Book Review Of Rampage The Social Roots Of School Shootings

The book “Rampage The Social Roots Of School Shootings” written by Newman et al, offers many different views and theories behind the issues of Rampage school shootings. In this paper I will give the reader an in depth overview and evaluation of the aforementioned book. Offering researched based reasons to why these school shootings actually happen. They explore the communities of Heath and Westside, the grounds of two horrific acts of rampage shootings by Michael Carnell, Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson. They explain various angles of there research such as identifying an issue, how signals given by children can be misinterpreted, the effects of social capital and how mental factors play a role in the acts of the shooters. The infrastructure

Sometimes this signal may be weak or mixed but it is always easier to play into the cliché “better to be safe then sorry”. Adolescents are looked at to be borderline masterminds in hiding their emotions and bottling up everything eternally. Michael Carnell showed very limited signs that something was wrong with him. Little did his teachers know that he actually suffered from schizotypal personality disorder which made him want to socially isolate himself as well as have severe anxiety and have odd behaviors and thoughts. Not only did he hind his signs from officials at school, he also hid them from his family. Both of which were not aware that he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child. You could very easily argue that as a teacher it is extremely difficult to pick up on treads and signals when you only see the students for nearly an hour a day. It is the major things that are spoon fed to those in authority where it is critical to be noticed. For one of Michael’s school assignment he wrote a paper explaining how embarrassed he felt when he was called gay in the school paper. In Figure 4:1 on page 93 he referenced various weapons and forms of violence such as “ using a sawed of shotgun and ak47 to shoot the mob of preps” (Newman et al., 2004:93). This left his teacher in an awkward and uncomfortable situation because he wrote on the paper “Please don’t tell anyone, Very Personal” (Newman et al.,