Battling the Columbine Copycats

Sporting a three-quarter-length parka, the 14-year-old boy sauntered toward the doors of W.R. Myers High School in Taber, a small town in the Canadian province of Alberta. Someone smirked, "Do you have a gun under there?" He did. Moments later, the ninth-grade dropout whipped out a .22-cal. rifle, killing a 17-year-old boy and critically wounding another.

On its own, the crime would have been horrible enough. But coming just eight days after the Littleton massacre, it was the centerpiece of a fevered week of copycat incidents at schools across the continent. Authorities rounded up scores of kids for allegedly plotting to blow up their schools, sneaking guns onto campus or threatening to off their enemies. Some schools hired guards; others canceled classes altogether. There is no telling exactly how many of these threats were serious. But it's clear that Littleton, at the very least, has given troubled and misguided kids a new way to garner attention. "Most kids aren't interested in this stuff," says Elissa Benedek, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Michigan. "But there are lots of unhappy ones who want their moment in the sun, and this is one way to do it."

One threat that was almost surely serious took place in Wimberley, Texas, where four 14-year-old boys were arrested April 23 for allegedly plotting to blow up Danforth Junior High School. Though the plot was initiated well before the Colorado massacre, Littleton was probably what spurred fellow students to report the boys after overhearing them bragging. Authorities who searched their homes said they found gunpowder and bomb-building instructions downloaded from the Internet. The eighth-graders were charged with conspiracy to manufacture explosives and commit murder and arson.

Other incidents were more ambiguous. Five teens at William McKinley Junior High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., were arrested after boasting about plans to blow up their school on graduation day. The students insisted they were just joking. Authorities slapped them with conspiracy charges nevertheless. Schools in Hillsborough, N.J., were shut down for a day when students received e-mail warnings, "If you think what happened in Colorado was bad, wait until you see what happens in Hillsborough Middle School on Friday." In Bakersfield, Calif., authorities yanked a 13-year-old boy out of school after his classmates spotted him loading a .40-cal. handgun. He had a hit list of 30 names with "they deserved to die" scrawled at the bottom. The epidemic has put school administrators in a tough position. "Now everyone has to be serious about everything," says Paul Houston, executive director of the American Association of Administrators in Arlington, Va., "because they're afraid if they aren't, they might be jeopardizing children." At the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union has been deluged with complaints from parents whose children were suspended for wearing black or making provocative statements on their web page. "There is a danger that schools are interpreting being different as being dangerous," says ACLU attorney Ann Beeson. "Any nonconformist kid fits some sort of profile of a killer."