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.
Experts diverge however, on whether the recent incidents, only one of which was committed by a student, represent a disturbing shift to crimes perpetrated by outsiders.
William Lassiter, the manager of the Center for the Prevention of School Violence, part of North Carolina's Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, said he found only 11 murders since 1992 committed in school by people who had no connection to the school.
"It's just absolutely bizarre how the individuals appeared out of the blue," says Ronald Stephens, the executive director of the National School Safety Center, a California nonprofit. "It's like lightning has struck twice in a week."
But Fox said that those who think school shootings by outsiders are new are "myopic." In 1988, Laurie Dann attacked an Illinois school to which she had no obvious connection, killing one, and spawned a series of copycats, Fox says. Given the small number of cases each year, it is hard to prove any trends.
In the wake of the incidents, Stephens and Lassiter recommended that all schools review safety plans and consider reinforcing security systems. Fox is more skeptical about the benefits of such an approach, however.
"When you look at a lot of these cases, security doesn't really prevent an attack," he says. He cites the 1998 attack in Jonesboro, Ark., where two students pulled the fire alarm and waited until students exited the school before opening fire.
All agree, however, that in the one-room schoolhouse attacked Monday, there was only so much teachers could have done.
"It would have been very difficult, if not impossible to keep this guy from coming in," Stephens says.