ABSTRACT
Televised pictures of students who have killed their school fellows with handguns; newspaper stories of a teacher disarming a student in the classroom; and telephoned bomb threats that close down schools for searching, while students shiver on sidewalks and in parking lots, watching; all these foster a belief that public schools are no longer safe. What has happened to cause these events? In 1993, John E.Richters of the National Institute of Mental Health wrote: “In a few short years the widespread availability and use of handguns has transformed childhood into something quite foreign to what most adults can recall of their own childhoods” (Richters, 1993, p. 3). By 1993, those who lived in the cities understood the effect of handguns on adolescents, especially those drawn into the traffic of illegal drugs. However, it was not until 1997-1998 that the nation at large became aware of just how far childhood, for all children, had been transformed by them. During those years, headline news on television and in newspapers across the country announced that, in a series of incidents, boys
had shot to death several people at schools in Pearl, Mississippi, West Paducha, Kentucky, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and Springfield, Oregon. The killing did not stop in 1998. Similar incidents, some perpetrated by even younger boys, have occurred since then each year.
