Puzzlement After Amish Shootings
As the Amish community of Lancaster County, Pa., prepares private funerals after the very public deaths of five girls in a one-room schoolhouse Monday, experts on school violence and politicians are questioning what to make of a rash of similar incidents in the past few weeks.
On Monday, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver, entered the Pennsylvania school and, after letting everyone but the girls in the class go, killed five students before shooting himself. Five more students remain hospitalized. Police do not believe the school was chosen because of any grudge against the Amish.
The attack came only five days after a drifter in Colorado held six female high school students hostage before killing one and then himself. Within the past few weeks, shootings have also occurred at schools in North Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
The timing of the incidents has raised concerns that the perpetrators are copycats. The similarities between the Colorado and Pennsylvania cases, in which the perpetrators entered a classroom and ordered all but the girls to leave, have received particular scrutiny. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, said the quick succession of the cases suggested "contagion" may be playing a role in some of the crimes.
But Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller has resisted drawing parallels between Monday's schoolhouse attack and last week's murder in Colorado.
"I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head," he said. Information released Tuesday backed up that position, suggesting that Roberts began buying supplies six days before the attack and before the incident in Colorado.
The attacks drew instant comparisons to the 1999 massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School, in which two students killed 13 people and then themselves, and have received a quick response from elected officials. President Bush announced plans for a conference on school violence, and Pennsylvania state legislators have revived a bill for stricter gun control that was defeated in Harrisburg last week.
But experts on school violence caution against reading too much into the crimes. The number of recent incidents and the attention they receive belies the fact that murder at school is exceedingly rare. Since 1992, when the government's National Center for Education Statistics began reporting data on school crime and safety, the number of school homicides for students ages 5 to 19 has never risen above 34 in a school year, and is often far lower. The latest report, covering the academic year 2001-02, reported only 17 homicides of children at school, compared with 2,036 such murders out of school.
Youth are consistently more than 70 times more likely to be murdered out of school than in it, and less than one in 1 million students is a victim of homicide in school in any given year. "With respect to murders and suicides, schools are relatively safe places," says Thomas Snyder, statistician for the National Center for Education Statistics. Numbers of school homicides in the 1990s were consistently in the high 20s or low 30s, but were in the teens for the last few years for which data was available.
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