School Violence, School Shootings

Historical Evolution

The earliest documented school shooting involved a brilliant, eccentric Williams College student named Lewis Jack Somers, Jr., who, on May 19, 1936, killed one classmate and wounded another before ending his own life with a pair of mail-order pistols. Occurrences of this kind were limited by the difficulty of successfully firing early pistols as well as the expense of purchasing them. By the time Charles Whitman climbed the Texas tower, assault weapons manufactured in China, Israel, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom were flooding the American market, making guns cheap and easily available through mailorder catalogues, gun shops, and later the Internet. Seventeen-year-old Anthony Barbara is considered the first of the high school rampage shooters. On December 30, 1974, he improvised a sniper's nest in a corner of a deserted third floor classroom of his high school in Oleans, New York, and fired at passing drivers and pedestrians, killing three and wounding 11. Barbara shared characteristics with many school shooters to come: he was an excellent student from a [Page 629]middle-class family that was well regarded in the community. He was socially ill-at-ease, had few friends, and bore a passion for guns and all things military. He chose his victims at random. Eight years later a Las Vegas, Nevada, high school student, Patrick Lizotte, 17, wounded two classmates and shot and killed a teacher, believing that the teacher had planned to institutionalize him. Between 1983 and 1995, nine shootings occurred at 1- or 2-year intervals (two in 1995). Then the pace began to accelerate, possibly due to the kind of copycat behavior often observed among adolescents in the wake of highly publicized suicidal and parasuicidal acts. Four shootings occurred in 1997, three in 1998, and five in 1999 (including an incident in Canada). On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with assault weapons, shotguns, and bombs. Twelve students and a teacher were killed and 23 others wounded before the shooters took their own lives. More school shootings have occurred since then, most significantly in Santee, California; Erfurt, Germany; and Red Lake, Minnesota Media coverage and public interest abated for a time but were reignited in 2007 when a student at Virginia Tech University, Cho Seung-Hui, shot and killed 32 people on that campus before killing himself.

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