As sites of crisis, schools become problems to which gated privatization and home schooling are reasonable responses. The focus on public schools as the site of the shootings also tends to emphasize the crimes of youth while distracting attention from similar adult crimes. Adults who strike out in rage and go on shooting sprees go wherever they can find the people they wish to hurt. When they wish to hurt their peers and their families, they go where they can find those people. Because adults work, those places are not schools but office buildings, the post office, county fair grounds, and, most often, homes.
Adolescence is a broader social category even than ethnicity.
The killers in Littleton, Colorado, and in the other similar shootings that have taken place in the past two years in Oregon, Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Mississippi, have all been white. Like the United States, Japan experienced a number of incidents of violence, including killings, among public school students in 1998. What Japan and the United States have in common that creates correlative patterns of violence is the wealth and privilege that is theoretically attainable within those societies. The personal success, wealth, and prosperity that can theoretically be attained within a privileged group is enormous. Therefore, people within such groups who perceive themselves to be underprivileged, unsuccessful, or isolated may experience themselves as rejected and disempowered at a level that is disproportionate to what would be experienced by someone in similar circumstances within a less privileged group.