policies amount to the biggest crackdown on teen rights in recent history.
“It all seems driven by post-Columbine hysteria and misinformation about safety,” says Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Students have always been irreverent, but we shouldn’t punish them for that behavior.”3
More than a decade later, the post-Columbine hysteria has not evaporated. It’s been integrated into the lockdown philosophy of school safety and youth discipline. Students making threats of violence—real or make-believe—are subjected to swift and harsh prosecution, even if no crime has occurred. Witness seventeen-year-old Jeremie Dalin from Fox River Grove, Illinois, who was convicted in June 2008 for making a “false terrorist threat.” Dalin, a senior at Barrington High School, posted a message on a website about Japanese anime, warning of an attack on Halloween at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. There are four schools in the country with that name and Dalin didn’t specify which. The FBI traced the posting to Dalin’s house hours after a student at a school named Stevenson High in a nearby town saw it on the website and reported it. Although Dalin had second thoughts and removed the posting and the FBI ruled it a prank, the teen was arrested and prosecuted. Odder still, Dennis Oh, the teen who reported Dalin’s prank, was arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer because he posted the phony threat on another website. Dalin faced up to fifteen years in prison.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, school administrators and law enforcement officials have been even more emboldened to apply the terrorist label to students with the usual behavioral problems, as well as more serious ones. Looked at another way, the lockdown approach to school security, which views students as potential terrorists and schools as likely targets requiring heavy policing and surveillance, was in many ways the paradigm for the national security crackdown that swept the country after September 2001. Columbine, a rare act of violence at one school, became the excuse for implementing costly new security systems and disciplinary codes that curtailed students’ rights to free speech, due process, and privacy. Likewise, the September 11 attacks, horrifying but rare acts of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil, have been used to justify retrenchments in civil liberties and widening surveillance by the government. In both incidents, authorities declared that “everything has changed” to justify extraordinary measures supposed to make us all safer, but which provided little evidence of that outcome. The Columbine scenario is terrifying, but the odds of it occurring in your hometown are about one in two million.4 Still, many people believe it can happen anytime, anywhere.
ARE WE ALL COLUMBINE?
Columbine provoked not only a crackdown on students but a spate of philosophizing on the causes of youth violence. President Bill Clinton, the figurative patriarch of the national family, said “perhaps we’ll never fully understand it,” and opined, “St. Paul reminds us that we all see things in life darkly . . . We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger . . . with words, not weapons.” The Littleton district attorney called for “a national soul-searching mission to stop the culture of violence,” which he blamed on “a society with too little respect for life . . . schools with too few rules . . . movies with too many murders and . . . video games that glorify too much gore and mayhem.” Experts proffered their two cents on what motivated Harris and Klebold, with psychologists blaming depression, isolation, and aggression and others dragging out the usual suspects: youth culture and its violent, nihilistic bent. News coverage segued from reporting on the particulars of Columbine, its victims, and the assailants to articles depicting an epidemic of hand-wringing among students, teachers, and parents who wondered: Could it happen here?
Columbine High School’s principal, Frank DeAngelis, would tell them unhesitatingly yes. “If you had asked me April 15 of ’99, ‘Could a Columbine shooting occur?’ I would say, there’s no way, not in this community,” DeAngelis says during an interview in his office in May 2008. “I can’t tell you the number of people who e-mailed me, or called me, or that I run into who said, ‘Your school is just like our school, your community is just like our community.’ And for anyone to state it could never happen is an inaccurate statement.” DeAngelis is compact, a Joe Pesci lookalike who has spent three decades at Columbine High, more than a dozen as principal. “If you look at school shootings, there is not a profile. They have occurred in rural communities, they’ve occurred in a suburban area, upper-middle-class, middle-class communities. They’ve occurred throughout. To say they only occur in inner cities, or they only occur in large high schools—there’s not one set profile.” DeAngelis calls what happened during his tenure a “wake-up call” to communities around the nation, even the world, and says he still doesn’t understand why Harris and Klebold did what they did. “That’s what is scary. That’s why people are afraid. If you could pinpoint it, then there’s a chance you could stop school shootings from occurring,” he says. “If you could state the reason—it was video games or it was the music. But you can’t! There are millions and millions of kids who played the game Doom, which Harris and Klebold played. Or millions of kids who listened to Marilyn Manson. Why did Klebold and Harris go off and these other kids didn’t?”
DeAngelis has a vested interest in claiming that what happened in his school could happen anywhere, and that Harris and Klebold behaved like millions of other teens. After all, he was a defendant in lawsuits that held him partly responsible for what occurred; his defense has been that he was clueless about two students in his charge or of the pecking order in his school. But facts indicate that a Columbine does not and will not happen just anywhere. There is less mystery and more clear information about where such incidents occur and who the likely perpetrators are than is generally acknowledged. Columbine-style violence has specific race, sex, and class characteristics, which are usually ignored or glossed over. The majority of school-shooting incidents with multiple victims have been committed by white, male teenagers and they have occurred in rural or suburban settings.5 There has never been a Columbine in a public city school. Yes, gun violence occurs in public city schools, but the school shootings that have grabbed headlines, what the sociologist Mike Males calls “rage killings,” have common characteristics: “All involved males, none poor, nearly all white, nearly all wielding guns (or more rarely, bombs), nearly all motivated by generalized rage.” These middle-class or affluent boys are motivated by rejection by girlfriends or school suspensions, Males found, and are not drug or alcohol users. They usually spend months or years planning their assaults and often amass arsenals of weapons.6 One reason that Columbine was spread across headlines and TV newscasts was that it shocked a nation that believed communities like the Denver suburb were supposed to be safe from extreme violence. Those sentiments were on display in news articles that quoted stunned Columbine residents saying, “This can’t be happening at our school,” and “I just can’t believe it is happening at my school.” Implicit is the idea that it would be believable and even expected for a shooting incident to occur at some schools. Which schools is made explicit in one New York Times article published two days after the incident, quoting one student’s mother: “As for safety, Mrs. Staley said she had never worried about violence at the school. ‘It’s a big deal when someone throws eggs at your house on Halloween,’ she said. Metal detectors? No one even thought about installing them at Columbine, she said. They were for urban schools.”7
If Columbine was a big story because it wasn’t supposed to happen in an affluent, white, suburban school, violence in urban schools with Latino or black victims and perpetrators isn’t news at all. In his analysis of school killings and news coverage of them, Males found that race and class played a role in what rated attention. Less than two months after Columbine, two Latina teenagers were shot to death outside their Southern California high school, rating a brief article inside the paper. Similarly, when a thirteen-year-old Latino boy shot and killed a thirteen-year-old Latina girl in a New Mexico middle school, it made no headlines. Yet a March 2001 shooting of two teens by another student—all three white—at a high school in Santee, California, was a national story. If high death tolls determined newsworthiness, several ignored school shootings had as many or more victims as well-publicized incidents in Springfield, Oregon, and Pearl, Mississippi,
