School Shootings Are Up In 2021. Who Are The Killers In Our Midst?

On June 24, the Washington Post reported their calculation that school shootings increased in 2021. Deaths, however, were down. The Post also told the story of a despondent Minneapolis sixth-grader. On April 26 of this year, he brought a gun to school and shot repeatedly at the ceiling. Everyone ran. Once the room had cleared, he sat alone on the floor and waited for someone to come in and kill him.

“The boy had unraveled during the pandemic,” reporters John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich explained, “as had so many other children across the country.”

Pandemic or no, “unraveling” seems to be a common thread among people who use potentially lethal weapons at school. The following historical look at the intersection of emotional distress, weaponry, and schools is excerpted and updated from my book Murders Most Foul: And the School Shooters in Our Midst (Vook: 2012).

The Killers Aren’t All Students — and Not All Weapons are Guns

Andrew Kehoe was fifty-five years old on the morning of May 19, 1927 when he began carefully peeling away a thick strip of bark from the entire circumference of each healthy fruit and shade tree on his farm. It was the most foolproof way he knew to kill them, short of going through the trouble of toppling them.

Mr. Kehoe had already killed his wife, Nellie, with a shovel. Then he'd tied her to a cart that he regularly used for wheeling milk buckets. He placed on the cart, right within Nellie's easy reach, a tiny chest of silver keepsakes he knew she liked.

The farm was in foreclosure. Nellie's aunt had loaned the two of them a good deal of money, but then Mr. Kehoe had gotten swept up in anger about the school taxes that were keeping him from paying important bills. He was so riled—especially about a proposal for a new school—that he'd run for a school board seat and become the board treasurer. He'd worked more on trying to stop that new school than on farming, and so the farm had gone to waste. And then that fool school was built anyway. Now Nellie’s aunt was intent on collecting the acreage that the mortgage papers said was due her.

It was a fine piece of property. But if she expected a house and a working farm as part of the bargain, well, she had a surprise coming.

There wasn't much livestock left. What remained Mr. Kehoe tied securely in the barn that would soon go up in flames. He a took a few minutes to drive around the whole property, making sure all of the firebombs were where they were supposed to be and that they were all wired together. Then, in his workshop, he took out a two-foot by one-foot piece of board and sanded it till it was smooth. He even oiled it. Using a stencil, he traced letters into the wood and then painted them nicely with a rich, black ink. Walking to a fence at the perimeter of his property, far away from any firebombs, he hung it.

It was looking like May 19^th would be a beautiful spring day.

By about 8:00 am children began arriving at the new school. Mr. Kehoe sat on his porch in the morning sun, listening to the sounds of children playing and of cars on the way to the schoolyard.

At about 8:45 is where the story gets tricky. Some witnesses reported that Mr. Kehoe detonated his own farmhouse before the one thousand pounds of dynamite he'd squirreled in the school’s basement and under its floorboards were triggered by a timer. Some said the school exploded first, and then the Kehoe farm went up in flames. Everyone agrees that townsfolk raced to the school. Nearly every family in town had a child enrolled. As mothers and fathers tore frantically at the rubble in search of their children, Mr. Kehoe drove into town, up to the mayhem, and blew up his car, killing himself, the school superintendent, and a few rescuers.

The death toll by the end of the week had climbed to thirty-seven children and seven adults. The numbers would have been about six times as high, but Mr. Kehoe wasn't as good an electrician as he'd thought. A main switch had a gap, and as a result, only one of the wings of the school exploded.

After the wounded and dead were pulled from the scene, some townsfolk made it over to the Kehoe farm to try to puzzle out what had happened. At the perimeter fence, they found the sign that Mr. Kehoe had so carefully kept out of harm's way. "Criminals," it said, "are made, not born."

One note of significance: The school massacre in Bath Township, Michigan, was technically the first bloodbath at an American school or university. But America’s history of massacres at institutions of learning began even before our nation was officially born.

On July 26, 1764, as an act of war, four Native American warriors of the Lenape tribe attacked a schoolhouse in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They killed ten students and a pregnant woman. After that raid, the Pennsylvania Assembly encouraged settlers to turn the tables on the enemy. The Assembly offered a bounty for the scalp of any Lenape above the age of ten.

