Research

Since the millennium, I have been conducting a qualitative study of 12 school rampage killings (e.g. Columbine; Pearl Mississippi; etc.). The study consists of two phases: the compilation of 12 detailed case studies and the coding of the data using the Atlas TI software, in the service of grounded theory building.

The case studies, more than 600 pages in manuscript, is an invaluable resource, not only in creating psychosocial profiles of the shooters in order to identify commonalities among them, but also in describing the way communities, the media, the law, and the federal government have responded to these tragedies.

So far my content analysis suggests that there is a difference between “purposeful violence,” as in a vendetta killing or a crime of passion, and “ceremonial violence,” a term I use to describe what occurs in a school rampage shooting. Ceremonial violence draws on David Elkind’s concept of the adolescent’s “personal myth” and the “invisible audience” (Elkind, 1967). An adolescent who has passed through the stage that Erikson identified as “identity versus identity diffusion” and failed to form an adult identity (i.e., is convinced that he will never find a rewarding career trajectory, never have friends, never marry, never find a place in society) plans to quit the world--his high school and his community--by staging a dramatic, public, suicidal or para-suicidal event in the form of a rampage killing, that will lend significance to his brief and lackluster life by garnering media attention.

Read anexcerpt from the case study of Brenda Spencer, a 15 year old girl who targeted the elementary school across the street, killing two adults and wounding many children.

Read anexcerpt from the case study of Columbine. 

Read anexcerpt from the chapter about ceremonial violence.