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From “I Don’t Like Mondays” to “Pumped
Up Kicks”: Rampage School Shootings in
Young Adult Fiction and Young Adult
Lives
Gwynne Ellen Ash & Jane M. Saunders
Children's Literature in Education
An International Quarterly
ISSN 0045-6713
Child Lit Educ
DOI 10.1007/s10583-018-9351-0
1 23Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self- archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-018-9351-0
CONTINUINGEDUCATION
From ‘‘I Don’t Like Mondays’’ to ‘‘Pumped Up Kicks’’:
Rampage School Shootings in Young Adult Fiction
and Young Adult Lives
Gwynne Ellen Ash1 • Jane M. Saunders1
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract This essay considers 12 books of contemporary young adult fiction,
published in the United States between 2000 and 2016, with plots directly related to
rampage school shootings. It compares the shooters’ psychological types, ages,
races, genders, roles, motives and the narrative points of view in the books with
dominant cultural scripts for rampage school shootings and explains how the fic-
tional texts confirm, critique, or extend these scripts.
Keywords Young adult literature School shootings Cultural scripts
Content analysis United States
Gwynne Ellen Ash teaches courses in literacy and children’s and young adult literature in the College of
Education at Texas State University, in San Marcos. She studied children’s and YA literature both during
her M.A. in English and her Ph.D. in reading education. A former middle school teacher, she is
particularly interested in how children’s and YA texts portray the reality of students, teachers, and
schools. Further work examines characterizations of teachers in children’s books and the representation
of teacher caring in books for middle and high school readers.
Jane M. Saunders, also at Texas State University, teaches literacy courses and integrates children’s and
YA literature into her instruction. She taught middle and high school English language arts, and her
doctoral studies focused on Curricular/Critical Studies.
& Gwynne Ellen Ash
Gwynne@txstate.edu
Jane M. Saunders
janesaunders@txstate.edu
1
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA
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Although infrequent, rampage school shootings loom large in the lives of students
and teachers in the US.1 Lockdown exercises happen at least as often as fire drills,
engendering more fear than preparation for potentially life-threatening events (Hall,
2014). Programs to prepare students for school-shooting scenarios give educators
and students active response strategies: first to run, then to shelter in place, and
finally, with no other options, to fight (Borum et al., 2010). In addition to practice
drills and news reports, youth also encounter shooters in fiction. In this paper, we
examine how rampage school shootings are portrayed in 12 young adult texts
published in the United States between 2000 and 2016.2 Our analyses identify the
shooter’s psychological type, age, race, gender, role, explanations/explications of
the shooter’s motive(s), and the narrative point(s) of view of the texts themselves,
which are then compared to cultural scripts of school shootings in popular culture
and media.3 We argue that the young adult fictions take up and challenge the
cultural scripts through a variety of strategies. For example, some authors
complicate the idea that bullying is the only motivation for school shootings and
instead construct the narrative through multiple perspectives to provide a nuanced
representation of the causes as well as the devastating aftermath. To better
understand the ways in which young adult authors, such as Todd Strasser, Marieke
Nijkamp, and others intervene in cultural scripts, we first turn to the broader history
of school shootings in the US.
Four Decades of Rampage School Shootings
On 29 January 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on Cleveland
Elementary, a school near her California home. When asked why she did it, she
replied, ‘‘I don’t like Mondays.’’ Spencer reportedly said a switch in her brain
flipped, so she decided to shoot. The Boomtown Rats subsequently made Spencer’s
chilling line famous in their song about the shooting, ‘‘I Don’t Like Mondays’’
1
Rampage school shootings are defined as those where the shooting (1) took place on school grounds or
at a school event; (2) claimed two or more victims; (3) was conducted by a student or students enrolled at,
or recently enrolled at, the targeted school; and 4) targeted at least some victims at random (Newman
et al., 2004). Following this definition, books in which only a single targeted revenge killing and the
suicide of the shooter were planned and/or carried out, such as Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock (Quick,
2012), were not considered. Books written for adults, such as We Need to Talk About Kevin (Shriver,
2003), Nineteen Minutes (Picoult, 2008), Project X: A Novel (Shepard, 2005), or Hey Nostradamus!
