I see before me the Gladiator lie…
There were his young barbarians all at play…
Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday.
—Lord Byron
If we zoom out from the school massacre in Paducah, we can see a larger picture taking shape.
The fact that we are experiencing a worldwide epidemic of mass murders committed by juveniles in their schools is beyond dispute. The Paducah school massacre was but one of the early events in a timeline that began in 1975.
Until 1975, never had a juvenile committed a multiple homicide against people in a school. Now it is a worldwide phenomenon.
Here is the most complete list of juvenile school massacres that I’ve been able to compile. It does not include instances of a juvenile killing his or her parent, one student killing one other student, a juvenile injuring multiple students without fatalities, students being killed outside of school, or gang-related murders. It does not include any perpetrators over the age of seventeen. It is purely a list of juvenile school massacres. Notice how the frequency escalates. Also note that none of these totals includes the killers when they commit suicide:
1975: 2 murdered in Brampton, Canada
1979: 2 murdered in San Diego, California
1985: 2 murdered in Spanaway, Washington
1989: 2 murdered in Rauma, Finland
1993: 2 murdered in Grayson, Kentucky
1995: 2 murdered in Lynnville, Tennessee
1996: 3 murdered in Moses Lake, Washington
1997: 2 murdered in Bethel, Alaska
1997: 2 murdered in Pearl, Mississippi (the killer also murdered his mother)
1997: 3 murdered (and 5 wounded) in Paducah, Kentucky
1998: 5 murdered (and 10 wounded) in Jonesboro, Arkansas
1998: 2 murdered (and 25 wounded) in Springfield, Oregon
1999: 13 murdered (and 21 wounded) in Littleton, Colorado
2003: 2 murdered (and 4 wounded) in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand
2004: 4 murdered (and 5 wounded) in Carmen de Patagones, Argentina
2005: 7 murdered (and 5 wounded) in Red Lake, Minnesota (the killer also murdered his grandparents)
2009: 15 murdered (and 9 wounded) in Winnenden, Germany
2012: 3 murdered (and 3 wounded) in Chardon, Ohio
2013: 2 murdered (and 7 injured) in La Loche, Canada (the killer also murdered two cousins outside the school)
2013: 2 murdered (and 2 wounded) in Sparks, Nevada
2014: 2 murdered (and 1 wounded) in Troutdale, Oregon
2014: 4 murdered (and 3 wounded) in Marysville, Washington
2014: 2 murdered (and 1 wounded) in Moscow, Russia
There are other school massacres that don’t qualify for this list because the killers had reached the age of eighteen when they committed their crimes. In 2002 a nineteen-year-old who had been expelled from high school murdered 16 people at his former school in Erfurt, Germany. In 2007 an eighteen-year-old student murdered 9 in his school in Tuusula, Finland. And in 2012 a twenty-year-old murdered 20 children and 6 adults at his former elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.
The first crime in the list above to have occurred outside the United States was in Canada, and it was in Germany that a seventeen-year-old set the all-time record for juvenile mass murders (not just in a school, but anywhere). The two Columbine killers murdered 13 people between them, but the killer in Germany gunned down 15 victims by himself.
Crimes of this sort have never before happened in human history. Today, massacres and the threat of such crimes are a ubiquitous reality. Five thousand years of human history, more than 1,000 years of gunpowder weapons, and 150 years of repeating firearms, and not once did any juvenile commit such a crime until 1975.
In the 1970s most Americans had cable TV, and kids were exposed to violent movies that way. In the 1980s, we saw the impact of VCRs, which delivered violent movies “on demand.” In the 1990s, we began to see the impact of violent video games on our children. As access to media violence increased, so did violent acts committed by children in their schools.
Of course, it is not just juvenile massacres that have skyrocketed. Mass killings have become so commonplace they are now an everyday occurrence. Literally. The New York Times conducted an in-depth investigation into mass shootings with four or more people dead or wounded. They found that these shootings occur, on average, more than once every single day in the United States. In 2015, mass shootings resulted in 462 dead and 1,314 wounded.1
Sometimes you might hear about a recent “decline in youth violence.” Here are the facts: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2013, 4,481 people ages ten to twenty-four were victims of homicide—an average of 12 young people each day. Homicide is the second leading cause of death for young people aged fifteen to twenty-four in the United States, and it is the third leading cause of death for children aged five to twenty-four. In a national sample of high school youth surveyed in 2013, 24.7 percent reported being in a physical fight within the last year, and 17.9 percent reported carrying a weapon (a gun, knife, or club) on one or more days in the thirty days preceding the survey. In 2013 alone, 547,260 young people aged ten to twenty-four were treated in emergency departments for injuries sustained from physical assaults.
If that still sounds like a decline in youth violence to you, consider this: On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members and wounded 2 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Can numbers begin to explain what those murders mean to their families, to that community, and to this country as a whole?
When I train cops, federal agents, and educators, I always emphasize that we have become very good at preventing mass murders committed by juveniles.
