And, much like Andrew Golden, Mitchell Johnson, and nearly every other boy who’s chosen to shoot up a school, the young killers studied by scientists tend to have been anything but closemouthed about criminal intent. Many joked, boasted, or warned explicitly of their plans to commit rape and homicide.
No one took them seriously. Why? Probably because our romanticization of childhood leads us to doubt the possibility that any child can be a premeditated slayer.
It shouldn’t.
As a psychologist, I especially should have known better than to be shocked by the massacre carried out by Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, because ethically and morally, kids are works in progress. Throw in psychopathy and you’ve got a soul that will never be complete. Add access to weapons, and what else can you expect but tragedy?
Childhood violence has always been a problem. Historically, many societies have channeled the murderous urges of the young by drafting kids into the military. This practice continues in many Third World cultures; American soldiers in Vietnam have recounted the shock of coming up against platoons of prepubescent guerrillas.
Sometimes military conscription has helped to defuse aggression, imposing a highly structured environment upon dangerous individuals at the peak of their criminal energies. Crime rates typically plummet during wartime and immediately following the cessation of war. In some cases, however, military training has merely provided an extended tutorial in the techniques of killing that has fed criminal careers (e.g., Timothy McVeigh).
Another reason we shouldn’t be surprised by violent children is that American history and folklore are rich with examples of bad kids blazing their way across the plains. Jesse James was seventeen years old when he rode with Quantrill’s Confederate guerrillas—a gang of murderous psychopaths that justified its viciousness with paramilitary rhetoric. By the age of nineteen, James had committed his first murder. William H. Bonney—Billy the Kid—was even more precocious, slaying his first victim at the tender age of fourteen. By his twenty-first birthday, he’d left twenty-one dead men behind. Butch Cassidy began rustling cattle during early adolescence and graduated to robbing trains before he was twenty. Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde notoriety, was judged an incorrigible truant, thief, and runaway at nine and committed his first armed robbery only a few years later. Murder followed soon after.
One of our most frightening and unrepentant criminals, labeled “the complete misanthrope” by crime historian Robert Jay Nash, was a charming fellow born a century ago named Carl Panzram, who evinced criminal tendencies almost from the crib (65).
“Dedicated to the wholesale destruction of mankind,” as Nash terms him, Panzram began his criminal career with an arrest for drunk and disorderly behavior at the age of eight, went on a robbery rampage at eleven, set fire to a warehouse at seventeen, robbed, assaulted, and burned throughout his adolescence, and capped his accomplishments with the robbery, sodomy, and murder of at least ten men. (Panzram claimed twenty-one victims, including children.) Jack Henry Abbott, Norman Mailer’s protégé, dedicated In the Belly of the Beast to Panzram. Perhaps Mailer and others should have taken the hint.
Not that admiration of psychopaths is limited to other psychopaths. The fact that American folklore has lionized the likes of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Bonnie and Clyde, elevating them to folk heroes, combined with our general glorification of the brutal and violent periods such as the Wild West, may tell us something about our true feelings toward youthful murderousness.
We decry the latest schoolyard rampage, but soon we’re back to singing adulatory ballads about bad kids and flocking to movies about young guns. Talk about mixed messages.
That same confused attitude was exhibited, to terrible effect, within the family of Kipland Kinkel, the fifteen-year-old who murdered his parents and shot up a school in Springfield, Oregon, killing two students and wounding twenty-two others.
For years, Kinkel’s parents had complained to friends and neighbors about their fear of their son. And with good reason. Kip had long displayed classical characteristics of violent psychopathy: cruelty to animals, sadism, a previous arrest for throwing rocks at cars from an overpass, attention deficit combined with learning problems, multiple school suspensions, and an obsession with weapons and explosives. Efforts to remedy the situation included Ritalin, Prozac, short-term psychiatric counseling, and overindulgence—summer trips to Spain and Costa Rica, lessons in tennis, sailing, and skiing. An attempt to sublimate Kip’s aggression with martial arts training resulted in a school suspension for karate-kicking another boy in the head. Soon after, Kip threw a pencil at another boy and was suspended yet again (66).
Kip was reinforced for his behavior by being allowed to remain out of school. Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel, both teachers, took turns instructing their son at home. Friends describe them as dedicated, hardworking parents whose other child, an older sister, was a model student.