(Coupland, 2004) were also excluded from the analysis (for a recent analysis of texts like these, see
Linder, 2014 or Phipps, 2015). Books where adult perpetrators took a class hostage, such as The Taking of
Room 114 (Glenn, 1997), were not analyzed either.
2
Additional criteria for selection included having a plot directly related to a rampage school shooting (as
defined by Newman et al., 2004), classified as PZ (Fiction and juvenile belles lettres) by the Library of
Congress classification system, and still in print.
3
The texts were evaluated using inductive content analysis, a qualitative research methodology, to look
for representations of both shooter and shooting characteristics across the texts (Krippendorff, 2013;
Schreier, 2012; Zhang and Wildemuth, 2009). In particular, researchers were using a cultural scripts lens,
for critical content analysis (Galda et al., 2000; Beach et al., 2009). Books were coded by both researchers
according to evidence related to shooters’ psychological types, demographics, motives, and narrative
points of view. Variations in coding were resolved through consensus.
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(Geldof, 1979).4 Spencer was later found to have a brain injury, which may have
compromised her functioning; she was also diagnosed as psychotic (Böckler et al.,
2013, pp. 251–253). Nevertheless, public response to her act was overwhelmingly to
question, ‘‘Why?’’ because people could see no reason, as echoed in the lyrics of
The Boomtown Rats. In 1979, at the time of the Cleveland Elementary shooting,
there was little discussion in popular culture of rampage school shootings; only one
published novel focusing on a school shooting, Rage (1977) by Stephen King
(written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), was marketed to adults rather
than youth.
Although there have been school shootings throughout the history of the United
States, rampage school shootings are a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the late
1970s, incidents were described as ‘‘isolated’’ (Rocque, 2012, p. 305). However, in
the two decades between the 1979 shooting at Cleveland Elementary School and the
one at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado in 1999, nearly 60 rampage school
shootings occurred, an average of three a year. By the 1990s, investigation of school
shootings focused on bullying and anti-bullying programs and curricula were widely
implemented in schools.5 Nevertheless, more than 115 school shootings occurred in
the US in K-12 (ages 5–18) schools in the 17 years between Columbine and 2016
(an average of over seven rampage shootings per year in that period), and 175 in the
37 years since the murders at Cleveland Elementary, an incident rate that
accelerated over the nearly four decades (Rocque, 2012, p. 305).
Fighting bullying did not stop or even slow down the killing.6 In February 2012,
Thomas ‘‘T. J.’’ Lane, who had been raised in an extremely violent and abusive
household, yet who was not, by all accounts, bullied at school, walked into his high
school cafeteria, killed three people and wounded three others. In December 2012,
20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in
Newtown, Connecticut, the deadliest shooting in a K-12 school in the United States
to date. The presumed connection between bullying and rampage shootings lay in
the larger cultural script about school shooters; the cultural script was less related to
who school shooters actually were than who people thought they were. This cultural
script has been questioned by, among others, young adult authors in their
characterization of shooters and their motivations.
Following Columbine, King removed Rage (1977) from print because the
shooters had discussed the novel as an inspiration for their violence in their diaries
and writings (Walker, 1999). No young adult novels dealing with school shootings
were published in the years leading up to Columbine, but in the 17 years since, there
have been a dozen. It was almost as if before Columbine authors were afraid to write
about school shootings, and then after Columbine, they were afraid not to do so.
Todd Strasser (2000) comments in his Author’s Note to Give a Boy a Gun, one of
4
For the full lyrics, see https://genius.com/Boomtown-rats-i-dont-like-mondays-lyrics.
5
Later evidence has suggested that psychopathy and psychosis demonstrated by shooters may have been
greater contributing factors in some cases (Langman, 2009, 2015; Wegner, 2016).
