School violence, especially in urban areas, assumed a prominent place in the national fixation on juvenile crime. A 1993 New York Times article about New York City noted the “spread of guns and youth violence into schools.” The article mentioned a parent boycott to protest hallway violence in Eastern District High School—the same Brooklyn school that twenty-four years earlier was the site of protests by black and Puerto Rican students against perceived racism.29 Over just one generation, the nature of school violence had morphed to reflect a different society outside the schoolhouse doors. The social protest and racial and ethnic rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s had faded. The crack-fueled drug wars of many urban areas sent violence and guns coursing through neighborhoods. Schools in those neighborhoods were not insulated from the dangers, and any news reports of crime in schools contributed to the public’s perception that young people and schools were dangerous—especially in cities. But there were no statistics at the time to prove it.
This time, the official response at every level—from school boards to state legislatures on up to the White House and Congress—matched the widespread fear of youth violence. In 1994, President Clinton took Reagan’s Drug Free Schools Act and went it one better, creating the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, adding violence-prevention funding to the agenda of the legislation. The same year, he signed the Gun Free Schools Act, which required states to enact their own zero tolerance laws for weapons possession by students, which would be punishable by mandatory expulsion. Clinton followed the law with a presidential directive that encouraged school districts to adopt policies requiring school uniforms for students as a way to reduce violence and promote discipline, and ordered the Department of Education (DOE) to distribute a uniforms manual. Clinton also initiated an annual report on school safety produced jointly by the DOE and the Department of Justice, called “Indicators of School Crime and Safety.” It was the first effort to collect data from schools nationally in order to track the actual incidence of crimes and violence. It has been published since 1998, with data on victimizations of students and teachers, discipline, and police actions, and its release usually prompts the news media to report key findings. Under Clinton, an entire multiagency, legislatively driven school violence and safety bureaucracy was elaborated with its requisite millions in annual public funding.
The White House set an agenda that reinforced and inflated the view that schools and students were out of control, as a political response to the public clamor about a perceived problem. At the local school district level, administrators and school boards responded to parent and teacher fears of violence and disruption, whether real or imagined. A 1995 survey by the American Federation of Teachers of school districts in two hundred of the largest U.S. cities indicated not only an entrenched and widespread fear of student violence, but also an embrace of a penal-system approach to the problem: 95 percent of respondents employed security personnel; 59 percent had metal detectors; and 53 percent had installed security cameras.
JOHNNY GOT A GUN
This fear and loathing of student violence and disorderly schools could have come to a low simmer, ultimately evaporating, just as school crime and violence itself had been diminishing. After all, the downward trend was unmistakable for anyone who payed attention to those annual reports on school crime and safety. Mirroring the same decline in crime experienced in the general population, youth crime overall began to plummet after its apex in 1993. For youth homicides, the numbers are dramatic: from 1993 to 1998, juvenile homicide arrests dropped by 56 percent, reaching their lowest rate since the FBI began recording this statistic in 1964.30 School crime echoed this trend: Between 1992 and 1998, the rate of nonfatal violent crimes for students ages twelve to eighteen dropped from 48 per 1,000 students, to 43 per 1,000.31 From 1995 to 1999, the percentage of students in that age group who reported being victims of theft or violent crime decreased from 10 percent to 8 percent, a trend most prominent among middle-school students, who are often characterized as the most difficult. Over that same time span, students were feeling safer, with 5 percent in 1999 saying they avoided one or more places in their school, compared to 9 percent in 1995.32 Even these small numbers suggest that the public’s view of schools as dangerous was out of proportion to the reality for 90 percent of students during those years with higher rates of reported incidents.
As for violent deaths at schools—the boogeyman of the school-violence nightmare—there simply is no real trend at all. In the 1992–1993 school year (the first year such data were collected) there were fifty-seven “school-associated deaths,” and that included thirty-four students killed by other students and six student suicides; the rest were teachers and other school employees. The total dipped over the next few years, and then reached fifty-seven again in 1997–1998. The 1998–1999 school year, the year of Columbine, would have had the lowest number of school deaths on record—twenty-five—but for the fifteen deaths in that tragic incident. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the DOE agency that copublishes the annual school crime and safety report, “Between July 1, 1992, and June 30, 1999, no consistent pattern of increase or decrease was observed in the number of homicides at school.” Indeed, each year’s report typically begins with a summary noting that students are safer at school than away from school. The 2000 report noted that students were less than half as likely to be victims of a violent crime at school than elsewhere. And the trend continued: in the 2003–2004 school year, young people were more than 50 times more likely to be murdered, and almost 150 times more likely to commit suicide, away from school. Schools, it seems, are a much safer haven than children’s homes and communities, and much safer than prevailing perceptions suggest.33
So why didn’t school violence simply fade from the radar of legislators and the public? How could the reality of more than 50 million school kids be so completely at odds with public perception? The answer involves the combustible mix of race, geography, guns, and the news media, which in the late 1990s brought public fears to a boiling point. Falling rates of all categories of school crime and violence were simply drowned by the tsunami of news reporting on a series of shocking—and unquestionably rare—multiple school shootings in America’s rural and suburban redoubts. From 1997 to 1998, a string of incidents in which students fatally shot other students and teachers made headline news nationally. Coming in close succession over a seven-month period, each event inflated the growing public panic a bit more, until school violence was diagnosed as epidemic.
• On October 1, 1997, Luke Woodham, sixteen, of Pearl, Mississippi, stabbed his mother to death and then went to Pearl High School, where he shot and killed two students and wounded seven others with a rifle.
• On December 1, 1997, Michael Carneal, fourteen, took a .22-caliber handgun to Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, where he killed three students and wounded five who were part of a morning prayer group in the school lobby.
• On March 24, 1998, Mitchell Johnson, thirteen, and Andrew Golden, eleven, waited outside Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with rifles, and killed four fellow students and one teacher after they exited the building for a fire alarm; Golden had pulled the alarm, and the boys retrieved the guns, which had been taken from his grandfather’s cabinet and hidden in nearby bushes.
• On May 21, 1998, Kipland Kinkle, fifteen, shot and killed his parents in Springfield, Oregon, and then went to Thurston High School, where he shot and killed two students and wounded twenty-one others.
The characteristics of the shooters and where they lived were key in pumping up the fears of school violence. All the shooters were white males living in rural and suburban communities. These were not John DiIulio’s Latino