not shame-based.
"It's not that females can't be violent, and we did have one female shooter who was outside our time frame of study," said Pollack. "But there's clearly a male code at work here. Females are more likely to come out, to break that code of silence, to seek help."
"It's about communication, not about firearms, or armed guards or security surveillance cameras,'' says Richard Lawrence, a criminal justice professor at St. Cloud State University and author of "School Crime and Juvenile Justice'' (Oxford University Press).
"If the students, the teachers and the parents get involved and might know what's going on in a kid's life, then perhaps we can begin to better detect students at risk and those at risk for violence. We need more mental detectors, not metal detectors, in schools.''
ONLINE
To read the U.S. Secret Service's study and guide on school shootings, go to www.secretservice.gov.
This report includes information from the
Chicago Sun-Times. Rubén Rosario can be reached at rrosario@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5454.
© 2005 St. Paul Pioneer Press and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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