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| Jeff Weise, who took his own life after killing seven people,
faced bullying at his school on Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. (Photo
by AP) |
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Recent school shootings that involved anti-gay bullying
include:
School: Frontier High School, Moses
Lake, Wash.
Assailant: Barry Loukaitis
Age at shooting: 14
Killed: 1
Anti-gay history: Classmates testified during Loukaitis’
trial that he pledged to kill classmate Manuel Vela after Vela repeatedly taunted
him as a “faggot” a month before the shooting.
School: Pearl High School, Pearl, Miss.
Assailant: Luke Woodham
Age at shooting: 16
Killed: 3 (stabbed his mother to death at home before killing
2 students at school)
Anti-gay history: Woodham had a history of being teased because
his weight, and was reportedly called “gay” and “fag.”
School: Heath High School, West Paducah,
Ky.
Assailant: Michael Carneal
Age at shooting: 14
Killed: 3
Anti-gay history: Carneal reportedly endured years of anti-gay
teasing after the school newspaper printed a rumor alleging he was gay and had
a crush on another male student.
School: Columbine High School, Littleton,
Colo.
Assailants: Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold
Age at shooting: Harris 19, Klebold 17
Killed: 15, including Harris and Klebold
Anti-gay history: Classmates of the two shooters said they
were often called “gay” by athletes and other students. “They’re
a bunch of homos…If you want to get rid of someone usually you tease ‘em.
So the whole school would call them homos,” a Columbine football player
told Time magazine.
School: Santana High School, Santee,
Calif.
Assailant: Charles Andrew Williams
Age at shooting: 15
Killed: 2
Anti-gay history: Was reportedly teased as being “gay”
by students at his new high school, and was troubled by the homophobic bullying,
according to an ex-girlfriend and her mother.
RYAN LEE
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HOME > NEWS > NATIONAL NEWS
By: RYAN LEE
COMMENTS |
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When gunfire and screams no longer pierce the air, and the glass and blood are
cleaned up from hallways, classrooms and cafeterias, mass shootings at America’s
middle and high schools leave the agonizing question of why — why do some
young people suddenly snap and gun down their classmates and teachers?
It is a question those living on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota
face now, after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed his grandfather and grandfather’s
girlfriend, then went on a shooting rampage at his high school, killing five
students, a teacher, a security guard and himself on March 21.
And it is a question the media and various government agencies have tried to
tackle over the past decade in a search for missed clues that might have warned
about the tragedies, or helped prevent similar episodes of school violence from
occurring.
There is no exact profile for the young people who have entered their schools
and opened fire in the last 10 years. Weise faced unique risk factors for violent
behavior coming of age on a desolate Indian reservation plagued by poverty,
drugs, poor education and crime. He also endured difficult family circumstances
after his father committed suicide and his mother suffered brain damage in a
car accident.
But the Minnesota youth possessed several characteristics considered prototypical
to teen shooters.
Like many, Weise was described as a misfit, a loner and a troubled youth with
a violent imagination that manifested itself in short stories and animations.
Similar to America’s most lethal school shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold of Columbine High School, Weise had an affinity for neo-Nazi culture.
And as has become the norm among school shooters, Weise had a history of being
teased and bullied — “terrorized,” one student told the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune — by his schoolmates.
But some youth violence experts argue the strongest influence contributing
to Weise becoming a mass killer was the so-called “boy code,” a
culture where bullying is considered “boys being boys,” and young
men learn that aggression and violence are legitimate expressions of their masculinity.
The perpetrators of random school shootings since 1982, all boys, were “overconformists”
to the popular notion that being a “real man” means aggressively
defending one’s manhood when it is challenged, such as through prolonged
bullying, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook.
And no weapon is more emasculating, or brandished more frequently on schoolyards
across the country, than the homophobic rhetoric used to describe anything that
makes a young man different from his male peers, Kimmel wrote in a June 2003
article for the journal American Behavioral Scientist.
“We found a striking pattern [while analyzing news] stories about the
boys who committed the violence: nearly all had stories of being constantly
bullied, beat up, and … ‘gay-baited’,” Kimmel wrote.
Instead of the standard review of “what went wrong” with individual
school shooters, the media, government researchers and society at-large must
understand the roles standards of masculinity play in facilitating violent outbreaks
by young men, Kimmel told Southern Voice last week.
“I think one of the saddest parts of this is how unwilling we seem to
be to really examine the heart of these kinds of issues,” Kimmel said.
“I think we are too quick to declare ourselves blameless and focus on
the psychological problems of the individual.”
Not all experts on bullying agree.
To focus on masculinity as the impetus for school shootings and lesser forms
of bullying is an “oversimplification,” according to Joel Haber,
a White Plains N.Y.-based psychologist known as the “Bully Coach”
who produces anti-bullying materials and forums.
“It’s not just about masculinity — it’s about a diminished
sense of self,” Haber said. “When someone has their self diminished
there is a pretty emotional and psychological aspect that takes place, and that
happens whether it’s a boy or girl whose being bullied.”
During a mental evaluation for his trial on charges that he gunned down three
of his classmates at a western Kentucky high school in 1997, Michael Carneal
said his attack was motivated by the constant anti-gay teasing he endured since
he was in eighth grade. He also cited a rumor column in the school newspaper
that reported he was gay.
“Mike detailed extensive harassment at school ...
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