Who Are the School Murderers?

Multiple fatality school and university murders have continued ever since Mr. Kehoe’s time, but the pace picked up dramatically in 1989. It has held steady over the ensuing decades.

As common as school murder now seems, to-date no reliable trend, pattern, or uniform cause has been identified. It’s possible that no clear picture ever will emerge; the sample size of “all American school, college, and university massacres,” as terrifyingly large as it may seem, may nonetheless be too small to offer significant evidence.

That being said, certain characteristics do seem typical of most teenage school shooters; a fascination with video games, feelings of isolation and rejection, and mounting rage are among them. But they are also characteristic of an extraordinarily wide swath of teenagers, and so are useless in helping educators or police predict who among the nation’s many nonviolent teenagers will turn out to be a mass murderer.

The handmade sign Andrew Kehoe hung on his perimeter fence in 1927—“Criminals are made, not born”—eerily goes to the crux of the questions about school murders. What sort of person would do such a thing? Is a mass murderer necessarily mentally ill? Are people born that way? If not, does something in a person’s family or school life create such an illness? Can some of these people be helped—stopped—before they act out? What should we do with those who are too far gone to help? How can we reliably identify potential slaughterers before they destroy lives?

Unfortunately, aside from “mostly males, and mostly with guns,” no school murderer profile has ever become evident. There are, however, similarities among the attackers. For example:

·     While few killers were diagnosed with mental illnesses at the time of their massacres, for many their actions had brought them under close scrutiny.

·     A good handful had horribly traumatic pasts.

·     Many of the perpetrators really liked guns—lots of heavy-duty ones. They were also good at smuggling them into places where they didn’t belong.

·     Many killers worked alone, though a few lone-acting perpetrators had significant encouragement from peers.

·     Except to dispense with relatives who might get in the way of the planned rampage, most of the killers had not killed before the day of their rampage.

·     Most of the perpetrators were Caucasian.

·     Stephen King’s novel, Rage, figured prominently in at least two school massacres.

·     Most massacres were not carried out impulsively. Quite the contrary. It took Andrew Kehoe months to pack the Bath Township schoolhouse with explosives. Diaries and videos left by the students who killed thirteen people in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, showed that they had planned for over a year. And the perpetrator of the April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech that killed 37 people spent time assembling an arsenal and creating a manifesto and video that he mailed to NBC.

·     Each massacre provoked a rush of media coverage.

·     Each massacre resulted in a national discussion about how to prevent the next one.

Gun Control, Ann Coulter, and An “Iffy” Argument for More Guns

For the most part that discussion has been largely about gun control. After the Columbine massacre, pressure mounted to require background checks for each firearm purchase, to ban the import of high-capacity ammunition clips, and to raise the legal age of purchase from 18 to 21. Democrats introduced Federal legislation supported by President Clinton. The Democrats’ rationale: Fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths.

Ironically, the very month of the Columbine massacre, the Law School of the University of Chicago published a paper concluding precisely the opposite of what the Democrats were saying. In “Multiple Victim Public Shootings, Bombings, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws,” economist and political commentator John Lott and University of Chicago Law professor William Landes claimed to have discerned a distinct advantage in allowing law-abiding citizens to carry guns in public places. They said it is this: If a perpetrator believes that victims and bystanders may be well-armed, he or she may elect to keep quarrels private and victim counts low. In other words, allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons might prohibitively raise the potential personal “cost” of a multi-victim shooting to any perpetrator.

In which case, bloodletting would be no bargain.

To arrive at their position, Lot and Landes analyzed news reports of multiple-victim public shootings that occurred in the United States between 1977 and 1995 and that seemed to have been conceived and executed in a way to maximize carnage. The researchers excluded from their data gang-on-gang shootings. They explained this choice by pointing out that those crimes’ perpetrators would have assumed that their shootings’ victims and bystanders carried guns regardless of what state law dictated. Ditto for assaults by and on members of organized crime.

