Election Year Executions

There is a new wrinkle in the killing program - postal
employees initially, a phase that ended at precisely
the time the student killings picked up. That
experimentation has run its course. Now it is
outsiders who have no particular grudge with the
school or establishment itself. Resentment is the
template for restructuring the personality and
prompting murder. 

I've seen it happen first-hand to the the stalker of
Jennifer Love Hewitt - a decent, child welfare worker
is, by a process of traumatic steps, transformed into
a potential killer. Now we have a sudden outbreak of
such incidents. There is no hope that the programmers
will be caught and the murders of five innocent little
girls in Pennsylvania avenged. But who doesn't dream
at night of picking the bones of the programmers, or
think of those girls every day. I do and will.

- AC

http://www.azstarnet.com/news/149346

Save for a disturbed teenager killing a principal in a
rural Wisconsin school on Friday, the recent shootings
were done by outsiders — going against a decade-long
trend of insular school violence committed mostly by
students.

"It's a disturbing change," said William Lassiter,
manager for the Center for the Prevention of School
Violence in North Carolina. "We've never seen anything
like this."

In Pennsylvania on Monday, most of the victims were
shot execution-style at point-blank range after being
lined up along the chalkboard, authorities said. Two
young students were killed, along with a female
teacher's aide who was slightly older than the
students, Miller said.

The gunman was bent on killing young girls as a way of
"acting out in revenge for something that happened 20
years ago," Miller said.
-------------------

I really believe this was about this individual and
what was going on inside his head," Miller said. -
"Amish shootings 'not copycat'"
http://www.azstarnet.com/news/149346

-----------------

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1152AP_More_School_Shootings.html

... On Monday in Pennsylvania, a gunman took a girls
hostage in an Amish schoolhouse, killing five,
including two who died the next day. The shooter
killed himself. He had apparently been motivated by a
grudge unrelated to the school, and his wife called
him a loving father.
Last week at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey,
Colo., a man singled out several girls as hostages in
a school classroom and then killed one of them and
himself.
On Friday, a school principal was shot to death in
Cazenovia, Wis., and a 15-year-old student was charged
with murder.
---------------------

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061004/4amish.htm

Puzzlement After Amish Shootings


By Will Sullivan
Posted 10/4/06
Related Links
 
• More from Nation & World
As the Amish community of Lancaster County, Pa.,

prepares private funerals after the very public deaths
of five girls in a one-room schoolhouse Monday,

experts on school violence and politicians are
questioning what to make of a rash of similar

incidents in the past few weeks.
On Monday, Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk

truck driver, entered the Pennsylvania school and,
after letting everyone but the girls in the class go,
killed five students before shooting himself. Five
more students remain hospitalized. Police do not
believe the school was chosen because of any grudge
against the Amish.
The attack came only five days after a drifter in
Colorado held six female high school students hostage

before killing one and then himself. Within the past
few weeks, shootings have also occurred at schools in
North Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
The timing of the incidents has raised concerns that
the perpetrators are copycats. The similarities
between the Colorado and Pennsylvania cases, in which
the perpetrators entered a classroom and ordered all
but the girls to leave, have received particular
scrutiny. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at
Northeastern University, said the quick succession of
the cases suggested "contagion" may be playing a role
in some of the crimes.
But Pennsylvania State Police Commissioner Jeffrey
Miller has resisted drawing parallels between Monday's
schoolhouse attack and last week's murder in Colorado.
"I really believe this was about this individual and
what was going on inside his head," he said.
Information released Tuesday backed up that position,
suggesting that Roberts began buying supplies six days
before the attack and before the incident in Colorado.
The attacks drew instant comparisons to the 1999
massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School, in which
two students killed 13 people and then themselves, and

have received a quick response from elected officials.
President Bush announced plans for a conference on
school violence, and Pennsylvania state legislators
have revived a bill for stricter gun control that was
defeated in Harrisburg last week.
But experts on school violence caution against reading
too much into the crimes. The number of recent
incidents and the attention they receive belies the
fact that murder at school is exceedingly rare. Since
1992, when the government's National Center for
Education Statistics began reporting data on school
crime and safety, the number of school homicides for
students ages 5 to 19 has never risen above 34 in a
school year, and is often far lower. The latest
report, covering the academic year 2001-02, reported
only 17 homicides of children at school, compared with
2,036 such murders out of school.
Youth are consistently more than 70 times more likely
to be murdered out of school than in it, and less than
one in 1 million students is a victim of homicide in
school in any given year. "With respect to murders and
suicides, schools are relatively safe places," says
Thomas Snyder, statistician for the National Center
for Education Statistics. Numbers of school homicides
in the 1990s were consistently in the high 20s or low
30s, but were in the teens for the last few years for
which data was available.Experts diverge however, on
whether the recent incidents, only one of which was
committed by a student, represent a disturbing shift

to crimes perpetrated by outsiders.
William Lassiter, the manager of the Center for the
Prevention of School Violence, part of North
Carolina's Department of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention, said he found only 11 murders
since 1992 committed in school by people who had no
connection to the school.
"It's just absolutely bizarre how the individuals
appeared out of the blue," says Ronald Stephens, the
executive director of the National School Safety
Center, a California nonprofit. "It's like lightning
has struck twice in a week."
But Fox said that those who think school shootings by
outsiders are new are "myopic." In 1988, Laurie Dann

attacked an Illinois school to which she had no
obvious connection, killing one, and spawned a series
of copycats, Fox says. Given the small number of cases
each year, it is hard to prove any trends.
In the wake of the incidents, Stephens and Lassiter
recommended that all schools review safety plans and
consider reinforcing security systems. Fox is more
skeptical about the benefits of such an approach,
however.
"When you look at a lot of these cases, security
doesn't really prevent an attack," he says. He cites

the 1998 attack in Jonesboro, Ark., where two students
pulled the fire alarm and waited until students exited
the school before opening fire.
All agree, however, that in the one-room schoolhouse

attacked Monday, there was only so much teachers could
have done.
"It would have been very difficult, if not impossible
to keep this guy from coming in," Stephens says.