6
There is some evidence that most shooters communicate their intentions to peers or others prior to a
shooting. ‘‘In more than half the cases, multiple people knew about the attack prior to its occurring’’
(Borum et al., 2010, p. 31). Schools have been using this information to attempt to avert the violence
before it occurs.
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the first novels published after Columbine: ‘‘One of the things I used to love about
writing books for young people was that it wasn’t necessary to deal with murder,
adultery, and various other immoral or criminal activities that seem mandatory in
adult novels these days. I find it sad and frightening that this is no longer the case’’
(n.p.).
Cultural Scripts and School Shooters
To understand how young adult novels confirm or challenge familiar storylines
about shooters in media and popular culture, it is necessary to understand the
concept of a cultural script. Cultural scripts define our understanding of the various
events that we engage in on a daily basis: our expectations for interactions and
others’ responses to us. Rarely are we explicitly taught cultural scripts; we absorb
them. In news coverage and other media, a predictable cultural script guides the
description of rampage shootings in schools: shooters are usually older white, teen
boys, and the motive for their violence is most often attributed to having been
bullied by peers. Even when reality provides a different shooter, a different story—
an above-average student, involved in extracurricular activities with lots of
friends—the script often overrides this information and these nuances get lost in
media portrayals or in collective memory.
Ralph W. Larkin (2009) first proposed using cultural scripts as a way of
understanding the behavior of rampage shooters after Columbine. He argued that
there were two big alterations in the cultural script after this event: the shooters’
wish to make an explicit statement through school shootings, and their desire of
notoriety. Before Columbine, most real-life rampage school shootings had a motive
related directly to a stated act of revenge against individuals, or the motive was
unarticulated and thus unknown. Following Columbine, the number of victims
became an explicit statement and an important feature of many shootings.
According to the post-Columbine script, killers seek a large body count of
seemingly random individuals, ‘‘primarily as a method of generating media
attention’’ (Larkin, 2009, p. 1322). Notoriety is driven by media attention, which is,
in turn, driven by body count. And notoriety is important because in the script of
post-Columbine school shooters the motive is often revenge for all injustices, in
order to give ‘‘voice to outsiders, to loser students, to those left out of the
mainstream, to the victims of jock and ‘prep’ predation’’ (Larkin, 2009, p. 1323). In
the cultural script, the motive is reduced to revenge for bullying, writ large.
As Kathyrn Linder (2014) argues, familiar cultural scripts create a liminial space
where two worlds cross briefly together, in this case real and fictional worlds:
‘‘Popular culture influenced early school shootings, which influenced additional
media and cultural representations, which then influenced more school shootings to
the degree where it is no longer clear which is the primary influence. Fact and fiction
have merged’’ (p. xvi). This creates and recreates the shootings, the scripts, and the
fictions; therefore, it is important to study the ways in which young adult fiction
relies on or disrupts the cultural script of school shootings. Previous analyses of
fictionalized shootings for young adults have concentrated on the idea of how
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shooters are bullied or isolated and driven into their acts, and how the adults around
them did not protect them from this bullying. For instance, Lourdes Lopez-Ropero
(2012) studies bullying narratives as a sub-genre within young adult literature and
argues that in examining Give a Boy a Gun (Strasser, 2000), ‘‘the bullying climate
ingrained in the school is clearly shown to be the main cause of the massacre’’ (p.
151). For Shooter (Myers, 2004), ‘‘bullying is his [Myers] main concern as well’’ (p.
152). Our analysis adds to this work by moving beyond bullying to argue that young
adult authors use, critique, and extend cultural scripts in their creation of fictions
about rampage school shooters, in their characterization of the psychological
profiles of the shooters, and in their construction of narrative point of view in order
to further trouble the question ‘‘Why?’’
