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Abstract.
In the spring of 1999, two high school students shot and killed 12 of their schoolmates and one teacher in at Columbine High School just outside of Denver, Colorado in the US. Since that shooting there have been a number of other similar well-publicized shootings with the most recent being in a suburban Cleveland, Ohio school in March of this year. This paper will examine similarities in these shootings to try to determine what may have motivated these students to engage in such extreme behavior. Bullying, the availability of guns, the role of the shooters' friends, parents and other influential adults, and the influence of media coverage are believed to be some of the factors in these incidents.
Keywords : school shooting, bullying, American availability of guns
Facts about the shootings
Although a series of shootings occurred in the US from 1997 to 2001, they did not attract the media attention that the events at Columbine High School did in 2001 (Muschert, 2007). The Columbine shooting was the worst of these high school shootings, killing 12 students and one teacher and is believed by some to have in some ways inspired a series of shootings since then, the latest occurring just a month before this paper was written in Chardon, Ohio. The Columbine shooting was the first to occur since the inception of cable news 24-hour coverage of such events in the US and some attribute the shootings afterwards to the live coverage of the event and the details provided about the two shooters and their personal backgrounds (Wamick, Johnson and Rocha, 2011).
Since then there have been an increase in the number of shootings in high schools as well as one on a major university campus and one in a rural Amish grade school in Pennsylvania. The number of "targeted school shootings" as they are referred to by Wamick, Johnson and Rocha (2011, 371) went from four incidents in the 1970s, to five in the 1980s, to 28 in the 1990s, to 25 between 2000 and 2010. While this paper focuses on high school shootings in the US, this type of shooting is not limited to high schools or the US. There was a well-publicized shooting at a university in the US...