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2020年07月29日 19:30
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By Timothy Egan
(1) Moses Lake, Washington – Well before the school shootings in Oregon and the South prompted a search of the depths of the national soul, a 14-year-old student named Barry Loukaitis walked into his algebra class in this hard little farm town and shot his teacher in the back and two students in the chest.
(2) Guns and violent videos were always around the boy’s house. He learned how to fire weapons from his father. And he picked up a pose from the Oliver Stone movie “Natural Born Killers,” telling a friend it would be “pretty cool” to go on a killing spree just like the two lead characters in the film.
(3) Dressed in black and armed with three of the family firearms, Barry entered Frontier Middle School in this desert town 180 miles east of Seattle on Feb. 2, 1996, and aimed his guns at fellow ninth-graders.
(4) “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it,” Barry said, according to court records, as he stood over a dying boy. He was tackled by a teacher and dragged off to jail, where he promptly took a nap.
(5) A sign soon appeared on a nearby school, bearing a single word: Why? Of late, that question has been asked around the United States, following a spate of multiple-victim school shootings over the last nine months that have left 15 people dead and 42 wounded. People wonder whether something aberrant and terrifying – a lethal virus, some have called it – is in the bloodstream.
(6) While precise answers may be difficult to answer, the recent killing sprees share a remarkable number of common traits. The first of the rural, multiple-victim student shootings, here in Moses Lake, looks in many respects like a road map of what was to come. From this case and interviews with police officers, prosecutors, psychologists and parents of the attackers – as well as the boys’ own words – several patterns emerge:
(7) ? Each case involved a child who felt inferior or picked on, with a hatred against some student or teacher. The attackers complained of being fat or near-sighted, short or unloved – the ordinary problems of adolescence, at first glance.
(8) But in fact, most of that assailants were suicidal, and of above-average intelligence, according to mental-health specialists who have examined most of the children arrested for the shootings. Their killings are now viewed by some criminologists and other specialists as a way to end a miserable life with a blaze of terror.
(9) ? The killers were easily able to acquire high-powered guns and, in many cases, their parents helped the children get them, either directly or through negligence. Gun with rapid-fire capability, usually semiautomatic rifles that can spray a burst of bullets in a matter of seconds, were used in the worst incidents.
(10) ? To varying degrees, each of the attackers seemed to have been obsessed by violent pop culture. A 14-year-old in West Paducah, Kentucky, was influenced by a movie i
n which a character’s classmates are shot during a dream, according to detectives. Violent rap lyrics may have influenced one of the boys in the Jonesboro, Arkansas, case, his mother says.
(11) The killer who has confessed in Pearl, Mississippi, says he was a fan of violent fantasy video games and the rock lyrics, as was the boy charged in the Springfield, Oregon shootings last month. The Springfield youth was so enmeshed in violent television and Internet sites that his parents recently unplugged the cable television and took away his computer, a close family friend said.
(12) ? The student killers gave ample warning signs, often in detailed writings at school, of dramatic, violent outbreak to come. The boy in Moses Lake wrote a poem about murder, saying, “I’m at my point of no return.” In virtually all of the cases, adults never took the threats and
warning signs seriously. Or they simply overlooked them.
(13) “When you look at the overall pattern, it’s a pretty serious wake-up call,” said Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, which monitors school violence from its headquarters in Westlake Village, California. “We are seeing an increasing number of violent, callous juveniles.”
(14) “What’s behind it,” Mr. Stephens said, “seems to be a combination of issues that range from the availability of weapons to the culture our kids immerse themselves in to the fact that many youngsters simply have no sense of the finality of death. “
(15) The peak in the trend of children killing children was the 1992-93 school year, when nearly 50 people were killed in school-related violence, according to the School Safety Center.
(16) Most of those killings were in urban schools, and prompted a federal law banning guns from schools, security measures like metal detectors and efforts to control the influence of gangs.
(17) In looking at the 221 deaths at American school yards over the last six years, what leaps out is how the shootings changed dramatically in the last two years – not the number, but the type.
(18) Most earlier deaths were gang-related, or they were stabbings or they involved money or a fight over a girlfriend. (Boys are almost always the killers.) Then came the Moses Lake shooting in 1996. Barry Loukaitis, who confessed to the shootings and was found guilty as an adult in trial last fall, did have a target in mind when he walked into the afternoon algebra class – a popular boy who had teased him. He shot the boy dead.
(19) But then he fired away at two other students, people against whom he said he had no hatred. He shot the teacher, Leona Caires, in the back. She died with an eraser still in her hand.
(20) When asked in a tape-recorded session with police why he shot the others, Barry said: “I don’t know. I guess reflex took over.”
(21) After Moses Lake, shootings of a somewhat similar nature followed.