Cultural Scripts and Post-Columbine Young Adult School Shooting
Novels
The post-Columbine stereotype of rampage school shooters has developed into a
standard cultural script, focusing on white nerd boys who have been bullied into
violence (Egan, 1998; Wegner, 2016). That script also suggests that shootings are
about retribution, which leads to media coverage and notoriety through an
increasingly high body count (Larkin, 2009). An examination of young adult novels,
however, reveals a more complex, and a more nuanced portrayal of school shooters.
The school shooters in the 12 novels examined are male. School shooters in real
life, as in cultural scripts, are predominantly white, as are their victims, yet the YA
novels create a tapestry of racially and ethnically diverse friends for their
homogeneously white shooters. Diverse friends and victims are given voice in
Shooter (Myers, 2004), Silent Alarm (Banash, 2015), Violent Ends (Hutchison et al.,
2015), and This Is Where It Ends (Nijkamp, 2016). As in both real life and the script,
shooters are more likely to be high-school rather than middle-school students.7
Authors seem comfortable using these demographic elements of the current cultural
script.
However, authors often challenge the idea that shooters are motivated by bullies.
Although the cultural script still suggests the strong role of bullying in rampage
killings in schools, just over half of the novels reviewed focused on it as the primary
trigger or motive for engaging in a rampage shooting. While seven novels included
direct revenge on bullies as a possible motive, only one, This Is Where It Ends,
explicitly references a character who seeks a larger, cosmic revenge against those
who he believes have done him wrong. The shooter, Tyler says: ‘‘I wanted to fit in
here….Instead, I lost everything….All of you with your perfect lives. Do you know
what losing feels like? Do you care?’’ (Nijkamp, 2016, p. 72). Likewise, a focus on
post-Columbine notoriety is only specifically addressed in two novels (Give a Boy a
Gun, Strasser, 2000, and This is Where it Ends). In Give a Boy a Gun, writings left
behind imply the shooters’ mindsets; in This is Where It Ends, the shooter’s quest
for notoriety is reported as directly communicated to another character, ‘‘Ty told me
7
Mockingbird (Erskine, 2010) is the only one in the sample that included younger students.
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he would make sure that the world remembered him. He told me….’’ (Nijkamp,
2016, p. 84, emphasis in original).
In the analyzed books published after 2009, direct bullying is no longer suggested
as driving shootings. Instead, the shooters seem to have more varied stressors. For
example, in Jennifer Banash’s Silent Alarm (2015) the fictional teen shooter is a
successful student and compassionate friend:
Classmates and residents described Aronson as a normal boy who excelled in
school and enjoyed skateboarding.
Bill Dunne, a next-door neighbor, said he was ‘‘stunned,’’ to hear of Aronson’s
involvement in the Wednesday shooting, describing Aronson as ‘‘an average
boy, pretty quiet.’’
‘‘The boy was a senior, had gotten into a good college. He had everything
going for him,’’ Dunne said. Reportedly, some months prior to the shooting,
Aronson had been accepted to MIT, where he planned to study biochemistry.
Equally stunned are Aronson’s classmates.
Eighteen-year-old Christa Conners, a senior at Planeville High School, said
that Aronson was known for his willingness to counsel others. ‘‘He always had
time to listen,’’ Conners states. When asked about bullying as a possible
motive, Conners stated that as far as she knew, ‘‘Luke was never made fun of
or bullied. He didn’t talk a lot in class, but nobody picked on him.’’
‘‘Even though he was kind of quiet, he still had friends,’’ said Tyler Rosen, 16.
(Banash, 2015, n.p.)
Luke does not fit the script. He should not be a shooter. And in the aftermath, the
characters all have the same lingering question: ‘‘I want to know why—why the fuck
did he do it? Why?’’ (p. 154). Banash challenges the idea that shooters are only
motivated by bullying and raises the possibility that the motives for such violence
might be incomprehensible.
