High School Massacres: An American Phenomenon

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Television's contribution, though, may not be restricted to violent content. The saturation coverage devoted to each of the more than five high school shootings over the past 18 months may serve as some perverse form of inducement to the alienated "loners" who carry them out. After all, if there is a pattern in the motive for the attacks it is generally a sense of alienation and desire to take violent revenge for perceived -- or real -- social exclusion. In a culture that has since World War II been built primarily around the television set, the coverage devoted to high school shootings has to have an allure for the angry outsiders searching for the most dramatic means available to express their rage.

A second postwar phenomenon that may contribute to this American trend is suburbia -- mass shootings by high schoolers appear to be confined to mostly white, suburban schools, rather than the inner city communities more commonly plagued by gun violence. "Violence in minority neighborhoods and schools tends to be gang- and drug-related," says TIME correspondent Elaine Rivera. "In suburbia, though, it appears to be influenced by intense alienation and isolation, combined with easy access to guns and a culture that teaches kids, in everything from movies to foreign policy, that violence is a valid means of resolving problems." The isolation of the latchkey kid is even more intense in the suburbs. "When Mom and Dad aren't home much and the extended family of the past is gone, kids are left to the mercies of a peer culture shaped by popular culture," says TIME senior writer Richard Lacayo. "Whiplashed from 'South Park' and 'Jerry Springer' to playing Mortal Kombat on Nintendo desensitizes ordinary kids to violence, but more susceptible kids are pushed toward a dangerous mental precipice."

There is no single or simple explanation for the emergence of high school shootings as a social phenomenon. And yet they are occurring too often to be dismissed as aberrations. Factors ranging from gun laws to a violent popular culture to the breakdown of community values have combined to turn the playground massacre into a symbol of a deep cultural crisis in late-20th-century America. The First Lady a few years ago used the aphorism "It takes a village to raise a child" as the title for a book. But America has yet to make that particular African proverb its own.

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