From their selective data set, Lot and Landes determined that, on both an absolute and per capita basis, states with strict gun laws had dramatically more deaths and injuries from public multiple shootings than did states in which civilians could easily and legally arm themselves.

From 1977-1995, the eighteen-year period from which Lott and Landes drew their numbers, data pointed increasingly in the “fewer guns equals more deaths” direction. Fourteen states loosened their gun control laws during that period. This brought the percentage of the national population living in states allowing average citizens to carry concealed weapons much higher. And as this demographic shift occurred, there was “a sharp drop in multiple murders and injuries per 100,000 persons …. Murders fell by 89% and injuries by 82%.”

Remarkable numbers, right? Conservative, pro-NRA commentator Ann Coulter had a field day with the Lott and Landes study, crowing in a 2011 post on her blog at AnnCoulter.com, “When there are no armed citizens to stop mass murderers, the killers are able to shoot unabated, even pausing to reload their weapons, until they get bored and stop. Some stop only when their trigger fingers develop carpal tunnel syndrome.” Coulter called schools popular sites for mass murder because they’re known as “gun-free” or, more to the point, “free-fire” zones.

Merrily articulated as it was, her blog post changed minds. And Lott and Landes’s conclusion—that liberalized gun laws translate to fewer rampage deaths—was considered compelling. But Lott’s and Landes’s statistical argument—and Coulter’s blog post—were sound only if the Lott and Landes data set was.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy” Argues Back

In April 2007, the Wall Street Journal’s “Numbers Guy,” columnist Carl Bialik, pointed out the two researchers’ several mistakes. Perhaps the most critical was that they should not have excluded from their study the many multi-victim murders involving gang members and organized crime. Yes, Lott and Landes’ assumption that the victims of and bystanders to such crimes carry guns regardless of the dictates of their state laws may have been correct. But no, that didn’t mean that those deaths should have been excluded. It meant that they should be included. Those people may have died even though they were well-armed, and even though witnesses were. In which case, theirs were the very sorts of deaths any study of the relationship between deaths and available guns should have counted.

If Bialik was right, the Lott and Landes study was fundamentally flawed for having used gun laws rather than guns present as a metric. The absence of gang and organized crime killings constituted a huge and prejudicial hole in the data set. Certainly, if that oft-cited study is to continue to inform public debate, rethinking and reprise are in order.

The Killers “Leak” to Someone That They Want to Kill

As the century began to turn and school massacres continued, the need to help law enforcement agencies and diversion counselors spot brewing trouble was painfully apparent. In 1998 the U.S. Department of Education had supplied schools and law enforcement agencies with an impracitcal checklist for use in identifying problem children. Billed as a “school shooter profile,” it warned readers to be on the lookout for children:

·              Exhibiting social withdrawal;

·              Feeling isolated;

·              Feeling rejected;

·              Feeling victimized by violence;

·              Feeling persecuted;

·              With low school interest and poor academic performance;

·              Expressing violence in writings and drawings;

·              Showing uncontrolled anger;

·              Impulsively or chronically hitting, intimidating, or bullying;

·              Needing to be disciplined;

·              With a history of violent and aggressive behavior;

·              With a low tolerances for differences;

·              Using drugs and alcohol;

·              Affiliated with gangs;

·              Having access to firearms; or

·              Threatening violence.

The list was long and inclusive; in part, it described how most teenagers feel most days. EFFFFWESINWWUAHT would have to have been its handy, mnemonic acronym. It’s hard to imagine how this kind of advice could have helped a guidance counselor sitting across a desk from a despairing student beginning to fantasize about mass murder.

Recognizing that there were problems with the Department of Education’s 1998 document, in 2000 the FBI issued a report that represented a governmental change of stance. Entitled The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective, it urged schools, families, community organizations, law enforcement, and mental health agencies and hospitals to exchange information openly, and to focus not on who kids are or what kind of video games they play or music they listen to, but on what they communicate. The School Shooter pointed out that rampage killers plan and brood, often for a long time. During that time, they usually make a threat, either directly or indirectly. Informed adult eyes and ears can take appropriate action.