Similarly, Violent Ends (Hutchison et al., 2015) gives no single specific reason
for Kirby Matheson’s decision to shoot his classmates. Kirby is traumatized at
home, with a family history of depression and suicide. Each chapter gives us a
possibility, but none is conclusive. He is beaten as a young child; he is rejected by a
romantic partner, and rejects another in turn (romantic rejection is documented to be
a possible triggering event in some shooters, Ferguson et al., 2011). It is also
implied that a teacher sexually assaults him. Kirby aids at least two classmates in
traumatic situations (attempted suicide and an abusive home), and helped another at
camp in the past. Yet he also engages in taunting a younger child, and does not warn
his sister to stay away from school on the day of his shooting. He is an enigma. As
one parent asks, ‘‘He didn’t seem like the kind of kid who could grow up and
become a monster?’’ (Hutchison et al., 2015, p. 38). Complex and troubled, like
Luke in Silent Alarm, Kirby presents no simple answers for readers.
In three novels, Crash and Burn (Hassan, 2013), The Last Domino (Meyer,
2005), and This is Where it Ends (Nijkamp, 2016), intense grief rather than bullying
is suggested as the central motivator for violence. These authors are likely drawing
on data that suggest that 98% of shooters experienced a major loss prior to a violent
outbreak (Ferguson et al., 2011, p. 151). For instance, in Crash and Burn, when
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Crash tries to get his friend David to confront his losses (David’s father, then
mother, and most recently, sister Roxanne, who was also Crash’s soul mate), all of
whose deaths have preceded David’s takeover of the school with incendiaries and
assault rifles, David’s deep and intense sense of anguish becomes apparent:
Well, that stops him now, because his expression changes, and for a second,
all the anger is gone, replaced by grief. I see this change flicker in his eyes,
like it was poker night. And maybe this was what Roxanne, from wherever she
was, would have wanted, because we were, the two of us, finally emptied of
our feelings. (Hassan, 2013, pp. 513–514)
And although David attempts to fight back as Crash hugs him, he eventually allows
himself to be subdued.
In addition to critiquing the simplicity of a cultural model that relies on the
centrality of bullying, young adult novels also began to question, very early after
Columbine, the possible role of mental illness in rampage school shootings,
extending the script from bullied to ill or traumatized. Peter Langman (2009, 2015),
amongst others, argues that mental illnesses, those rooted more deeply than issues
with self-esteem or in-group rejection (such as the serious diagnoses facing David
Burns in Crash and Burn, or other psychotic or psychopathic diagnoses), contribute
to the formulae for rampage school shootings in real life. In Crash and Burn, The
Last Domino, and Silent Alarm, mental illness (one explicitly diagnosed, two
implied) is identified as a direct causal factor in the shootings. Mental illness is
represented in the novels by a character hearing voices, such as a dead brother’s in
The Last Domino (Meyer, 2005), or through the intense withdrawal from family and
friends, like Luke in Silent Alarm. His sister Alys tells the reader: ‘‘In the past two
years, I’d grown accustomed to my brother’s cryptic silences, his mood swings, how
one moment he would be thrilled to see me, and the next he’d be just as likely to
slam his bedroom door in my face, shutting me out completely’’ (Banash, 2015,
p. 49).
Through these representations of growing mental illness as a stressor for
shooters, young adult authors address three primary psychological diagnoses for
those who engage in rampage school shootings: psychopathic, psychotic, or
traumatized (Langman, 2009, 2015). Psychopathic shooters like Eric Harris at
Columbine High School exhibit entitlement and arrogance; they are likely to have
narcissistic features and lack empathy. In contrast, psychotic shooters like Brenda
Spencer at Cleveland Elementary School experience schizophrenia or similar
disorders; they are delusional, often experiencing hallucinations or hearing voices.
