The Trouble With Looking for
        Signs of Trouble
 

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        The New York Times: America Under the Gun
 
 

        By TIMOTHY EGAN

            SEATTLE -- The boy stalking victims through a
            video dungeon in the game Doom, or laughing at
        the slaughter in Oliver Stone's movie "Natural Born
        Killers" might well be the next person to shoot up a
        school in some polished American suburb. But then
        again, he might be a quiet scholar with an odd side.

        How to tell the difference is one of the more difficult
        challenges left by Tuesday's carnage in Colorado,
        where 15 people were killed in a long afternoon of
        gunfire and murder at Columbine High School in
        Littleton, south of Denver.

        In the days since the shooting, Americans have been
        advised to learn the characteristics of potential killers.

        "We must all do more to recognize and look for the
        early warning signals that deeply troubled young
        people send often before they explode into violence,"
        President Clinton said.

        Thousands of people have sought out a checklist of
        characteristics of young people prone to school
        violence, provided by the National School Safety
        Center in California, which monitors lethal action in the
        schools. Among the things to watch for in a child:

        Mood swings. Loves violent television. Uses drugs or
        alcohol. Fond of bad language, name-calling and
        cursing. Is often depressed. Likes guns and blowing
        things up. Anti-social.

        The profile could fit most teen-agers on a bad day, and
        some on a good day. And sure enough, the day after the
        killings, news agencies reported a scattering of arrests
        of teen-agers around the country for wearing trench
        coats, the uniform of a Columbine High outcast clique
        of which the killers were said to be a part.

        But as educators develop a profile of a child who may
        murder his classmates, they are wading into the same
        territory that airport security personnel, police
        departments and federal agents have already gone --
        often with unhappy results.

        Last week, Gov. Christie Whitman of New Jersey
        announced that state troopers have improperly stopped
        and searched blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike
        because of profiles developed to catch drug dealers
        and other criminals.

        In New York, the police department's Street Crime Unit
        has been accused of indiscriminately frisking black and
        Hispanic pedestrians who fit an informal profile of
        those suspected of carrying guns. Four members of the
        unit have been indicted for killing an unarmed,
        law-abiding African immigrant street peddler outside
        his apartment.

        The police commissioner, Howard Safir, said people
        were not stopped because of their race, but because
        they represented "the demographics of known violent
        crime suspects as reported by crime victims."

        For years, airport security workers and Secret Service
        agents have been trying to develop something similar,
        with mixed results. Three years ago, following the
        Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton ordered federal
        agencies to develop a computer tracking system to flag
        certain profiles of a "terrorist type," people with
        suspicious travel patterns or behavior.

        Last year, 51,000 of the 71 million people who passed
        through United States customs were subject to body
        searches. Black and Hispanic travelers were more
        likely to be searched, even though they are no more
        likely to be smugglers or terrorists than other groups,
        according to federal surveys.

        Dozens of lawsuits around the country, and growing
        public pressure, seem likely to curtail widespread
        profiling based mainly on race. But profiling for certain
        criminal tendencies, especially among students, is
        gaining ground.

        These conflicting impulses are a product of two very
        modern ideas that are often at war with each other. The
        first is the faith that social science can protect society
        by classifying potential malefactors so they can be
        detected and isolated before they can do any damage.
        The second is the equally powerful conviction that the
        act of categorizing is the more serious threat because
        the innocent may become entangled in the social
        scientific net.  [Note:  these correspond to utilitarian and
        deontological ethical arguments.]

        There have been six multiple-victim school shootings
        over the last 18 months, and the shooters have indeed
        shared many traits. Guns and bombs figured
        prominently. The killers were all unpopular types,
        never the jocks or student body leaders. They preferred
        black clothing, often trench coats, or military
        camouflage gear. They talked about death and acted out
        death fantasies through video games.

        Doom, for example, the popular game that allows
        someone to track and kill people, was a favorite of one
        of the Colorado shooters, Dylan Klebold, and also of a
        14-year-old boy who murdered three people in West
        Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal. A pop musician who
        caters to dark fantasies, Marilyn Manson, always seems
        to turn up on the list of child shooter tastes.

        Acting on the desires of parents for something --
        anything -- to make people feel safer, Mayor
        Wellington Webb asked promoters to cancel the
        Marilyn Manson show scheduled for Friday in Denver,
        which they promptly did. He asked the National Rifle
        Association to cancel its convention there, too, and
        school officials announced a ban on trench coats.

        What many schools really seem to want is a metal
        detector for personality. But whether sweeping and
        elemental profiling will prevent another massacre
        seems doubtful.

        "We know what the risk factors are," said Dr. Delbert
        Elliott, director of the Center for the Study and
        Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado.
        "But when we get down to explaining which of those
        kids will actually do something like this, that's a tough
        question."

        Compounding the problem is that often the invisible
        student is the one most likely to explode -- not the gang
        member, bully or loudmouth. Many students at
        Columbine High remember the killers as wallpaper-shy
        students who played cards in the lunchroom and helped
        others with computer problems.

        A boy who shot schoolmates in Springfield, Ore., last
        year, Kip Kinkel, once wrote a class essay about his
        fantasy of blowing up the school, and he was named, in
        his yearbook, "Most Likely to Start World War III." He
        all but left a road map to his future behavior. Even so,
        his teachers felt powerless to do anything. They are,
        after all, not police officers or psychiatrists.

        Teachers know a lot more about some kids than parents
        do, who tend to see them through a slanted lens," said
        Dr. Beatrix Hamburg, a psychiatrist who is co-author of
        "Violence in America's Schools" (Cambridge
        University, 1998). "But teachers are not trained to
        report when a kid may be going off the edge."

        In trying to figure out the psychic recipe for an assassin,
        the Secret Service has reviewed cases of every
        assassination attempt over the past 50 years. But such
        profiling is not enough, some experts now argue.
        Rather, it makes more practical sense to identify
        behavior that can help predict a killer.

        In Colorado, the two killers left some clues in the form
        of computer messages, including death threats,
        according to Web pages assigned to the boys.

        It seems unlikely a school would have such information
        in its profile of a child, unless schools became more
        like prisons, or marketing agencies that track every
        electronic action of an individual.

        Another trait of child shooters points to a particular
        Western or rural form of rootlessness. Suicide is
        highest in Western states and rural areas, which experts
        attribute to transient populations. By this reasoning,
        entire regions are doomed to confusion about the kinds
        of children they are raising. A more accurate way to
        profile potential shooters is to look for what experts
        describe as three legs of a stool. One is fascination
        with violent media. Another is easy access to weapons.
        A third is flawed character. By itself, no element will
        turn a brooding student into a killing machine. But taken
        together, all three elements spell trouble.

        "I worry about this every day when I send my kids off
        to school," said Craig LaMay, an adjunct professor of
        law at Northwestern University and author of,
        "Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television
        and the First Amendment," (Hill & Wang, 1995).
        "Because there is no absolute predictor."