April 25, 1999
The Trouble With Looking for Signs of Trouble
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The New York Times: America Under the Gun
By TIMOTHY EGAN
EATTLE -- The boy stalking victims through a video dungeon in
the game Doom, or laughing at the slaughter in Oliver Stone's movie
"Natural Born Killers" might well be the next person to shoot up
a school in some polished American suburb. But then again, he might
be a quiet scholar with an odd side.
How to tell the difference is one of the more difficult
challenges left by Tuesday's carnage in Colorado, where 15 people
were killed in a long afternoon of gunfire and murder at Columbine
High School in Littleton, south of Denver.
In the days since the shooting, Americans have been advised to
learn the characteristics of potential killers.
"We must all do more to recognize and look for the early
warning signals that deeply troubled young people send often before
they explode into violence," President Clinton said.
Thousands of people have sought out a checklist of
characteristics of young people prone to school violence, provided
by the National School Safety Center in California, which monitors
lethal action in the schools. Among the things to watch for in a
child:
Mood swings. Loves violent television. Uses drugs or alcohol.
Fond of bad language, name-calling and cursing. Is often depressed.
Likes guns and blowing things up. Anti-social.
The profile could fit most teen-agers on a bad day, and some on
a good day. And sure enough, the day after the killings, news
agencies reported a scattering of arrests of teen-agers around the
country for wearing trench coats, the uniform of a Columbine High
outcast clique of which the killers were said to be a part.
But as educators develop a profile of a child who may murder his
classmates, they are wading into the same territory that airport
security personnel, police departments and federal agents have
already gone -- often with unhappy results.
Last week, Gov. Christie Whitman of New Jersey announced that
state troopers have improperly stopped and searched blacks on the
New Jersey Turnpike because of profiles developed to catch drug
dealers and other criminals.
In New York, the police department's Street Crime Unit has been
accused of indiscriminately frisking black and Hispanic pedestrians
who fit an informal profile of those suspected of carrying guns.
Four members of the unit have been indicted for killing an unarmed,
law-abiding African immigrant street peddler outside his apartment.
The police commissioner, Howard Safir, said people were not
stopped because of their race, but because they represented "the
demographics of known violent crime suspects as reported by crime
victims."
For years, airport security workers and Secret Service agents
have been trying to develop something similar, with mixed results.
Three years ago, following the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton
ordered federal agencies to develop a computer tracking system to
flag certain profiles of a "terrorist type," people with
suspicious travel patterns or behavior.
Last year, 51,000 of the 71 million people who passed through
United States customs were subject to body searches. Black and
Hispanic travelers were more likely to be searched, even though
they are no more likely to be smugglers or terrorists than other
groups, according to federal surveys.
Dozens of lawsuits around the country, and growing public
pressure, seem likely to curtail widespread profiling based mainly
on race. But profiling for certain criminal tendencies, especially
among students, is gaining ground.
These conflicting impulses are a product of two very modern
ideas that are often at war with each other. The first is the faith
that social science can protect society by classifying potential
malefactors so they can be detected and isolated before they can do
any damage. The second is the equally powerful conviction that the
act of categorizing is the more serious threat because the innocent
may become entangled in the social scientific net.
There have been six multiple-victim school shootings over the
last 18 months, and the shooters have indeed shared many traits.
Guns and bombs figured prominently. The killers were all unpopular
types, never the jocks or student body leaders. They preferred
black clothing, often trench coats, or military camouflage gear.
They talked about death and acted out death fantasies through video
games.
Doom, for example, the popular game that allows someone to track
and kill people, was a favorite of one of the Colorado shooters,
Dylan Klebold, and also of a 14-year-old boy who murdered three
people in West Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal. A pop musician who
caters to dark fantasies, Marilyn Manson, always seems to turn up
on the list of child shooter tastes.
Acting on the desires of parents for something -- anything -- to
make people feel safer, Mayor Wellington Webb asked promoters to
cancel the Marilyn Manson show scheduled for Friday in Denver,
which they promptly did. He asked the National Rifle Association to
cancel its convention there, too, and school officials announced a
ban on trench coats.
What many schools really seem to want is a metal detector for
personality. But whether sweeping and elemental profiling will
prevent another massacre seems doubtful.
"We know what the risk factors are," said Dr. Delbert Elliott,
director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at
the University of Colorado. "But when we get down to explaining
which of those kids will actually do something like this, that's a
tough question."
Compounding the problem is that often the invisible student is
the one most likely to explode -- not the gang member, bully or
loudmouth. Many students at Columbine High remember the killers as
wallpaper-shy students who played cards in the lunchroom and helped
others with computer problems.
A boy who shot schoolmates in Springfield, Ore., last year, Kip
Kinkel, once wrote a class essay about his fantasy of blowing up
the school, and he was named, in his yearbook, "Most Likely to
Start World War III." He all but left a road map to his future
behavior. Even so, his teachers felt powerless to do anything. They
are, after all, not police officers or psychiatrists.
Teachers know a lot more about some kids than parents do, who
tend to see them through a slanted lens," said Dr. Beatrix
Hamburg, a psychiatrist who is co-author of "Violence in America's
Schools" (Cambridge University, 1998). "But teachers are not
trained to report when a kid may be going off the edge."
In trying to figure out the psychic recipe for an assassin, the
Secret Service has reviewed cases of every assassination attempt
over the past 50 years. But such profiling is not enough, some
experts now argue. Rather, it makes more practical sense to
identify behavior that can help predict a killer.
In Colorado, the two killers left some clues in the form of
computer messages, including death threats, according to Web pages
assigned to the boys.
It seems unlikely a school would have such information in its
profile of a child, unless schools became more like prisons, or
marketing agencies that track every electronic action of an
individual.
Another trait of child shooters points to a particular Western
or rural form of rootlessness. Suicide is highest in Western states
and rural areas, which experts attribute to transient populations.
By this reasoning, entire regions are doomed to confusion about the
kinds of children they are raising. A more accurate way to profile
potential shooters is to look for what experts describe as three
legs of a stool. One is fascination with violent media. Another is
easy access to weapons. A third is flawed character. By itself, no
element will turn a brooding student into a killing machine. But
taken together, all three elements spell trouble.
"I worry about this every day when I send my kids off to
school," said Craig LaMay, an adjunct professor of law at
Northwestern University and author of, "Abandoned in the
Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment," (Hill &
Wang, 1995). "Because there is no absolute predictor."