Traumatized shooters like T.J. Lane at Chardon High School have encountered
chronic physical, sexual, and/or emotional abuse in their family or elsewhere, but
unlike psychopathic and psychotic shooters, they do not exhibit major mental
disorders. In evaluating the likely psychological types of the fictional shooters, we
looked for evidence in the novels that aligned with the characteristics developed in
forensic psychological analysis of actual shooters. Using such analysis, five shooters
or instigators of shooters in the novels could be classified as psychopathic (Tyler
Browne in This is Where it Ends; Daniel Pulver in The Last Domino; Leonard Gray
in Shooter; Brendon Lawler in Give a Boy a Gun, and Mike in The Brimstone
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Journals). Most of these characters’ mental illnesses, while portrayed in the novels,
are neither diagnosed nor treated in the novels; the same is often true of actual
shooters (Langman, 2009, 2015; Newman, 2004). All killers with apparent
psychopathology, except for Tyler in This is Where it Ends, appear in early novels,
published before 2006. Although aligned with research into the possible mental
illnesses of real shooters, the portrayal of fictional shooters as psychopaths might be
uninteresting to current YA readers; some criticisms of This is Where it Ends
suggest that Tyler is just too simple. For example, a pseudonymous reviewer on
goodreads.com grumbles:
Tyler. The perpetrator. My god, what a one-dimensional character he is. Dare I
say, murderers are always complex people. We read crime novels, mysteries,
we watch mystery shows because it’s the motivation of such an act that
fascinates us. Some of my favorite book series in the world are murder
mysteries because they are so addictingly macabre in their portrayal of the
psychology behind such an act. (Khanh (the meanie), 2015, n.p; emphasis in
original)
Unfortunately for curious readers, and for people in the real world, psychopaths do
not give motivations or leave explanations, and this may lead to poorly received
fiction.
In Adam Myer’s The Last Domino, Daniel Pulver is not directly involved in the
shooting himself; however his description, as given by the shooter, Travis Ellroy,
suggests psychopathology:
his eyes were blank, as though he were in a coma, and his mouth hung straight
across his face, the smile from earlier gone. It was as if the Daniel I knew was
just a mask pulled on over this face, and the real Daniel was buried deep
inside, in a place too dark and too deep for even me to reach. (2005, pp. 152-
153)
Daniel serves as the instigator for Travis, who exhibits psychotic behavior,
including experiencing auditory hallucinations and delusions. Daniel engages in
gaslighting, a form of psychological abuse that drives Travis to question his sanity
further. Daniel also suggests violence as a solution to his difficulties and introduces
Travis to the gun that he will use to kill his tormentors and others. Yet, when Travis
begins his rampage, Daniel is in the office speaking to the Principal about Travis,
not to prevent his actions, but so that he can remain unsullied by the violence. The
behavior of recruiting and grooming psychotic or traumatized individuals by those
evidencing psychopathic tendencies is supported by research into real shootings,8
even if it is not yet part of the cultural script in popular culture and media or in the
majority of novels written for young adults (Langman, 2009, 2015).
Nevertheless, the unpleasant idea that some adolescents can have a mental illness
(psychopathology) that causes a life of narcissism, filled with pathological contempt
for others and resulting in violence, seems to be less likely to appear in more recent
YA books, possibly because readers, like the reviewer cited above, are not ready to
8
It is proposed to have been the pattern of the Columbine shooters (Cullen, 2004, 2010).
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accept killing without complex motives. By contrast, Endgame (Garden, 2006),
Hate List (Brown, 2009), and Violent Ends (Hutchison et al., 2015) feature
protagonists with characteristics associated with the traumatized type, and Crash
and Burn and Silent Alarm with the psychotic type. Shooters who are traumatized
and psychotic (rather than psychopathic) provide more opportunities for readers to
develop empathy, and suggest the possible emergence of new character types that
complicate both the-no-motive-for-shooting narrative and the-bullying-as-motive-
for-shooting narrative. Although these more recent portrayals of shooters are no less
terrifying than the psychopathic type, there is some evidence that they are less
deadly (Langman, 2009, 2015). The body count of psychopathic perpetrators tends
to be measurably higher, both in real life and in YA fiction.
