Bishop Neumann High School has 231 students, with about 20 students per class. The home of the Golden Knights, it is situated three hours north of Pennsylvania in a bucolic town called Williamsport. In recent years, its students have done especially well in forensics and foreign languages. A full 85 percent of them go on to college.
A Catholic school, Bishop Neumann requires its pupils to take four credits in theology as well as four in English, math, science and social studies. The school, in its own words, "strives to develop within students a sense of respect for themselves (body and spirit), their community and their country."
Wednesday around noon at Bishop Neumann, an eighth-grade girl shot a 13-year-old in the shoulder. Doubtless she had seen the coverage of Monday's tragedy at Santana High School in suburban San Diego, where Andy Williams, 15, allegedly opened fire and killed two students there.
Even if the eighth-grade shooter at Bishop Neumann missed the Santana coverage, she could have read similar stories elsewhere about the spate of school crimes that have cropped up in headlines this week. Seven separate students were arrested in California Tuesday for making violent threats. An eighth teenager, a 15-year-old honor student from Camden, N.J., was arrested Tuesday for threatening to shoot members of a clique in his wood shop class. And a ninth, from Charles Town, W. Va., was charged with assault Tuesday for writing in an e-mail to the school board president: "I will put you in so much pain that you will wish you were dead."
Wednesday, as the Bishop Neumann shooter was taking out her gun in Williamsport, students at Santana High were making their way down the halls to the cafeteria. They did not see the holes where stray bullets from a .22-caliber revolver had pierced the walls. Administrators had caulked them in already. They did not see the blood stains. Those were painted over.
We can cover up the evidence with caulking and paint; maybe it makes us feel better. But we can't cover up these crimes. We need to discuss why a Catholic school that claimed to harbor "a climate of love and hope" was no different than the impersonal Colorado factory that churned out Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. And we can no longer afford to lie to ourselves based on skewed anecdotal evidence.
American high schoolers have not suddenly moved from disgruntled grumblings and backyard fistfights to vicious e-mails and massacres. School violence has always been with us. In a joint study by the Department of Justice and the Department of Education published last week, researchers reported that violent crime in schools actually decreased between 1992 and 1998, from 48 crimes per 1,000 students to 43 per 1,000. Shooting sprees are more common now than they were five years ago, but the overall number of students killed in schools is down. And in 1999, about 7 percent of high schoolers in the study reported carrying a weapon on school property within the last month. Six years before that, it was 12 percent.
What gives? Could it be that violent crimes in schools only make headlines when the weapon of choice is a gun, when the victims are numerous, or when the victims are white?
What about gun control? Would any law keep these tragedies from happening? Aren't these kids already getting guns illegally?
Do we have a good picture of who the shooters are? Students at Santana said Andy Williams was a loner. Lawyers said that's exactly who he wasn't. "He was not a loner sitting in a corner with a Doom sweatshirt making ground glass to put in a bomb," the district attorney said. "That's my frustration. We cannot tie all this up neatly for you."
When we try to come up with rules to prevent school shootings, do we keep a clear head?
Does anyone know what's really going on?
Here's another sad story: One morning, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer took out her .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a Christmas gift from her father. She went to a local school and peered through the sights. Within one minute, she had killed the principal and a custodian who were trying to shield students. She also wounded eight children and a police officer.
That was in 1979. We've had over 20 years to keep it from happening again. And that's the scariest thing about school shootings-we don't know how to stop them.
Mary Carmichael is a Trinity senior and executive editor of The Chronicle.
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