Toward The Root Of The Evil

By Richard Lacayo

The questions people are asking themselves now in Jonesboro, Ark.--How could this happen? What makes kids kill?--are the same questions they were wondering about last year in Pearl, Miss. In October, Luke Woodham, 16, having just stabbed his mother to death, arrived at Pearl High School and opened fire, killing two and wounding seven. Assistant principal Joel Myrick subdued Woodham at gunpoint and held him until police arrived. "I kept asking him, Why, why, why?" Myrick later recalled. "He said, 'Mr. Myrick, the world has wronged me.'"

For as long as there has been childhood, a well-developed sense of grievance has been part of it. But it used to be unusual for kids to get back at the world with live ammunition. Jonesboro's is the fourth student shooting spree on school grounds in the U.S. since February 1997. That was when Evan Ramsey, 16, opened fire in Bethel, Alaska, leaving two dead and two wounded. After Pearl came West Paducah, Ky. Michael Carneal, 14, erupted there in December, killing three students and wounding five. Joseph ("Colt") Todd, 14, an eighth-grader at Stamps High School, killed two fellow students on Dec. 15.

Everyone knows that late 20th century America, where no-parent households, Marilyn Manson and the National Rifle Association all converge, is not for the faint of heart. But how did it become a place where kids gun down other kids?

Juvenile mass murderers. Fledgling psychopaths. Among the experts, the search for a new vocabulary is well under way. Psychologists are wary of speculating about specific causes in the Jonesboro killings--violence at home? A history of serious mental disturbance?--until a fuller picture emerges of the two boys and their circumstances. But on the question of how the larger ground is prepared, meaning the psychological terrain that might make a kid capable of killing, the professionals share the assumptions of most parents. These days Mom and Dad are not always home much. The extended family of the past is gone. A feckless popular culture has moved into the vacuum.

"Television and the movies have never, in my experience, turned a responsible youngster into a criminal," says Stanton Samenow, author of Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get into Trouble and What Parents Can Do About It. "But a youngster who is already inclined toward antisocial behavior hears of a particular crime, and it feeds an already fertile mind." Most children resist the worst temptations, he says. The trick is to recognize the ones who do not. "If you have a child who increasingly is lying instead of putting some value on the truth, a child who is becoming more ruthless and unprincipled--you need to take some of these signs seriously."

In a great many households, work, divorce or both have removed parents for much of the day. Mitchell Johnson, the older boy accused in Jonesboro, didn't see a lot of his father, who split from his mother in 1994. When the grownups are out, or even when one is there but not mindful, children are left to the mercies of a peer culture shaped by the media, the ultimate in crazed nannies. Armed with video-game joysticks and TV remotes--a funny word, with its false promise that it keeps you at a distance from whatever excitements it bounces you through--kids are whiplashed from one bit of blood sport to another, from South Park and Jerry Springer to Mortal Kombat on Nintendo. Ordinary kids may be a bit desensitized to violence. More-susceptible kids are pushed toward a dangerous mental precipice.

All that remains is for their world to be bristling with real firearms, which it often is. In a nation in which a third of all households have at least one gun, even an 11-year-old like Andrew Golden, the younger boy accused in Jonesboro, knows where to get one. Jonesboro is hunting country, so people there bridle at any suggestion that the simple availability of guns, especially long guns, had anything to do with the killings. But child-development experts say that for kids who never develop an internal brake on their own aggression, the pop-pop culture of weaponry makes a difference. "The violence in the media and the easy availability of guns are what's driving the slaughter of innocents," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco.

As for media violence, the debate there is fast approaching the same point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco reached some time ago--it's over. Few researchers bother any longer to dispute that bloodshed on TV and in the movies has an effect on the kids who witness it. Added to the mix now are video games, at least the ones built around the model of hunt and kill. Captivated by effects that are ever more graphic, game boys learn to associate gusts of "blood" with the primal gratifications of scoring. In Golden Eye, a big seller, the player spends nearly all his time drawing a bead on his victims down the barrel of a gun.

"Many boys have impulse-control problems," says Gil Noam, a professor of education and medicine at Harvard. "They don't think, What are going to be the consequences for the rest of my life?" Bringing them through the treacherous pathways of mass culture takes a watchful adult. Things that merely amuse a grownup can injure a child, whose brain undergoes a powerful development surge before age 14. "Parents don't understand that taking a four-year-old to True Lies--a fun movie for adults but excessively violent--is poison to their brain," says Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys.

There is a special problem for boys, who were the shooters in all the 11 multiple killings at American schools in the past five years. When boys are ready to detonate, the signs are harder to read. Girls are more likely to decline into such inward-directed aggressions as depression or eating disorders. They are also more likely to put their feelings into words, an early warning that boys don't always offer. "The signals of boys tend to be discipline problems," says Gurian.

Given all that, the real wonder may be that schoolboy massacres are still an aberration. But like crime generally, juvenile violence involving guns has actually been in decline since 1994. A downturn in the ultraviolent crack trade is one reason. Just two weeks ago, the National Center for Education Statistics, in a survey requested by President Clinton, found the incidence of serious crime in schools to be flat. In the past year, only 10% reported a rape, robbery or fight involving a weapon. But again, like crime generally, violent juvenile crime has stabilized at a rate that would have seemed very high 30 years ago, making the recent declines more like nicks in a high plateau.

One of the ironies of the Jonesboro massacre is that people looking for a refuge from stress and violence often try to escape to places very much like Jonesboro. But most of the recent school shootings have occurred in rural areas. The psychic stresses of the 1990s are not so easy to evade--not when so many of them, from TV to being a latchkey child, are right in the home. There they can easily act on any kid who believes that "the world has wronged me"--a sentiment spoken from the darkest part of the human heart. And no place in America is more than a stone's throw from there.

--Reported by Victoria Rainert/New York

With reporting by Victoria Rainert/New York