Narrative Point of View, Post-Columbine
In the most recently published novel in our sample, This Is Where It Ends (Nijkamp,
2016), psychopathology takes center stage. Tyler Browne believes both in his
superiority and that of his family. He seeks revenge against the entire town for what
he sees as his rejection. His grandiosity is not overestimated; of all of the fictional
rampage school shooters, his body count is by far the highest (39 killed and 25
wounded). We learn very little about Tyler’s motivations other than through his
spoken words and actions. He is bitter, angry, and jealous. We can infer that he is a
rapist, that he beats up his sister at least once, and that he is homophobic. The
narrative is never focused through his point of view, and we are given no peek into
his internal dialogue. We only learn about him through the impressions of others,
and what he chooses to share about his motives during his shooting rampage. The
narration of the novel includes many first-person perspectives (his sister, his sister’s
girlfriend, the brother of his sister’s girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend), but it never takes
his.
The framing of school shooting stories provides different information regarding
the shooters than what the characters themselves give us. Varying approaches to
storytelling offer different experiences before, during, and after rampage school
shooting events. The analyzed novels demonstrated three different points of view:
first person, multi-voiced; first person, single-voiced; and documentary. Analysis
suggests that young adult novels are likely to present response-to-school-violence
events through the filter of multiple narrators and perspectives. Although some
books focus on a single survivor’s perspective, such as Hate List (Brown, 2009) and
Crash and Burn (Hassan, 2013), and even fewer on perpetrator perspectives (The
Last Domino, Meyer, 2005), it is most likely that a tale of school shooting is told
through multiple lenses. Five of the 12 novels analyzed feature multi-voiced
narration. Voices include those of the victims (Violent Ends, This Is Where it Ends),
the survivors/friends (Violent Ends, This is Where it Ends, Shooter), the shooter’s
siblings (Give a Boy a Gun, This is Where it Ends), and adults (Give a Boy a Gun,
Violent Ends), although most offer a mixture of voices. One chapter in Violent Ends
(Hutchison et al., 2015) is even told from the point of view of the gun itself. Hearing
from multiple voices allows the reader to view an incident from a variety of
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perspectives, and helps to build empathy for victims and survivors, and potentially
the shooters themselves. Multiple voices can also present incomplete, conflicting,
and contradictory evidence, spurring the reader to draw his or her own conclusions
about motive, triggers and cause. And perhaps they allow even the author to avoid
difficult decisions about shooters’ motives, leaving them implied rather than
explicit.
Of the five first-person, single-voiced narratives, two offer the perspective of a
friend or sibling of the shooter, including Crash and Burn (Hassan, 2013) and Silent
Alarm (Banash, 2015) and one the perspective of the sibling of a victim
(Mockingbird; Erskine, 2010). One presents the voice of the shooter’s girlfriend,
who is also a victim (Hate List, Brown, 2009). These novels in particular
demonstrate the strong presence, influence, and critique of the media, during and
following a rampage school shooting. Larkin (2009) argues that ‘‘the communities
in which rampage shootings occur are victimized twice: first by the shootings
themselves and second by the media who rampage through their communities to get
the story’’ (p. 1322). These novels often use the media to portray the shooters
through one script to contrast it with the portrayal through the lens of friends and
family. For example, in Silent Alarm, Alys and her parents, who sneak by the media
camped on their lawn daily, are alarmed to see a leaked video of Luke on television
screaming, ‘‘This is your fault. All of you. Now you’re going to die!’’ (Banash,
2015, p. 117). These novels also provide a window into the predatory role of the
media and how the media shapes the script of the shooter.
Only one novel, The Last Domino (Meyer, 2005), presents a first person, single-
voiced narrative of a shooter. However, the voices of shooters are also found in the
three documentary novels (Give a Boy a Gun, Shooter, and Endgame), whether in
interview transcripts or through journals or other writings.9 These novels differ from
the other eight in providing more direct evidence for the shooters’ motivations and
in drawing more explicit connections to triggering incidents and stressors that may
have led to the rampages. In each, trauma and/or mental illness are elements in the
shooter’s backstory. For readers who long for an answer to their ‘‘Why?’’ some of
these novels might be more satisfactory because they are more direct conduits to
their shooters’ motives, even if those motives are irrational and misshapen in their
expression.
