When I was a teenager growing up in Arkansas, I stored my 12-gauge shotgun under my bed. I took it out when I went with Dad to shoot clay pigeons. That wasn't back in the 1950s but rather the late '80s; even in that recent decade, I wasn't considered an outcast. Lots of kids drove to school with rifles they had forgotten to take from gun racks over the weekend. A teacher might cluck disapprovingly, but no one called a SWAT team.
Just 15 years later, my parents and my school must seem spectacularly negligent. In the past few years, 17 states have made it a crime to leave a loaded firearm within reach of a minor. And you don't have to bring a gun to school to get suspended. In the post-Columbine era, a fingernail clipper will do, or a pair of scissors, according to a Harvard report released last year on zero-tolerance policies against "weapons."
Of course, nothing could be the same after Columbine, and now Santee. As long as sad little boys can find guns, schools must be vigilant. But at what price? Today it seems as though an arms race has begun in American high schools: as a tiny number of disaffected kids stockpiles guns and home-made bombs to mimic Columbine's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (or at least threaten to), communities are investing millions of dollars to bring armed cops--er, "resource officers"--to campus, along with metal detectors and security cameras.
Meanwhile, the culture of high schools is changing in a more subtle way. A kind of psychological arms race has broken out. Some teenagers identify with the killers and yearn for the attention they receive. These kids make lists of their enemies, set up websites memorializing Harris and Klebold, even warn they will "pull a Columbine." But a much larger group of teens is ever more watchful, ready to report any threat, no matter how ludicrous it sounds. It's unclear what kind of people graduate from high schools where some kids hurt so much they want to kill, while other kids fear so much they want to report harmless pranksters. But we already know that high school will never be the same.
Columbine was not the first mass killing at a school, but it was so ornately gory and so profoundly heartbreaking that it became a cultural reference point. "The anxieties and angers that used to be free floating in adolescents now simply attach to events like Columbine," says University of California at Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring. "Instead of just talking about it, now they have a model." Harris and Klebold would smile at their progeny not only in Santee but also in Lake Worth, Fla.; Fort Gibson, Okla.; and Deming, N.M. (see chart, page 30).
But in part because they have seen the survivors of school massacres weeping after the slaughter, many kids are helping to stop the shooting before it starts by sharing information about troubled peers. "The best metal detector is the student," says Ronald Stephens of the National School Safety Center. That's because in more than 75% of school-violence incidents, the attacker had told someone first, according to a post-Columbine study by the Secret Service that applied its threat-assessment techniques to school safety.