(22) In February 1997 in Bethel, Alaska, a boy arme
d with a 12-gauge shotgun that had been kept unlocked around the home killed a popular athlete, fired shots at random and then tracked and killed the principal. Like Barry, the 16-year-old Alaskan killer thought it would be “cool,” prosecutors said, to shoot up the school.
(23) By the end of last year, the killings seemed to come with numbing sameness. Almost one of the victims apparently were chosen at random in the shootings outside a high school in Pearl, Mississippi.
(24) “I wasn’t aiming at anyone else,” said Luke Woodham, convicted last week in the shooting, in a tape-recorded confession played at his trial in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. “It was like I was there, and I wasn’t there.” He was sentenced to two life terms in prison plus 20 years on each aggravated assault charge, all to run consecutively.
(25) In West Paducah, Kentucky, three girls were killed and five students were wounded in a shooting with no apparent motive. “It was kind of like I was in a dream,” the accused attacker, Michael Carneal, 14, told his principal.
(26) In March, an 11-year-old steeped in gun culture and 13-year-old with a troubled past opened fire, in what seem like a military assault, at students who filed out of Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
(27) And finally in Springfield last month – where a boy with a love of guns is accused of shooting down as many students as possible in the crowded school cafeteria, using a semiautomatic rifle taken from his father – the victims were anyone who happened to be in the way, the police said.
(28) People ask why this is now happening in white, rural areas, said Dr. Alan Unis, a University of Washington psychiatrist who did an examination of the Moses Lake assailant for the court. “It’s happening everywhere,” he said. “One of the things we’re seeing in the population as a whole is that all the mood disorders are happening earlier and earlier. The incidence of
depression and suicide has gone way up among young people.
(29) Suicide rates for the young have increased over the last four decades and have leveled off near their all-time highs. More than 1.5 million Americans under age 15 are seriously depressed, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Most of the attackers in the recent cases had shown signs of clinical depression or other psychological problems. But schools, lacking mental health counselors, are less likely to pick up on such behavior or to have the available help, principals at the schools where the shootings happened said.
(30) A depressed, insecure child is quite common. But that same boy with a gun can be a lethal threat. In all of the recent shootings, acquiring guns was easier than buying beer, or even gas.
(31) The Moses Lake assailant used to play at home with his family guns as if they were toys, friends testified in court. In his confession, Barry Loukaitis said he took two of his father’s guns from an unlocked cabinet,
and a third one – a 25-caliber semiautomatic pistol – from a family car.
(32) The gun used in the Alaska school shootings was kept unlocked at the foot of the stairs in a foster home where Evan Ramsey was living, according to the police.
(33) The shootings in West Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield were similar in that semiautomatic weapons – capable of firing off dozens of rounds within a minute – were used to kill children. Weapons of less rapid-fire capability would likely have reduced the death tolls, the police said.
(34) In Jonesboro and Springfield, the parents of the accused assailants followed the general advice of the National Rifle Association and taught their children, at an early age, how to use guns properly. The story of how Andrew Golden, accused in the Jonesboro shooting, was given a gun by Santa Claus at age 6 and was an expert marksman in the Practical Pistol Shooters Club a few years later has been widely reported.
(35) But less well-known is how the other accused Jonesboro killers acquired his knowledge of guns. Mitchell Johnson’s mother, Mrs. Woodward, said in an interview that she taught her boy how to shoot a shotgun, and then he took a three-week course.
(36) When the boy were arrested after hitting 15 human targets at Westside Middle School, police found nine guns in their possession. Most of them had been taken from the home of Andrew’s grandfather, Doug Golden, a police officer who says he usually kept his guns unlocked in the house.
(37) The parents of Kipland Kinkel, the boy accused of the Springfield shootings, were not gun enthusiasts, but their son was, according to interviews with family friends. The parents agonized over the boy’s gun obsession, finally giving in and buying him a weapon. The father and son took courses in marksmanship and safety, and the guns were kept under lock and key.
(38) Just as easy to get as guns were videos or cassettes in which murder is a central theme, and often glorified. Jurors in the trial of Barry Loukaitis were shown a pearl Jam video, “Jeremy,” about a youth who fantasizes about using violence against classmates who taunt him. That video, along with “Natural Born Killers,” a movie about a pair who kill their parents and then go on nationwide shooting spree, were among Barry’s favorite, his friends testified.
(39) “There are many cultural forces predisposing kids to violent behavior,” said he Reverend Chris Perry, a youth minister for Mitchell Johnson at Central Baptist Church, who has talked to the boy three times since the shootings. “There is a profound cultural influence, like gravity, pulling kids into a world where violence is a perfectly normal way to handle our emotions.”