Conclusion
Young adult novels concerned with rampage school shootings replicate the cultural
scripts on a surface level (for example, the age, race, and gender of school shooters),
but in other ways they critique those scripts (the motives and the extensions of the
scripts themselves). Indeed, young adult authors broaden familiar cultural scripts to
include representations of complicated and complex mental states through a variety
9
Documentary novels present multiple text types (such as letters, photos, newspaper articles, transcripts
of interviews, school assignments, diaries, text messages, television broadcast transcripts, accounts, legal
statements, police reports, etcetera) with plot content in a non-linear structure, which is then pieced
together by the reader into some type of a cohesive narrative.
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Children’s Literature in Education
of strategies, including the use of multiple perspectives. Although current cultural
scripts in popular culture and media continue to suggest that bullying is a central
cause of rampage school shootings, the novels investigated here present a more
nuanced argument, well-supported by current research, which indicates that other
concerns, including issues of abuse and trauma in the family of origin and
undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, might also be influential. This move away
from a central focus on bullying does not mean that actions addressing bullying in
schools are not useful; rather, it suggests that they might only be the beginning of
meaningful programs to address the emotional well-being of adolescents at school,
at home, and in the community (Knox, 2012). Likewise, while the cultural script
suggests that shooters aim for notoriety and revenge, and that is born out in many
actual shootings, these ideas are rarely demonstrated as motivating factors in
fictional shootings in the novels analyzed. Young adult novels instead meditate on
more complex possible whys of school shootings, even though the deadly outcomes
are the same.
Because schools are potential (and actual) sites of violence (Warnick et al.,
2010, 2015), novels about school shootings could be used in classrooms in attempts
to understand, and to circumvent, such violence (Cart, 2010, 2011). Researchers
such as Katherine Newman and her colleagues (2004) have suggested that
communities such as schools might be our greatest strength in combating rampage
school shootings. They argue that these communities must examine what they value,
and in that examination identify also what they exclude, whether actively or
passively. It is through active work toward inclusiveness and self-analysis that
communities are likely to be able to identify those who are traumatized or who
suffer from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, which would make them
more vulnerable toward triggers to violence. One way to engage in that self-analysis
is through the reading and discussion of texts such as the ones analyzed in this
article. Sara Knox (2012) has suggested that classroom instruction can investigate
how rampage school shooters (and as appropriate their bullies) are portrayed in the
media, in order to discuss issues of social status and teen peer cultures. She
specifically recommends the reading and analysis of young adult novels as a
springboard for these discussions. In reading about fictional rampage school
shootings, and analyzing the scripts portrayed, readers could see confirmation of
their own assumptions regarding individuals who engage in school shootings and
their behaviors, or they might see contradictory portrayals that suggest alternate
scripts (Trousdale and McMillan, 2003).
How cultural scripts are acted out, or reified, in fictional texts could influence both
their interpretation by readers and their influence on them. In their 2010 song,
‘‘Pumped up Kicks,’’ Foster the People use a playful pop melody as a contretemps to
the dark story of a young man’s rampage shooting, and it is possible that many listeners
never discern the lyrics without critical analysis (Johnson, 2011).10 However,
examining the lyrics makes the message more clear with its description of a young man
10
According to the songwriter, Mark Foster, ‘‘The song is an amazing platform to have a conversation
with your kids about something that shouldn’t be ignored, to talk about it in a loving way’’ (Barker, 2011,
n.p.).
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Children’s Literature in Education
finding a gun in his father’s things, and the students with the good tennis shoes, the
pumped up kicks, running from the protagonist’s gun and bullet (Foster, 2010).11
Discussing fictional texts that describe rampage school shootings, the motivations of
the perpetrators (if they can be identified), and possible ways to avoid the violence can
provide opportunities for adolescents to push back against these cultural scripts and
possibly begin to rewrite them in the real world, so young people’s options are better
than training to hide in the closet or to try to outrun the gun.
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