Although relatively rare events, school shootings have gained increasing attention in the media, the home, and the classroom. Television images of wounded and panic-stricken students fleeing from institutions like Columbine High School have become seared in Americans’ collective consciousness as emblematic of the social and emotional turmoil experienced by many adolescents today, especially among white males living in small towns or suburban communities, where most shootings occur. Unfortunately, very little in the way of systematic and scholarly research has focused on the causes and consequences of such events.

Katherine Newman and her colleagues have made a significant attempt to address this deficiency in their examination of the causes and consequences of two school shootings, one that occurred in 1997 at Heath High School near Paducah, Kentucky, and the other in 1998 at Westside Middle School near Jonesboro, Arkansas. In the first event, a 14-year-old boy was charged with the deaths of three students and injuries to five others. In the second event, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were charged with the deaths of four students and one teacher and injuries to nine other students and one teacher.

To understand the reasons for these and similar events, Harvard sociologist Newman and a team of four graduate students conducted interviews with 163 people in the affected communities as part of a National Academy of Sciences study of lethal school violence mandated by Congress in 1999. Rather than focus exclusively on the psychological explanations, the authors emphasize the social dynamics that led to the tragedies at Heath and Westside. They note that “shooters choose schools as the site for a rampage because they are the heart and soul of public life in small towns” (p. 15). Such communities obscure the warning signs of impending shootings by limiting the flow of information on at-risk youth and their behavior, and they provide such youth few opportunities for developing and maintaining self-esteem and mental health. Within this social context, the authors identify five specific conditions for rampage school shootings: the shooter’s perception of himself as extremely marginal in the social worlds that matter to him; psychosocial problems that magnify the impact of marginality; cultural scripts that prescribe violence by firearm as a way of solving problems; the failure of surveillance systems intended to identify troubled teens before their problems become extreme; and gun availability.

The book also offers an excellent illustration of the difficulties of conducting research on this topic. Approximately three years had passed between the time of the shootings in each community and the initiation of fieldwork by the investigators. Much of the data collected may, therefore, have been subjected to retrospective bias and selective recall as key players forgot important events or constructed new explanations for their occurrence. The investigators were unable to interview the shooters and their parents or access court records. Many community members, particularly parents of victims, declined to participate in the study, citing either impending litigation or a concern that such research would perpetuate a negative image of the community to the outside world. The very difficulties cited by the researchers in gaining access to information about prior disciplinary episodes in the lives of the shooters may have compromised their analysis of the significance of these episodes. Consequently, their conclusions at times appear somewhat speculative or based on hearsay rather than direct evidence. This is not unexpected, given the difficulties in attempting to conduct research in traumatized communities in a timely manner. Nevertheless, the result is a tendency to underemphasize the importance of individual characteristics and overemphasize the importance of social and organizational context in explaining why these events occurred. Similarly, the attempt to draw conclusions from a broader sample of school shootings is also limited by such events’ relative rarity, which provides insufficient power for quantitative analysis.

These limitations notwithstanding, Newman and her colleagues offer some valuable insights: that the causes of school shootings are multifactoral, with no single characteristic taking precedence in explaining why they occur; that blame for such events rests not solely with the boys who committed these acts of violence but also with the communities that have raised and educated them; and that prevention of such events lies in fostering a culture of recognition and response to behavior that signals a risk for violence to self or to others. These insights represent an important first step in the prevention of youth violence, in general, and rampage school shootings, in particular.