Abstract
There are many causes to the explosion of events such as the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres and subsequent school shootings. Complex historical events such as the Virginia Tech, Columbine, and other school shootings, require a multiperspectivist vision to interpret key factors that constitute the constellation from which events can be interpreted, explained, and understood. The causes of school shootings involve a range of apparently disparate factors such as male socialization and ultramasculine male identities, gun culture and militarism, and a media culture that promotes violence and retribution while circulating and sensationalizing media spectacle and a culture of celebrity. In this chapter, I present a critical diagnostic of school shootings that suggests preventative measures such as the reconstruction of masculinities and schooling.
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Notes
- 1.
See National Center for Injury Prevention & Control, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Web-Based Injury Statistics Query & Reporting System (WISQARS) Injury Mortality Reports, 1999–2009, for National, Regional, and States (Sept. 2011) at http://www.lcav.org/statistics-polling/gun_violence_statistics.asp (accessed April 4, 2012). A useful website collects statistics on gun violence, including murders, suicides, domestic violence, gun accidents, and gun victims according to age, race, and other factors at http://www.lcav.org/statistics-polling/gun_violence_statistics.asp (accessed April 4, 2012).
- 2.
See “A Time Line of Recent Worldwide School Shootings” at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777958.html (accessed June 24, 2012).
- 3.
The quote can be found at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1901337. The_Shooting_Game (accessed April 5, 2012).
- 4.
“A Time Line,” op cit.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Liptak notes: “There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists—thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.” Liptak suggests that opinions over the last two decades by liberal law professors helped produce a March 2007 decision whereby a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Adam Winkler (2011), who I discuss below, documents how the militia argument for interpreting the Second Amendment and gun rights has been replaced by interpreting the Second Amendment in terms of private gun ownership.
- 8.
Interestingly, Barbara Kopple’s HBO documentary Gun Fight (2011), with the same title and year of release as Winkler’s book, has quite a different take on the debate between gun control and gun rights forces in the United States. While Winkler presents the two camps as extremist and diametrically opposed, Kopple’s film shows gun control forces who are extremely reasonable, including major figures in the Brady Center gun control camp. In the film Gun Fight, they insist that they are simply advocating the closure of gun show loopholes that allow individuals to buy guns from private dealers without any background check, registration, or paper trail. By contrast, Winkler presents the Brady group as extreme “gun grabbers” whose goal is banning and seizing all guns (p. 35), a position at odds with their portrayal in Kopple’s film. It thus appears that Winkler’s attempt to brand gun control advocates as unabashedly absolutist in a desire to ban guns completely is problematic.
- 9.
On the April 12 60 Minutes report, see http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/09/60minutes/main4931769.shtml (accessed April 15, 2012). See also “Gun Sales: Will The ‘Loophole’ Close?” CBS News, July 26, 2009, retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-4931769.html (accessed April 15, 2012).
- 10.
Interestingly, Eric Thompson’s company, TGSCOM Inc., which sold Cho and Kazmierczak weapons through his Web site www.thegunsource.com offered customers weapons at cost for two weeks to help citizens get the weapons they needed for their own self defense, see “Owner of Web-based Firearms Company that Sold to Virginia Tech and NIU Shooters to Forgo Profits to Help Prevent Future Loss of Life,” April 25, 2008, TGSCOM Inc. at http://www.thegunsource.com/Article.aspx?aKey=Guns_at_Cost (accessed on April 16, 2012).
- 11.
On the failure of Obama and other leaders of the Democratic Party to address gun control during the 2008 presidential election, see Derrick Z. Jackson, “Missing on Gun Control,” The Boston Globe, February 19, 2008, retrieved from http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/02/19/missing_on_gun_control/ (accessed April 4, 2012). Adam Winkler recently claimed: “Few presidents have shown as little interest in gun control as Barack Obama … It’s as if ‘avoid gun control at all costs’ has become a plank in the Democratic Party platform.” Cited in Mitchell Landsberg, “NRA is restless despite clout: The group is so worried about Obama that it is willing to ignore Romney’s past.” The Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2012, p. AA7.
- 12.
On the new sensibility, see my introduction to Marcuse’s collected papers on Art and Liberation (2006).
- 13.
This misplaced pedagogy of teaching for testing did not just originate with the Bush administration, but has long been a feature of pedagogically challenged schools; see Janet Ewell, “Test-Takers, Not Students,” The Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2007, p. A19. For some compelling criticism of the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” policies, see “Correcting Schools,” The Nation, May 21, 2007, pp. 11–21 and Ratvich (2011).
- 14.
Good sites that exhibit youth voices, participation, and politics include http://www.moveon.org; http://www.raisethefist.com; http://www.tao.com; and the youth blog site at http://www.Bloghop.com/topics.htm?numblogs=14566&cacheid=1044419966.3569 (accessed May 14, 2007). Since the advent of Facebook and social networking, youth sites and productions on YouTube, Twitter, and other new media forms have expanded exponentially.
- 15.
There is neither space nor context in this article to express the downsides of new media, social networking, and the growing power of technology in this society. For serious reservations concerning these phenomena, see Morozov (2011). To counter negative effects that new technologies and social media may produce, I am arguing the need for a critical pedagogy that delineates how to use new technologies constructively to enhance education and democracy and warns against its limitations and problematic aspects.
- 16.
For instance, Mosaic, Netscape, and the first browsers were invented by young computer users, as were many of the first websites, list-serves, chat rooms, and so on. A hacker culture emerged that was initially conceptualized as a reconfiguring and improving of computer systems, related to design, system, and use, before the term became synonymous with theft and mischief, such as setting loose worms and viruses. On youth and Internet subcultures, see Kahn and Kellner (2003).
- 17.
Information, publications, films, and other materials on the Mentors in Violence Program can be found at http://www.jacksonkatz.com/ (accessed April 4, 2012). There is also a book, Violence Goes to College: The Authoritative Guide to Prevention and Intervention (Nicoletti, Spencer-Thomas, & Bollinger, 2001) assembled by a group that holds annual conferences on university violence in a multiplicity of forms and develops violence prevention strategies. Available online at http://books.google.com/books/about/Violence_Goes_to_College.html?id=T_ClourcxRwC (accessed on April 4, 2012).
- 18.
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Kellner, D. (2013). School Shootings, Crises of Masculinities, and the Reconstruction of Education: Some Critical Perspectives. 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_22
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