The FBI’s “threat assessment approach” found enthusiastic support from sociologists like Kathleen Newman, author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings and psychologists like Peter Langman, author of the 2009 book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Mind of School Shooters and the 2015 School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators. In an article in The Forensic Digest, Langman told people working with children to look for what the FBI calls “leakage”—things they say or otherwise hint about, either directly or in schoolwork. He suggested that Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, may have been leaking about mass murder when he wore Nazi paraphernalia to school. Langman also cited the 1997 school massacre in West Paducah, Kentucky that killed three students and injured five. Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal had mentioned to a friend it would be “cool” to shoot into a prayer group and said that Monday would be “the day.” He even warned some people to stay away from school on Monday.

In a class-assigned essay written earlier that year, Carneal had described a character named Michael who graphically helped kill specific fellow students. Carneal used students’ real names in the essay.

Equally as flagrant an example of “leakage” predated the 1977 Pearl, Mississippi, murder of two students by high school freshman Luke Woodham, whose shooting spree also injured seven other students at school. When an eighth grade writing assignment required him to describe how he would spend his day if he were a teacher, Luke had written:

If I could spend a day as Mrs. Neal, I would be very, very nice to Luke Woodham and pass him for the year. Then I would knock the crud out of the 'omniscient dork' for putting junk on my computer.

Then I would go crazy and kill all of the other teachers. Then I would slowly and very painfully torture all of the principals to death.

Then I would withdraw all of my money in the bank and give it to Luke Woodham. Then I would get all of the other teachers and principals' bank account numbers, withdraw all of the money and give it to Luke Woodham.

Then I would do acid. Then I would get a gun and blow my brains out all over the dog-gone room and leave my house to Luke Woodham.

The year he finally turned to murder, Luke made friends with boys in a Satanist cult, and with them he would talk and joke with high school friends about murder.

Eric Harris, Michael Carneal, and Luke Woodham are not the exception, but the rule. A 2002 study of thirty-seven school shooting incidents involving student perpetrators confirmed the legitimacy of the FBI’s advice about leakage. The Secret Service found that 81% of the perpetrators had confided their plans to at least one person.

The Massacre at Virginia Tech

It was April 16, 2007 when 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho stalked through on-campus buildings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, shooting and killing thirty-two people and wounding five. About six months earlier, there were signs that all was not well with Seung-Hui. For example, he turned in this troubling response to a poetry assignment.

So-Called Advanced Creative Writing—Poetry

[Downloaded from www.schoolshooters.info and used with permission.]

Not too long ago I had an epiphany about this class—What barbarians you people are. Now, tell me if I'm wrong but I thought this was a poetry class, yet everybody—everybody but me that is—spent the whole hour and a half talking about eating.

It started to with somebody talking about eating baked beans everyday overseas in some country. Then before I knew it, the conversation turned into a type of a conversation that of animal massacre butcher shop. Some body began talking about chopping off turtles' heads, dipping them into eel sauce and eating them; cooking ions' balls deep friend and thin sliced, and eating them with ketchup; and chewing on a nice, fat, birds head with a nice bottle of wine. Then that somebody said she doesn't do that anymore because the animals that she ate are now her friends, yet she who the one who deliciously, joyfully gobbled them up like one jolly clown. That's like a robber stealing twenty millions dollars from a bank and years later haughtily apologizing for stealing the money without returning any of it. Yea, as long as he's sorry! As if!

I don't know who said that but that somebody is in this room. That somebody sits in this vicinity, right there to be exact! if I'm not mistaken. I don't know which uncouth, low-life planet you come from but you disgust me. In fact, you all disgust me! Because as far as I can remember somebody jumped inane said, "have you eaten a snake. They taste so good. I love snakes!" Who said that? What's wrong with you! You wanna get leasarsy or something! As if that wasn't bad enough she went on, "Ostrage are good too. My uncle owns an storage farm and every summer we murder a few of them and we barbecue themm on the grill rare…Posoms are pretty good too. You should kill them and eat them because they go through your trash and make a mess. You should just kill them and eat them." Then another person jumped in an said, if you own a horse you should keep him locked up in a cage so his muscles don't develop. It's much easier to chew him that way." Before I could shake my head and catch a breath to all this genocidic talk of innocent animals, certain individuals ran out of of the class not to throw up on the bathroom floor but to get something to eat! "Hey you guys, you're making me hungry!" Who said that! You know exactly who you are! Yes, I'm talking to you, you, you, you…all of you! You low-life barbarians make me sick to the stomach that I wanna are all over my my new shoes.

