Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence: Case Studies of School Violence Committee
Edited by Mark H. Moore, Carol V. Petrie, Anthony A. Braga, and Brenda L. McLaughlin
National Research Council and Institute of Medicine
National Academies Press, 2003

In addition to the four editors of Deadly Lessons, twenty different persons collaborated on the six separate chapters dealing with lethal shootings in American public schools during the late 1990s. They undertook this task in response to a Congressional request to the National Academy of Sciences to have its National Research Council study the spate of lethal rampages in rural and suburban schools. Congress, no less than the public at large, wanted to learn why seemingly senseless massacres happened in good educational institutions like Columbine High School and what could be done to prevent them. The request could not be ignored by the agency, chartered in 1863 “to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters.” In the preface to the book, Harvard Professor Mark Moore, Chair of the Case Studies of School Violence Committee, thanked dozens of additional scholars and organizations for contributing “their diverse perspectives and technical expertise…. to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge.” [p. xii]  He sounded as though the project succeeded in its objectives.

Yet explaining school rampages proved extremely difficult, partly because, notwithstanding enormous media attention, lethal school rampages were rare. Of the 116,910 elementary and secondary schools in the United States only 35 experienced multiple-victim shootings by student perpetrators from 1992 to 2001 [p. 10]. What the authors of the report did was to make the best of a bad research situation: They conducted six case studies of lethal violence at schools in excruciating detail instead of attempting a statistical study with an inadequate sample.  Four of these case studies addressed shooting incidents in rural or suburban schools, the other two shooting incidents in inner-city schools in Chicago and New York City. 

The shootings in the inner-city schools were fundamentally different from the shootings in the rural and suburban schools. They were not rampages in the sense of promiscuous lethal attacks on persons that the shooters had no specific grievances against; inner-city shooters chose victims out of anger, fear, or other grievances. The authors of the report recognized this difference; “…rampage shootings… are not found in inner-city schools [p. 7].” What was baffling and what had led to the Congressional request for a study was the occurrence of seemingly senseless rampages in “good” rural and suburban schools, not the more understandable violence of deprived youngsters in “bad” inner-city schools. Despite this important difference, the Case Studies of School Violence Committee decided to include two inner-city cases, perhaps because members of the Committee wanted to assess the extent to which perpetrators had similar characteristics in both milieus.

A crucial question was whether the shooters involved in lethal school violence had personal characteristics sufficiently different from those of their fellow students to explain their behavior.  Despite exhaustive descriptive analysis of the six cases based on personal interviews (including interviews with some of the perpetrators and of their families), official reports, and media accounts, the authors did not confront this issue directly. But the book’s indirect answer was a resounding, “No.” Each of the case studies concluded, grudgingly or forthrightly, that neither the pathologies of the shooters nor of their communities were sufficient to explain what happened. For example, in several case studies the authors judged the shooters mentally ill. But the paranoid illnesses involved did not rise to a level sufficient to alert parents, peers, or school authorities of a serious problem requiring immediate remediation. That is why no one took seriously remarks that some of the shooters made beforehand that they intended to do something dramatic. Before they acted, the shooters seemed to have problems not so different from those of other adolescents. Even after the fact (and after thorough psychiatric investigation), evidence needed to establish an insanity defense was insufficient.

In short, the subtitle of the report, Understanding Lethal School Violence, is misleading. The report provided understanding only in the sense of showing that none of the usual suspects was guilty: not poverty, not negligent parents, not school failure, not poor educational programs, not peer rejection. Knowing that the mystery is still unsolved is useful; such knowledge may head off massive preventive or remedial programs that are worthless. But it does not explain the mystery.

Perhaps because a committee rather than a single scholar produced the report, it is somewhat repetitious. An individual scholar might also have ventured a speculative explanation of the most tantalizing finding of the book: that lethal rampages occur only in good rural and suburban schools, not in the educationally worse schools of inner cities. Perhaps the high dropout rates of inner-city schools, though horrendous from an educational point of view, may serve as a safety valve for kids otherwise desperate enough to kill their classmates and themselves, as kids in a few rural and suburban have done. Instead they truant or drop out. In the better schools where attendance is monitored more carefully and the community regards dropping out as unthinkable, unhappy kids may be trapped in a school situation intolerable to them, whatever the causes of their unhappiness. If so, one way to make lethal rampages even rarer than they are now is to increase social and curricular options for students. For example, in the Swedish school system, which recognizes that some students get “school tired,” withdrawing from school for a time is legitimate.

Jackson Toby is a visiting fellow at AEI.