ABSTRACT
The number of fatal shootings at schools and school-related violent deaths in the United States since the late 1980s has been a wakeup call to the nation about the accessability of firearms to unstable, high-risk youth and their potential to create mass harm and havoc. Examples of recent killings at schools follow:
• On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, orchestrated the country’s deadliest massacre at a school when they entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with semiautomatic weapons and opened fire, killing fifteen, including themselves, while wounding twenty-five others.