Yet Kip remained impervious to their efforts, boasting about stuffing firecrackers into a cat’s mouth and reading aloud in class from a journal in which he wrote about plans to “kill everybody.” He learned about explosives on the Internet, built five bombs, and hid them in crawl spaces around the family home.
This was the boy Mr. and Mrs. Kinkel chose to favor with a semiautomatic Ruger rifle and two handguns. The rifle was the weapon Kip used to kill them and to fire fifty rounds into the cafeteria at Thurston High.
One hesitates to blame victims. But . . . why on earth?
When I practiced psychology it wasn’t at all rare to encounter parents who brought a child for treatment and expressed great distress about the identified problem, but turned ambivalent and resistant when the patient began to improve.
Sometimes ambivalence showed itself right from the beginning, like the father who bemoaned his son’s bullying tendencies during an intake session, only to smile at me across the desk and add, “He is pretty tough. Doesn’t take guff from anyone.” Other displays were more subtle—a wink and a nod, failure to comply with a treatment plan, failure to bring the child back once a treatment plan had been devised. I encountered parents who grew openly resentful toward the child after he got better and tried actively to undermine the therapeutic process. One particularly hostile mother went so far as to overdose on her seriously depressed daughter’s antidepressants.
From what I could tell, this shift typically occurred when the child had been labeled the primary or sole problem in a systemically malfunctioning family. Focusing exclusively upon a problem child is easy to do even in cohesive families, because difficult kids do demand and receive a tremendous amount of attention. But there can also be defensive value in scapegoating and concentrating solely on the identified patient, as it allows everyone else to ignore their own problems.
Could that have been part of what was going on when Bill and Faith Kinkel rewarded their flagrantly dangerous son with an instant collection of lethal weapons? Was there some need to keep Kip bad? Or had these poor parents simply been beaten down by years of threats and rage and finally relented out of fear of what Kip might do if they continued to frustrate his lust for guns?
Whatever the reason, giving in was a tragic error that signed their death warrants and those of two children.
The backgrounds of Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, though not as conspicuously psychopathic as Kinkel’s, are also in accordance with what we know about dangerous kids. Initial accounts of the Arkansas pair described two normal-sounding country boys—Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with speed loaders. But as information filtered in, quite another picture materialized.
Andrew’s grandmother described him as an all-American kid, but neighbors labeled him as mean-spirited and recalled his strutting around the neighborhood with a hunting knife strapped to his leg (67).
“We knew the kid was evil,” said one local, “but never that evil.”
Like many juvenile slayers, Golden grew up in a household obsessed with firearms. His father was an officer of the Practical Pisto
l Shooters club, and he introduced Andrew to lethal weapons at a very young age, snapping photos of the boy at six, staring, rather cold-eyed, down the barrel of a pistol. Andrew’s grandfather, from whom most of the Jonesboro massacre weapons were stolen, bragged about Andrew’s killing his first duck the previous year—bragged after the schoolyard shootings. Even allowing for rural norms that encourage hunting and shooting as male-bonding experiences, all this seems more than a bit worshipful of bloodletting.
Mitchell Johnson, claimed by his mother to be just a regular kid from a regular family, was anything but. A police chief in the Minnesota town of Grand Meadow, where Mitchell spent his early childhood, described the boy as highly troubled, with a chronic tendency to wander away from home that suggests early neglect.
During a visit to the Johnson house, this same officer noticed a .357 pistol sitting on the kitchen table, in full view and reach of eight-year-old Mitchell, and warned the parents about it. The officer forbade his own children to associate with Mitchell.
Paternal risk factors also loom large in Mitchell’s history. His father was fired for theft. His mother, a prison guard, obtained a divorce and moved with Mitchell to Jonesboro in order to join her new boyfriend, an ex-con incarcerated for drug and firearms crimes at the very prison where she’d worked. Shortly after, she married this felon and he became Mitchell’s stepfather.
Mitchell had long attracted attention as a troubled kid. He bragged that he smoked heroin and had joined a gang, warned he might commit suicide, and finally, broadcast his intentions by exclaiming, “I’ve got a lot of killing to do.”
