Apr 15, 2005  |  By: RYAN LEE  | COMMENTS     

When gunfire and screams no longer pierce the air, and the glass and blood are cleaned up from hallways, classrooms and cafeterias, mass shootings at America’s middle and high schools leave the agonizing question of why — why do some young people suddenly snap and gun down their classmates and teachers?

It is a question those living on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota are facing, after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and grandfather’s girlfriend, then went on a shooting rampage at his high school, killing five students, a teacher, a security guard and himself on March 21.

And it is a question the media and various government agencies have tried to tackle over the past decade in a search for missed clues that might have warned about the tragedies, or helped prevent similar episodes of school violence from occurring.

There is no exact profile for the young people who have entered their schools and opened fire in the last 10 years. Weise faced unique risk factors for violent behavior coming of age on a desolate Indian reservation plagued by poverty, drugs, poor education and crime. He also endured difficult family circumstances after his father committed suicide and his mother suffered brain damage in a car accident.

But the Minnesota youth possessed several characteristics considered prototypical to teen shooters.

Like many, Weise was described as a misfit, a loner and a troubled youth with a violent imagination that manifested itself in short stories and animations. Similar to America’s most lethal school shooters — Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine High School — Weise had an affinity for neo-Nazi culture.

And as has become the norm among school shooters, Weise had a history of being teased and bullied — “terrorized,” one student told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — by his schoolmates.

Some youth violence experts argue the strongest influence contributing to Weise becoming a mass killer was the so-called “boy code,” a culture where bullying is considered “boys being boys,” and young men learn that aggression and violence are legitimate expressions of their masculinity.

The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists” to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively defending your manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003 article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.

“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly bullied, beat up, and … ‘gay-baited,’” Kimmel wrote.

“And most strikingly, it was not because they were gay — at least there is no evidence to suggest that any of them were gay — but because they were different from the other boys: shy, bookish, honor students, artistic, musical, theatrical, non-athletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird,” he continued.

Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks by young men, Kimmel said in an interview for this article.

“I think one of the saddest parts of this is how unwilling we seem to be to really examine the heart of these kinds of issues,” Kimmel said. “I think we are too quick to declare ourselves blameless and focus on the psychological problems of the individual.”

Not all experts on bullying agree.

To focus on masculinity as the impetus for school shootings and lesser forms of bullying is an “oversimplification,” according to Joel Haber, a White Plains, N.Y.-based psychologist known as the “Bully Coach” who produces anti-bullying materials and forums.

“It’s not just about masculinity — it’s about a diminished sense of self,” Haber said.

Homophobia, bullying constant themes
During a mental evaluation for his trial on charges that he gunned down three of his classmates at a western Kentucky high school in 1997, Michael Carneal said his attack was motivated by the constant anti-gay teasing he endured since he ...