They are so rare, and there are so many school kids, and our understanding of what motivates people to be violent is so imprecise, that this would be a very difficult task. Still, there is the impulse to analyze, to understand, to prevent. After disasters like Littleton, where two teenage gunmen killed 13 people and then themselves, sociologists, psychologists and criminal justice experts are interrogated by the media in a collective search for societal failures, in much the same way that aviation investigators look for jammed rudders or ruptured fuel lines after an airplane crash. But risk cannot be eliminated. Fine surgeons still kill patients.
Tornadoes still wipe out towns.
Their county already had one of the few juvenile assessment centers in the country. Its population is affluent and well educated. Children get a good education and health care. And one of the gunmen, Eric Harris, was already seeing a psychiatrist. Most took that as disturbing evidence that a good system had failed.