If you despicable human beings who are all disgraces to human race keep this up, before you know it you'll turn into cannibals—eating little babies, your friends, siblings, your parents, grandparents. And your classmates! That's it. I'm getting the hell out before I blink and get eaten alive by you barbarious, uncivilized monsters!

I hope y'all burn in hell for mass murdering and eating all those little, harmless animals!

That fall Cho was involved in at least three stalking incidents, and texted a student the message, “I might as well kill myself now!” Campus police escorted Cho to a mental hospital, where he was evaluated and determined to be dangerous and in need of hospitalization. At a commitment hearing, a judge assigned him to treatment as an outpatient. Unfortunately, as an outpatient not involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, he was still, under Virginia law, eligible to buy guns.

The FBI’s 2000 report The School Shooter urged schools, families, community organizations, mental health agencies and hospitals, and law enforcement to exchange information openly and efficiently. Unfortunately, shortly after being declared an imminent danger, Cho slipped entirely through the fabric of whatever safety net was supposed to catch him. The judge who remanded him to outpatient care assumed that the mental hospital that evaluated Cho would become his mental health care provider of record, inheriting a duty to monitor him. The hospital claimed never to have been so named.

Mirage

In 2000, Harvard University sociologist Katherine S. Newman was approached by the National Academy of Sciences to participate in a project funded by Congress to discover why school rampage shootings were happening even in communities that appeared to be safe. That summer she sent a team of three doctoral candidates to Jonesboro, Arkansas, where, in 1998, middle school students Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson had killed four students and a teacher.

Everyone associated in even the most remote degree with the massacre in Jonesboro had just spent two years under the microscope of the news media, and surely had what Newman called “interview fatigue.” In spite of this, many agreed to speak with the researchers. In her team’s 2004 book, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shooting Newman speculated that doors may have opened for her team because of its double Congress/Harvard imprimatur. People may also have been swayed by the researchers’ explanation that they hoped to help prevent more rampages from happening.

The juvenile justice system did not allow Newman’s team to interview Golden or Johnson. But the researchers were able to interview officials of the criminal justice system and court, as well as the boys’ guards, families, friends, lawyers, and members of the news media who had covered the massacre story. In their countless conversations, the researchers heard inconsistent portraits of both Golden and Johnson. Some interviewees were convinced that Golden was the massacre’s “mastermind” and Johnson was just a boy who got caught up in something terrible and was still weeping two years later. Others saw Johnson as the primary culprit and Golden as the tagalong.

From Rampage:

Appearances can be deceiving, even for those who had a close vantage point of the two boys after their arrest. Several people had the opportunity to observe and interact with Mitchell and Andrew over the months that followed the rampage, including Michelle Collins, an employee of the juvenile corrections system who monitored the conditions of their incarceration, and Frances Perkins, an employee of the Craighead County jail, where they were housed for four months while awaiting trial. Neither is an expert in child development, and their accounts cannot be corroborated, because no one else had the opportunity to observe Mitchell and Andrew as they did. Hence we must approach their interpretations with caution. Nonetheless, their unique vantage point, so soon after the shooting and often without the shooters’ [knowledge] that they were under surveillance, make these accounts worthy of notice.

Michelle Collins is certain that Mitchell was, and remains to this day, full of remorse for his actions. He has taken every opportunity to reach out from the juvenile facility where he has been held since his conviction to express his contrition. …

Mitchell spent as much time as he could with pastors assigned to the juvenile facility, studied his Bible, and continued to tell his mother and Michelle Collins that he hoped he would have a chance to do some good in the world when he is released. From his apparent sincerity, Michelle deduces that the shooting was not his idea. She is less certain of what to say about Andrew Golden, although she did describe him as the “darker of the two.” The younger boy has never confided in her and she does not know what goes on in his mind.

