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Action follows through mostly from pronouncement { May 8 2007 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/1328236http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/1328236
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
Katherine Newman on "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings"
* Katherine Newman, Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University. She has previously taught at Columbia, Berkeley, and Harvard where she founded the doctoral program in sociology and social policy. She is the author of several books including "Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings" (Basic Books).
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
EXCERPT
KATHERINE NEWMAN: School shooters are looking to gain the attention and affection of their peers, and so they never explode spontaneously. They do let out hints, sometimes for many months in advance. We found evidence of hints of what was coming in those two cases, as long as three or four months before they actually happened, because what the shooter is trying to do is pique people's attention, and so they say things like, “I’m going to be running from the police, you won't see me for a while,” or “We'll see who lives or dies on Monday.” And these kinds of veiled hints or threats come at fairly rapid clip before the shootings happen.
The problem for the kids who hear them is they don't really know exactly how to interpret what this means, and usually the shooter is someone who is known to be saying crazy things a lot of the time to get attention. The attention-getting doesn't work until they start talking about school shootings. And when they start talking about shooting people, they start to get the kind of attention they crave. And then they have backed themselves into a corner, having made pronouncements about what they are going to do, and so even though they’re usually deeply ambivalent about it, they go forward, because what they’re thinking about is, what will people think of me if I don't do what I said I was going to do. They’re rarely thinking about the people they’re going to kill or that they’re going to kill anyone at all.
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