We have deterred them in many ways. We have put thousands of armed cops in our schools. What’s more, virtually every school in America performs lockdown drills, which can reduce the body count if a crime does occur and also serves as a powerful deterrent, greatly reducing the probability of crime. Armed cops and lockdown drills send a message to the students. Somewhere, in every school that practices these drills, a student might say to himself or herself, “I’d better not try it here. They’re ready for me.”
But it is not normal to put thousands of cops in our schools to stop our kids from killing each other. It is not normal for every kid in America to practice hiding under tables in case a classmate comes to kill them. Never lose your sense of outrage that these measures are the only options we think we have left. Never think this is business as usual.
We also have detected these would-be killers by the hundreds, catching them before they commit their crimes. When I teach cops and educators, I say, “I bet many of you know of cases where we caught the kid with the gun, we caught him with the hit list, we caught him with the bomb, and it never got into the national news.” And in fact people often come up after the class to give me examples. “If you personally know of one or two cases that never made it into the national news, how many are there nationwide?” I ask. “Every year we nail hundreds of these kids before they commit their crimes. They’re just kids! They are not usually very sophisticated. If we look for it—and we are looking for it—most of the time we can spot it.”
Finally, we have learned to defeat these killers. Never again will cops sit on the perimeter and do nothing as a mass murder happens in a school, as they did during the Columbine massacre. The most fundamental shift in law enforcement tactics happened after Columbine. “Rapid Reaction” or “Active Mass Murder” training teaches cops to go into schools to stop the killings. It works. Most people never heard about what happened in a high school in Spokane, Washington, in 2003. The police arrived at that school within minutes of being summoned and ultimately shot the suspect before he could take a single life. He survived. (Nobody died that day, so it is not on anybody’s list of these types of crimes.) The cops who were there told me that one of the first things out of the kid’s mouth was, “How’d you get here so fast?”
According to a school crime and safety report by the CDC and the U.S. Department of Education, there were 53 “school-associated violent deaths” between July 1, 2012, and June 30, 2013 (the most recent data set released).2 This means that although you might worry about school fires, playground accidents, or illnesses harming your kids, the simple truth is that violence is the number one cause of death for kids while they are at school. You will never see that statement in an official report, but I challenge anyone to show me any other combination of factors that has given us 53 dead kids in our schools in one year.
We deter these killers. We detect them. We defeat them. And still, every few years we see a new record number of children who die as a result of violence in our schools.
Not a single child has been killed by a school fire in the United States in more than fifty years. Fire experts tell me that meeting fire codes can easily double the construction cost of a school building. Fireproof or fire-retardant material is more expensive than the cheapest alternative and must be used in all structural materials, interior furnishings, paint, flooring, and wallboards; fire sprinkler systems remain under pressure for the lifetime of the building; the electrical system must meet fire codes; and fire exits, fire alarms, fire lights, and smoke alarms must be wired throughout the building. So if you spend $6 million in construction costs for a school building, up to $3 million could have gone into just meeting the fire codes. Do we mind? Of course not. We’d do anything to prevent our children from dying in a school fire. And yet 53 children died in one school year as a result of school-related violence.
After our children graduate, the threat of violence continues. The massacres at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, Louisiana Technical College, the University of California–Santa Barbara, Umpqua Community College, and many other colleges now seem to have been inevitable, as do the college tragedies in many other nations, from Australia to Canada, Finland to Germany. Why? Despite our drills and the diligence of the cops in our schools, we never did anything to address the root cause of the problem.
The horrors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the massacre in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the massacre at a retirement home in North Carolina, and the massacre at a youth camp on an island in Norway—in which 69 were murdered and more than 100 were wounded in the most violent solo gun massacre in human history—all of these are just the beginning. An entire generation out there has been fed violence as entertainment from their youngest days, and they have been systematically taught to associate pleasure and reward with human death and suffering.
In 1995 (three years before the Jonesboro massacre and four years before Columbine), my book On Killing came out, predicting that we were raising a generation of juvenile mass murderers who will commit crimes like we never imagined.
After the Jonesboro massacre, the media tried to boil the problem down to a “southern gun culture thing.” Gloria DeGaetano and I wrote, in Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, that Jonesboro was just the beginning, and that these crimes would continue to happen across the United States and around the world unless we changed our culture. The Columbine massacre occurred as the book was in the final editing stages. We added information about Columbine, sadly predicting again that more violence was on the way.
For years I predicted that the kids who gave us Jonesboro in the middle school and Columbine in the high school would give us unprecedented college massacres. Then the Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, University of California–Santa Barbara, and Umpqua Community College massacres happened.
I was in Hartford, Connecticut, training two hundred Connecticut law enforcement officers on the day of the Sandy Hook massacre. That morning I told the audience what I have been telling my audiences for several years: that we would see elementary school massacres at the hands of adults. The kids exposed to the breaking news reports of Jonesboro, Columbine, and Virginia Tech are all grown up. As the killer at Sandy Hook proved, these adults will be returning to places like our elementary schools to unleash violence we never dreamed of in our darkest nightmares.
