the reality of more than 50 million school kids be so completely at odds with public perception? The answer involves the combustible mix of race, geography, guns, and the news media, which in the late 1990s brought public fears to a boiling point. Falling rates of all categories of school crime and violence were simply drowned by the tsunami of news reporting on a series of shocking—and unquestionably rare—multiple school shootings in America’s rural and suburban redoubts. From 1997 to 1998, a string of incidents in which students fatally shot other students and teachers made headline news nationally. Coming in close succession over a seven-month period, each event inflated the growing public panic a bit more, until school violence was diagnosed as epidemic.
• On October 1, 1997, Luke Woodham, sixteen, of Pearl, Mississippi, stabbed his mother to death and then went to Pearl High School, where he shot and killed two students and wounded seven others with a rifle.
• On December 1, 1997, Michael Carneal, fourteen, took a .22-caliber handgun to Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, where he killed three students and wounded five who were part of a morning prayer group in the school lobby.
• On March 24, 1998, Mitchell Johnson, thirteen, and Andrew Golden, eleven, waited outside Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with rifles, and killed four fellow students and one teacher after they exited the building for a fire alarm; Golden had pulled the alarm, and the boys retrieved the guns, which had been taken from his grandfather’s cabinet and hidden in nearby bushes.
• On May 21, 1998, Kipland Kinkle, fifteen, shot and killed his parents in Springfield, Oregon, and then went to Thurston High School, where he shot and killed two students and wounded twenty-one others.
The characteristics of the shooters and where they lived were key in pumping up the fears of school violence. All the shooters were white males living in rural and suburban communities. These were not John DiIulio’s Latino and black superpredators, living in urban centers. Those youths were “gangstas” and “thugs” who were expected to be violent and kill one another, in the view of many Americans. But how could such horrible things happen in Pearl or Jonesboro, asked a chorus of commentators. If it could happen there, then it could happen here in our community, came the answer. A poll conducted after the Jonesboro incident for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that 71 percent of those surveyed believed it likely or very likely a school shooting could happen in their community.34 “I am struggling to make sense of the senseless, and to understand what could drive a teenager to commit such a terrible act,” said President Bill Clinton in a radio address after the Oregon shooting. Of course, school shootings were nothing new—recall that Washington, D.C., saw its first back in 1970. And during 1997–1998, there were other school shootings around the country. But the quick succession of these incidents, the greater number of wounded and fatalities, and the intense news media coverage of them combined to create the perception of epidemic school violence despite a very different reality.
When less than a year after the Springfield incident, another even more shocking school shooting occurred, it cemented public fears and misconceptions about school violence beyond the reach of reason. On April 20, 1999, eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, conducted an assault on Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, a white, suburban, affluent enclave. Using semiautomatic guns procured at a Denver gun market and homemade explosive devices, they killed twelve students, one teacher, and then themselves within a half-hour. The death toll of fifteen, counting Harris and Klebold, was the highest of any school shooting. The news media, primed to cover Columbine because of the earlier string of incidents, mined every possible angle to create a dramatic parable of saints and sinners, good and evil. Every angle except two crucial ones: that school shootings were even rarer than ever, despite the brutal events at Columbine, and that it was easy access to automatic firearms that had given Harris and Klebold the ability to kill so many people so quickly. Even with Columbine’s terrible death toll, that school year had fewer student-on-student homicides than in 1992–1993.
In the wake of these incidents, elected officials scrambled to react with programs and policies to further penalize youthful offenders and to ratchet up zero tolerance disciplinary codes at the school level. Senators Orrin Hatch of Nevada and Jeff Sessions of Alabama introduced the Juvenile Crime Bill, designed to toughen sentencing of juvenile offenders, including elimination of the long-standing practice of separating incarcerated juveniles and adults. President Clinton held a conference on school violence, called for spending $60 million to hire thousands of police officers for schools, and announced a $12 million program called SERV—School Emergency Response to Violence—to help schools and communities cope with violent deaths. Clinton also asked Congress to pass legislation that would prohibit the sale of guns to violent juvenile offenders for life, a measure akin to closing the barn door after the cows have gone. This new breed of school shooter was more akin to a terrorist, the feds determined, and school violence should be elevated to the status of a national security threat. So post-Columbine, the Secret Service’s Threat Assessment Center was enlisted to study school shootings, producing the “Safe School Initiative” in 2002, which profiled the shooters—all males—who had carefully, not impulsively, planned their attacks, and who had easy access to guns (two thirds had taken guns from their homes or a relative’s). The two-year study also found that most shooters had exhibited behavior before their attacks that signaled their need for help, and bullying was a motivator in a number of incidents. The report concluded that there was no profile of a school shooter and that some attacks are preventable.
Each year since Columbine, the incidence of school crime and violence, including shooting deaths, has continued its downward trend, in lockstep with declining crime rates in society overall. Still, there have been several other high-profile incidents. On March 21, 2005, sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise, a Chippewa teen in Red Lake, Wisconsin, shot and killed nine people, including students at his school and relatives, and then committed suicide, using a gun he’d taken from home. News coverage invoked the specter of Columbine and quoted hand-wringing parents and school administrators worried about copycat shootings. The National Rifle Association offered its solution: let teachers have guns. In fall of 2006, the two previously cited incidents in Colorado and then Pennsylvania involving adult men invading schools and taking students hostage again invoked fears of Columbines erupting around the country. President George W. Bush responded like his predecessor did. He held a conference on school violence, even though neither incident was initiated by students. Pennsylvania legislators responded by revisiting a gun-control bill that had just been defeated.
President Bush continued the trajectory initiated by Bill Clinton of legislating punitive approaches to school security. His No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 continued the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities program. One new provision required state and local education agencies to identify “persistently dangerous” schools, as defined by their own standards. Such schools risked losing funding and students. But early reports on this requirement showed state standards and definitions of violence varying wildly, with some schools reporting every push and shove, while others ignored serious incidents to avoid penalties. The provision also provided grants for drug prevention education, drug testing, purchase of metal detectors, and security guards. Funding was also available for conflict resolution and peer mediation education, but overall funding levels dropped after 2003—except for drug testing in schools. For a Republican administration that made accountability a cornerstone of its education policy, the Bush White House was no different from its predecessor in doling out funds without requiring measurable results from millions spent on drug abuse or safe schools efforts.
The only attempts to evaluate the Safe and Drug Free Schools program, which is now more than twenty years old, were undertaken during the Clinton years, and findings were dismal. A review by the criminal justice professor Lawrence W. Sherman for the Brookings Institute in 2000 called the program “symbolic pork” that Congress supports in order to show concern for a problem that constituents are worried about, regardless of effectiveness. “Since 1986, this program has given more than $6 billion to some fifteen thousand local school districts and fifty state governors to spend largely at their own discretion,”