Frances Perkins, who works in the jail, reached a very different conclusion…. As the weeks passed, she observed closely the relationship between Mitchell and Andrew and formed her own views on just how much they regretted their actions. The answer, she surmised, was not much….”

As the researchers sifted through the many different likenesses that were presented to them, they began to suspect that no single picture would ever coalesce about either boy. Before the rampage, both Golden and Johnson had been scrambling in the difficult, shifting sands of middle school social pressures. In some situations, they’d felt (or posed as) tough; in others, they’d been softies. That’s the way middle school goes. But after the shooting, they were in much more difficult social straits. They had reputations they needed to build in their detention centers, where their peers were juvenile offenders older and more worldly than they were. Golden and Johnson, in committing mass murder, had created for themselves a life of pressures vastly more extreme than the ones under which they’d cracked (if “cracked” is indeed what they’d done). Which meant that there was probably no telling when, if ever, they were projecting images of who they truly were, inside and out.

If, for example, in court, either boy had seemed particularly penitent, that may have been because his lawyer had told him he must. If Johnson prayed sorrowfully with his mother, that may have been because he desperately needed her love. Pre-massacre, the boys were just caught in hell-hole middle school lives. Post-massacre, they constantly needed to cut for themselves the best possible deal with family, and with more menacing figures like police, lawyers, the court, jailers, and their fellow detention center inmates.

Sadly, with scores of Jonesboro residents ready to share their inside views of Golden and Johnson, Newman and her researchers learned that a portrait of school murderers as a type, or even of the Jonesboro school murderers as a duo, was never going to gel.

Bogeymen like Andrew Kehoe

In the years after the Columbine massacre, the town of Littleton, Colorado, became something of a gawker’s paradise, tour buses and all. And in 1927, after forty-four people were blown up by Andrew Kehoe, who also killed himself at the schoolhouse in the small, primarily agricultural community of Bath Township, Michigan, traffic was snarled with onlookers from surrounding towns.

What sort of havoc had Kehoe wreaked? The question drew oglers from far and wide. And certainly on the minds of many was the question of how this had all happened, how someone known as plain old townsfolk could perform this most confounding act of all: mass murder in a schoolhouse. It’s a question that has resounded in America since Kehoe’s day.

Toledo’s Blade of May 19, 1927 answered the question with this strong suggestion: “That person was no person.”

Killer's Skull To Be Studied. Maniac Who Blew Up Bath School Is Believed “Throwback”.

By Margrete Daney of the Blade staff.

Bath, Mich., May 23 - What freak mental twist led Andrew Kehoe, farmer, to murder 44 children and adults? What queer streak in his make-up made him plan with demonic cunning, the dynamiting of a school filled with small children? What caused Kehoe to be a super-killer? Was it a throwback to primitive ages, when men killed their enemies as they chose, and the survival of the fittest was the law? Scientists may soon know. Application for the skull of Kehoe has been made by officials of a Michigan university to Bath authorities. It is believed the skull will be turned over to the educational institution for analaysis [sic]. 

…

Although Kehoe's body was blown to bits in the explosion, his skull is said to be intact. People who knew him before the wholesale murder remarked of the strange ridges across his forehead and the back of his head. Students of mankind declared that Kehoe was a strange throw-back to the primitive day, who may have been bewildered by being forced to live under civilization laws.

It seems that, to that journalist at least, an enemy alien was a more comforting, more comprehensible concept than an enemy within.

If Margrete Daney of the Blade staff was right, it may be that by insistently hunting an illusory profile of a typical school shooter for the past ninety-four years, we Americans have been up to the tricks of the 1927 Blade. “You’ll know them by their video games,” we tell each other. “No, by their trench coats. No, their beady, television-rotted eyes. No, it’s their music. You’ll know them by their rap songs.”

We prefer our school shooters to be bogeymen. It’s much easier than knowing they are our neighbors and even our children, and that they drop enormous hints about their intentions that our law enforcement personnel, mental health providers, and educators are often too untrained to notice or address.