Crime and Justice International Magazine - Sam Houston State University

One of the earliest known school massacres on American soil occurred nearly 250 years ago. On July 26, 1764, four Delaware Indian warriors raided a schoolhouse in what is now Franklin County, Pennsylvania. They shot and scalped the schoolmaster, Enoch Brown, then tomahawked and scalped the children, killing at least nine. Two of the children survived the attack.

The deadliest school massacre in American history took place in Bath, Michigan. Andrew Kehoe, a school board member who was upset about a property tax levied to build the school, used explosives to kill himself and 45 people, most of them children in the second through sixth grades. The year was 1927.

In Houston, Texas—1959—Paul Orgeron, approached a teacher at Poe Elementary School and detonated a suitcase bomb, killing six people, including himself and his own son. Just seven years later in Austin, Texas—August 1, 1966—Charles Whitman, a mentally unstable ex-marine, murdered his mother and his wife, then climbed University of Texas at Austin’s 27-floor tower with an arsenal of weapons and barricaded himself in the observation deck. He shot and killed 15 people on the campus below, wounding 31 before police stormed the observation deck and shot him numerous times.

In 1976, Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian at California State Fullerton, shot nine of his fellow workers, killing seven. Then in 1979, sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer gunned down eight children and two adults as they arrived at the school across the street from her house. When interrogated by police, Spencer boasted: “It was just like shooting ducks in a pond.”

School shootings became even more frequent in the 1980s. In 1983, eighth-grader David Lawler shot two classmates at Parkway South in St. Louis, Missouri, before turning the gun on himself. In Winnetka, Illinois—1988—30-year-old Laurie Dann entered Hubbard Woods School armed with three pistols and killed an eight-year-old boy and wounded two girls and three boys. Then on January 17, 1989, Patrick Edward Purdy opened fire on the Cleveland Elementary School playground with an assault rifle, killing five children and wounding 29 others.

Yet all of these incidents did not prepare us for the 1990s, the worst decade on record for school shootings. The University of Iowa in 1991. The College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 1992. Richland High School in 1995. Frontier Junior High in Moses Lake, Washington, in 1996. Pearl High School in Mississippi and Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, both in 1997. Then the shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas, on March 24, 1998, which garnered extensive, nationwide media coverage, probably due less to the number of victims (4 killed; nine wounded) as it was to the ages of the two shooters, who were at the time only 11 and 13 years old.

A little over a year later, on April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out the deadly shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 24 others. And exactly one month later, fifteen-year-old Thomas Solomon opened fire on fellow students in Heritage High School in Conyers, Georgia, wounding six. In the wake of these two shootings, many Americans began to question the role of the entertainment industry, suggesting the violence portrayed in films, music, and video games contributed to the actual violence carried out. There was also much criticism of the media for their round-the-clock coverage, which, it was argued, might encourage potential school shooters to act in the hopes of having their day in the media spotlight. Many more criticized what has been called the American gun culture, calling for strict gun control laws. Yet despite all the public debate, and despite zero-tolerance policies instituted at schools across the nation, the shootings have continued well into the new millennium:

• March 5, 2001: Santana High School in Santee, California; two killed, 13 wounded.

• January 16, 2002: Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia; three killed, three wounded.

• September 24, 2003: Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minnesota; two killed.

• March 21, 2005: Red Lake High School in Minnesota; seven killed.

• November 8, 2005: Campbell County High School in Jacksboro, Tennessee; one killed, two wounded.

• September 27, 2006: Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colorado; one killed by gunman Duane Roger Morrison, 53, who first sexually assaulted six female students.

• September 29, 2006: Weston High School in Cazenovia, Wisconsin; one killed.

• October 2, 2006: West Nickel Mines School, a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; five killed, five wounded.

• January 3, 2007: Henry Foss High School in Tacoma, Washington; six killed, 11 wounded.

• And April 16, 2007: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia; 32 dead, 29 wounded.

This most recent massacre has rekindled all the debates about gun control, entertainment violence, and media over-exposure, as well as criticisms of the mental health care system (psychiatrist had determined Virginia Tech shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, was a threat to himself and others, but he was sent back to school anyway). Criticism has also risen from across the globe concerning America’s gun culture. It would be a mistake, however, to assume this is a strictly American problem, for similar incidents have occurred in schools around the world. For example: Israel’s Avivim school bus massacre of 1970 and the Ma’alot massacre in 1974; Canada’s shootings at École Polytechnique in 1989, Concordia University in 1992, W. R. Myers High School in 1999, and Dawson College in 2006; Scotland’s Dublane massacre of 1996, in which sixteen children and one adult were killed, and which remains the deadliest attack on children in United Kingdom history; the Sanaa, Yemen, massacre in 1997; the 2002 shooting at a school in Erfurt, Germany, in which 16 people were killed; Australia’s Monash University shooting, also in 2002, which claimed the lives of two students, injuring five; and the 2004 hostage crisis at a primary school in Beslan, Russia.

This last attack, in Beslan, is particularly notable for several reasons. First, the number of casualties—344 killed, including 186 children—far exceeds the typical school shooting, perhaps making this incident the worst mass killing at a school in history.

Second, the weapons used in the attack were not limited to guns, but also included several explosives. In fact, most of the casualties were caused at the end of the siege by explosions, not gunfire. As we also saw in the aforementioned Bath, Minnesota, tragedy, the deadliest attacks on schools involve the use of explosives. This would seem to counter the argument that simply eliminating guns will ensure that schools will be safe, as does the case of Mamoru Takuma of Japan, who in 2001 entered the Ikeda Elementary School near Osaka and murdered eight children with a kitchen knife.

Finally, the Beslan massacre, as well as the two incidents in Israel, were politically motivated. School shootings in the U.S. and in most other countries have typically been motivated by revenge, often against a vague or even imagined persecutor, as in the case of Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. Cases like Beslan, Avivim, and Ma’alot are technically acts of political terror, and, arguably, so was the Bath tragedy—the most-suggested motive for the bombing was to protest a property tax levied by the local government.

Though the U.S. has not suffered a terror attack since 9/11 and (if the current administration is to be believed) we have made great progress at our borders and overseas, the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech exposes a weakness we have not yet dealt with in the fight against terrorism. This latest attack proves that a single shooter, when targeting a school campus, can inflict as many or more casualties than a typical suicide bomber in Iraq or Palestine. And this raises the question: What is to stop a terrorist or group of terrorists, foreign or domestic, from carrying out a Beslan style attack on American soil?

Apparently nothing.

Chris Fisher is an editor at Crime and Justice International.