Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings

I really enjoyed this book because my background educationally and occupationally deals with the mental health community. Thus I am all to aware of the social roots behind a lot of social maladies as it is thrust in my face on a daily basis. That being said, this book may not appeal to those looking for a quick, easy read like you'd get in People magazine. It offers not easy answers, and it is low on sensational details. It is more academic in nature than entertainment. Fact is violence of this nature is a complex issue affecting so many people directly and indirectly which this book labors to illustrate. The best writers show you what they mean rather than merely telling you, and this book meets that requirement. It demonstrates through interviews and statistical data just how these incidents came about and helps us understand how we can apply real world, community based solutions to help prevent future incidents. It does not go for easy scapegoats and adheres to no political agenda as far as I can see which makes it a worthwhile read for anyone truly interested enough to take the time to digest the facts.

Great product

Good overview of the problem; most importantly, the social environment underlying the perpetrators' rampages. The authors paint a realistically dim prognosis for spotting perpetrators before they act. It's the classic needle-in-a-haystack problem; except, it may be more accurate to characterize the problem as analogous to a needle in a stack of pins. The perpetrators would have been extremely difficult to distinguish from half of the other male students. My conclusion (consistent with the findings of this book) is that it is COUNTER-productive to attempt to identify the handful of individuals apt to perpetrate a rampage shooting before it happens. Any such focused effort would necessarily become analogous to a witch-hunt. The targeted body (whether high school students or the public at large) would simply clam-up and avoid identification at any cost. The "witch"=hunters would be bound to produce results. So, someone in each pool of candidates would be targeted as the designated threat. The authors wisely advocate a broadly targeted approach. We ought to be concerned about the general social environment in which students live. Address bullying seriously and effectively. Develop mental hygiene programs. There are two useful targets: students; and, professional councilors. Students need to be taught about mental hygiene (just as they are taught about cleanliness). Teachers and councilors need to make themselves available to students who need help coping with life. Potentially, a great many students (who would never become rampage shooters) would benefit from such efforts. The payback would come in the form of a general improvement in quality of life and school performance.

This book is well researched and thoughtful, would make an excellent policy guide. This country needs to get serious about this issue.Other books:The Scarred Heart, Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill by Helen Smith, 1991The Great American Gun Debate, Essays on Firearms and Violence by Don B. Kates and Gary Kleck, Pacific Research Institute 1997Gun Violence, The Real Costs by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig, Oxford Press 2000Guns and Violence, The English Experience by Joyce Lee Malcolm, Harvard University Press 2002Gun Show Nation, Gun Culture and American Democracy by Joan Burbick, 2006

Since 2004, there have been over 1,000 books written on bullying and interventions---most prompted by the rash of school shootings in the late 1990's. Newman's book stands alone for it's clairty and genuine contribution to understanding this complex issue. Having read many texts on this topic, this is by far the one I would recommend to my colleagues.

Katherine Newman offers one of the more complete and well-contextualized analyses of school rampage shootings, but focuses almost exclusively on two instances, ignores college campus shootings, and seems to suffer from confirmation bias on the exclusively male perpetration of such events.The 1997 Heath (KY) High School and 1998 Westside (AR) Middle School shootings, on which the book is mostly based, offer fascinating and important insights into the role that small, tight-knit (and Christian) communities play in enabling the elements that contribute to rampage events. Newman also offers a valuable analysis of the often toxic adolescent social structure that is common to most school environments, with bullying and teasing as frequent a part of teen life as is bragging about getting even to prove one's status - which leads to both being typically ignored.But the narrowness of focus on a limited number and variety of school shooting events may allow too easy conclusions to obscure the complexity of forces, motives and goals that are found in the whole constellation of campus-based mass killings, let alone other public forms of what Johnathan Fast calls "ceremonial violence" (such as likely just occurred at Fort Hood, TX).For one, though firearms are by far the most common weapon used by school rampage killers, Newman limits her scope to gun-related events. As noted, she completely ignores college events. And, for no apparent reason, because it fits perfectly into her definition of school rampage shooting, she has chosen to ignore one of the earliest and most infamous school mass shootings, apparently only because it was committed by a 16-year-old girl and that would violate her certainty that this is an exclusively male phenomenon and hence connected to the thwarted and perverted struggle to assert manhood in a culture which offers mostly violent models for that status.That notorious 1979 "I don't like Mondays" shooting spree by 16-year-old Brenda Spencer at the Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego, in which she killed the principle and custodian and wounded eight children and a police officer, was the basis of a popular song and set the stage for many more such events.But it was one of the rare urban shootings (and Newman focuses primarily on rural and suburban instances), and infamous precisely because the shooter was female. Other than those two factors, and that she shot from her house across the street (though the Westside shooters shot towards the school from a wooded hillside), this event should have been part of Newman's scope of concern. When I asked her why she excluded it, she sidestepped the question and then ignored me.Other scholars have highlighted that shooting spree specifically because it breaks the male-only pattern and offers insights that might otherwise be missed.The article "School Shooters Who Are Not White Males" by Peter Langman, PhD, author of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters, addresses this, as does "Female Mass Shooter Can Teach Us About Adam Lanza" by Laura L. Lovett, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a founding co-editor of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.The other significant omission from an otherwise scholarly book is, though the table of contents lists an index, it is absent from the printed pages. That renders the book a good read but a poor reference volume on school shooting events.But for the quite striking limitations and omissions, Newman's book is still worth including in any investigation into these rare but devastating public tragedies.