Unfortunately for all of us, I have been 100 percent correct in all of these predictions thus far. All of this is on record and completely verifiable. Now I warn my trainees that these mass murderers are coming not just to our schools but straight to our school buses, kindergarten classes, Little League games, hospitals, and day care centers. We will see unprecedented massacres in all these locations in the years to come.
As with all my other predictions, I pray that I am wrong.
The important thing to remember is this: The new factor causing this crime wave is the violence fed to children, particularly violent video games.
We have created the most violent generation in history. The kids who do nothing but play the sickest video games and watch the sickest movies are very, very sick indeed. The responsibility for their horrific acts should be placed directly at the doorstep of the industry that markets these violent products to children. A trail of blood leads us directly to this industry, which has fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for the “right” to market its products to children without any restraints, regulations, or third-party control whatsoever.
We are witnessing an unprecedented, horrifying increase in homicide rates in our cities. The Washington Post analyzed police-supplied data for the fifty largest cities in America and found an average increase in the homicide rate of 17 percent in 2015. According to reporting by the New York Times, more than thirty cities saw dramatic increases in homicides in 2015 compared to the year before, including:
Milwaukee: up 76 percent
St. Louis: up 60 percent
Baltimore: up 56 percent
Washington, DC: up 44 percent
New Orleans: up 22 percent
Chicago: up 20 percent
Darrel W. Stephens, executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, is quoted in the article saying, “If you have that many cities that are having that kind of experiences, we ought to worry about it.”3
Then in April 2016, NBC reported a new record: Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas and its metro area, saw its homicide rate jump by 107 percent.4 And these murder rates are only the tip of the iceberg. In 2002, a groundbreaking study conducted by the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University reported that if we had the medical technology of the 1970s, the murder rate would be three to four times what it is today. In the ensuing years, the study has been validated by several other studies, including one published in 2014 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.5
Recall that 53 kids died as a result of school violence during the 2012–2013 school year. Multiply that figure by four and you’ll have an idea how many would have died if we had 1970s-level technology. The 72 cops who were murdered on the job in 2011? Multiply that by four to get a feel for how many would have died. These shockingly high increases in the homicide rates in our cities? Multiply those by four as well to understand how profoundly more violent our society has become.
In my book On Combat, I extrapolate that data back to the 1930s to understand how bad the situation would be if we only had Depression-era medical technology available: no 911 systems, no ambulance service, and almost no phones or cars. How many more would die of knife wounds and gunshot wounds in a world without antibiotics? You can safely assume that if we had only 1930s-level technology, the murder rate could be ten times what it is today.
What’s more, it’s clear that more people are killing strangers than ever before. Alan Lankford of the University of Alabama analyzed “random mass murderers” using NYPD data. He looked at criminals who attempted to murder people in a confined area and who chose at least some victims randomly, counting only those incidents with at least two casualties. In the 1980s, there were 18 such “random mass murders.” In the 1990s, there were 54. In the 2000s, there were 87.6 It’s another trend that seems to have snuck up on us when we weren’t looking.
Remember, this study counted only the incidents in which at least two victims were killed. As we’ve seen, every passing decade’s advances in medical technology hold that number down. And still in 2015 the world came unglued with an explosion of violence—and homicides continue to increase in our cities at unbelievable rates.
When we as a society put violent offenders in jail, we are safer. That’s the point of prison. Some people would disagree with this, but ask yourself this: If we took all 1.5 million convicted offenders (mass murderers, serial killers, rapists, child molesters, and all the other criminals convicted by our justice system) and let them all go tomorrow, do you truly believe that it wouldn’t be worse?
In 1970 we incarcerated 96 out of every 100,000 citizens. By 2007 we reached a peak of 506 of every 100,000 Americans in prison. In recent years mandatory sentencing, in which criminals are automatically sentenced to a certain term, has led to longer prison terms for many repeat and violent offenders.
For decades, video game industry spokespeople have pointed to the fact that the crime rate is down as a sign that media violence isn’t a problem. By looking at these factors, we can examine that assertion a little more closely.
Crime is down because we have spent trillions of dollars to increase by fivefold the number of violent offenders in jail. Crime is down because of advances made in lifesaving medical and law enforcement technology and tactics.
Recently, however, we have seen declining incarceration rates as we’ve started to shut down prisons nationwide. Since that 2007 record high of 506 per 100,000 Americans in jail, the numbers have begun to dwindle.7 In 2014 the incarceration rate was 471 per 100,000. Why? Frankly, we are broke. We can simply no longer afford to put increasing numbers of our citizens in jail.
Sooner or later, we’ll get tired of living in a world where the only answer to crime is to build more jails, arm more citizens, and develop better treatments for gunshot wounds. Sooner or later, we’ll tire of living in a world where our kids practice hunkering down and hiding in our schools and our cops practice going into our kids’ schools and shooting their classmates to keep them safe.
The situation is worse than it looks. Law enforcement has made great strides in deterring school massacres, and medical technology and increasing incarceration rates have held down violent crime. Yet the body count in our schools is moving ever upward. It is only going to get worse until we solve the root cause of the problem: the proliferation of increasingly violent video games that are warping the minds and behavior of children around the world.