Citation

Kleck GD. Crim. Justice Ethics 1999; 18(1): 2.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, John Jay College of Criminal Justice - Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics, Publisher Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

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Abstract

[Excerpt] On April 21, 1999, two young men armed with guns and explosives murdered 13 people, wounded 31 others, and then committed suicide in a high school in Littleton, Colorado. This mass shooting had been preceded by three other highly publicized mass shootings in schools involving adolescent boys in the preceding year-and-a-half in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Jonesboro, Arkansas (and there had been at least seven other multi-victim school shootings in the six years before that), and was followed by two more occurring within a month in Springfield, Oregon, and Conyers, Georgia.

In the aftermath of this spate of murders, a wave of commentary followed, in which journalists and other writers of every ideological stripe explained to their readers what lessons were to be learned from Littleton or, more broadly, from this cluster of massacres. In a typical commentary, a writer would diagnose one or more key problems that supposedly contributed to the killings, and then prescribe one or more solutions. The diagnoses and solutions generally fitted remarkably well with preexisting news media themes, reflecting either an impressive ability of news providers to identify causes and solutions in advance or a tendency to exclude the solutions that do not easily fit the themes.

Littleton and the other school shootings do raise serious issues, some largely ignored by the news media, and others only briefly mentioned and obscured by the noisy debates over the irrelevancies. These issues might include school bullying and taunting, male-on-female teen dating violence, and violence-saturated entertainment disseminated by profit-hungry corporations. But we will be best able to separate the issues that matter from the ones that do not if we learn our lessons from careful analysis of "ordinary" crime and violence rather than from the freakish events chosen for our attention by the news media.