Abstract
School shootings are to a great extent driven by the culturally rooted status struggles of adolescents. Alongside material resources and physical attractiveness strategies of self-assertion and self-presentation play an absolutely central role in the struggle to achieve an acceptable place in the peer hierarchy. Especially within the lifeworlds of male adolescents, media-communicated cultural scripts of masculinity thus become the yardstick of their own action. Failure to live up to these prevalent norms creates increasing pressure within adolescents when feelings of powerlessness, desperation, and shame have to be overcome, and the contribution cites diverse examples illustrating the social mechanisms that reproduce, stabilize, and intensify this logic. Relevant case studies show how a school shooting can be read as a radicalization of society’s ideals of masculinity and a dramatic form of adolescent identity management.
This chapter is adapted from Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings by Katherine S. Newman, Cybelle Fox, David J. Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
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Notes
- 1.
James Coleman was among the first to explore this puzzle in his classic work The Adolescent Society (1961). Coleman argued that the movement from a primarily agricultural economy in the nineteenth century to an industrial economy in the twentieth century brought about a decisive shift in relations between youth and adults. Whereas before, youths were essentially apprenticed to their parents and education was an extension of the process of socialization; in an industrial (and now postindustrial) society students engage in ever longer periods of general training intended to prepare them for the much more differentiated and unpredictable occupational sphere. The result is that adolescents become more dependent on the opinions of their peers (hence the “adolescent society”), and this adult influence on adolescent behavior is greatly diminished. For a less functional explanation of the same shift, see John Boli’s New Citizens for a New Society (1989).
- 2.
As students got older and college seemed like a more immediate prospect, the status of those who did well in school rose, although never to the level of the really popular kids, like the athletes and the cheerleaders.
- 3.
Sociologist Stephanie Coontz has labeled this product of the modern economy “rolelessness,” because it is a length of time during which youths are too old to listen mindlessly to the dictums of adults, but not yet old enough to have firm identities rooted in established work and family patterns (1997, esp. pp. 12–18).
- 4.
There is also considerable evidence that sometimes individuals or groups are able not to internalize stigma and have a variety of protective responses to avoid doing so (Crocker & Major, 1989). Why junior high adolescents are less able to do this is not clear. Kinney suggests that there are developmental reasons, but it is also possible that within a closed social system with a single source of status resistance is very difficult.
- 5.
This is similar to what Charles Cooley described as the “looking glass self.” See Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and Social Order (New York: Scribner’s, 1902).
- 6.
This story was on Michael’s computer hard drive. It appears to have been submitted to a teacher because it says, “sorry, messy writing.”
- 7.
Coleman (1961) argued that sports are accorded special respect in high schools because they bring status and esteem to the whole community, as opposed to academics, which are primarily a competition among individuals. The fact that academic teams still are much less well-respected than sports teams, particularly football and basketball, suggests that cultural notions of what activities are desirable are playing an important role as well.
- 8.
Coleman (1961) argued that the reason that sports has such high status in schools is that the teams represent the school in competition against other schools, whereas academic competition took place within schools and, hence, tended to set kids against each other. He suggested that by having debating teams and the like compete against other schools, it would raise the social status of these activities. Our evidence suggests that these assumptions, while plausible, do not take into account the powerful forces that valorize athletic talent in our society. In a world where even poor kids in Africa are wearing Michael Jordan jerseys and band camp is the subject of never-ending sarcasm in movies like American Pie, there is little chance that band members will be on a par with athletes in the adolescent social tournament.
- 9.
Eric Harris, one of the two shooters in the Columbine massacre, was stuck: He had no college plans and had been rejected by the military when he tried to enlist. The social rejections he suffered in high school looked like they would become a staple of his reality for some time to come. By contrast, Dylan Klebold had already been accepted at the University of Arizona and he knew that he had a way out of Littleton.
- 10.
Taken from a letter she wrote to Nicole Hadley after Nicole’s death.
- 11.
Even those who leave often find their way back when they are ready to settle down. There are no exact figures available, but many residents told us that a common pattern was to return either after college or, more rarely, to retire after spending one’s career years in a bigger city.
- 12.
Because our focus is rampage school violence, our discussion of the negative consequences of social capital has been directed toward its implications for Michael Carneal. But even for those who do not take such drastic actions, there can be downsides to social capital, the most obvious of which is a lack of privacy and autonomy (Boissevain, 1974; Portes, 1998; Portes & Landolt, 1996; Simmel, 1950, particularly “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” pp. 409–426). Morgan and Sorenson (1999) argue that the kind of norm-enforcing social capital that is so pervasive in Paducah and Westside can also inhibit academic achievement, perhaps by promoting a more parochial or insular mind-set. This would explain why so few students leave either of the towns to go to college, and why the few students we talked to who had said that they needed to make a clear break from their home communities (Morgan & Sorenson).
- 13.
The KKK had a noticeable presence at Westside. In Heath, on the Future Farmers of America, a relatively small group of rural students were thought by their peers to be racist.
- 14.
Powell and DiMaggio’s primary context is organizational analysis, but their discussion of different notions of culture, particularly the primacy given to scripts and schema, is useful for our analysis.
- 15.
The campaign was created by the Harvard School of Public Health. The “squash it” script was featured on a variety of popular teen television shows, and a national survey in 1997 of high school junior and seniors revealed that 60% of African-American youth had used the phrase, and 39% had used the hand signal. Report available at http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/chc/squashir.html.
- 16.
When girls experience this kind of psychological distress, by contrast, they seem to turn their anger inward, sometimes cutting themselves or develo** eating disorders. Thus far, a “feminine script” does not provide for a lashing out violently toward others as much as an inward-turning self-destruction.
- 17.
Again, the purpose of school shootings is to make a public statement. The other killers who commonly take public credit for their actions are terrorist groups, who similarly want to be known so that their killings carry a symbolic message.
- 18.
Both Mitchell and Andrew also somehow thought that after a time away, they were going to be able to come back to enjoy their newfound status. Mitchell told a friend, “I’m gonna be running from the cops for a while,” but that he planned to return in the not-too-distant future. This suggests that they thought they were going to be able to cash in on their changing social status.
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Newman, K.S. (2013). Adolescent Culture and the Tragedy of Rampage Shootings. In: Böckler, N., Seeger, T., Sitzer, P., Heitmeyer, W. (eds) School Shootings. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5526-4_3
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