Neglectful parenting, broken home, criminal father, criminal stepfather, a mother whose choices—selection of two criminals as spouses, leaving a loaded pistol in front of a grade-schooler—suggest less than optimal judgment, guns, guns, guns. Sound familiar?
These are the kids we teach to speed-load and to shoot semiautomatic weapons?
Which leads us to the single most important step we can take, in the short run, to preventing child criminality: Restrict access to firearms.
No matter how much time is spent drilling young psychopaths in the art and etiquette of “practical shooting,” they will inevitably use firearms to victimize others, precisely the way Kip Kinkel utilized his karate skills. Given the ease with which we allow kids and guns to interact, we have no right to be astonished at incidents of headline-grabbing carnage accomplished by dangerous boys. Once again, the chief surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.
Back off, NRA, I’m not talking about trampling on any adult’s constitutional right to bear arms. Let’s sidestep the entire gun-control debate but accept the painfully obvious fact that no kids should ever be allowed access to pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Children and teens are simply insufficiently socialized to handle implements designed, no matter how you gussy them up with clubs and guilds and marksmanship contests, to kill. We restrict minors from driving and establish a minimum age for voting because we understand the principle that minors have not yet attained full reasoning capability. Why in the world do we continue to allow them to play around with Rugers and Colts and Mosslers?
The very fact that we even debate the point seems ludicrous. Then again, we are the country that lionizes the likes of Billy the Kid.
When I proposed restricting children’s access to lethal weapons in my USA Today column, I received irate mail from gun freaks letting me know I’d missed the point completely and was probably a mushy-minded social reformer. The culprit for schoolyard shootings and similar abominations, according to these geniuses, wasn’t access to weapons, it was some nebulous concept labeled “societal breakdown.”
Fine. Let’s assume society has indeed deteriorated to the point of damaging the psychological stability of our youngsters. Isn’t that all the more reason to keep them away from Messrs. Smith and Wesson et alia? The reluctance to make these commonsense decisions is truly astonishing.
If separating kids from guns violates some rural or good-ol’-boy norm, so be it. It’s a bad norm. Wanna bond with your son? Go hiking, toss the football, play catch. Or even—and this is radical—sit down and talk to him. Maybe you can even discuss what masculinity is all about, how to temper assertiveness with kindness, why avoiding violence can be braver and more effective than lashing out.
Yes, I’m talking about that old sissy stuff. The kind of effete chatter that leads to introspection rather than mass destruction. The kind of softhearted, softheaded mollycoddling that may even protect some little girl or boy from being sighted like quail on the hot asphalt of a schoolyard.
Sure, a black market will develop in response to such gun laws, as it does with any prohibition. And sure, urban gangbangers will continue to get hold of weaponry. But the likes of Golden, Johnson, and Kinkel are a lot more likely to be inhibited from taking up arms in the service of psychopathy. They got their arsenals from Mom and Dad and Gramps.
Restricting children from having access to firearms should be backed up with real judicial muscle—quick and unconditional imposition of jail or reformatory sentences for possession of pistols, rifles, or shotguns for youthful offenders, and even longer jail time, combined with outrageously high monetary fines, for the adults who allow guns to fall into the hands of minors. Zero tolerance is needed because the stakes are high. It’s worked to almost completely eliminate drunk driving in the Scandinavian countries, in the absence of any concomitant decrease in overall Scandinavian alcoholism.
Two other quick fixes: The first is to take the warnings of violent kids seriously. When they say they’re going to kill someone, they mean it. Arrest them for making terrorist threats. The second is to take your time figuring out what to do with them. Be extremely reluctant to release them back into the community. (I’m no constitutional scholar, but the fact that we routinely restrict the rights of minors via curfew laws and limited licenses suggests there would be few successful legal challenges to this type of preventative custody.) And second, when youngsters murder coldly, lock them up till they die.
Now for long-term solutions.
If, as the evidence suggests, a cold emotional system is most frequently the result of maltreatment, we need to focus our attention much more consistently and assiduously upon the detection, prevention, and remediation of child neglect and abuse. Policies that emphasize reintegration of the abused child into his family need to be looked at extremely critically. Obviously, if biological parents are motivated to change, we need to work with them. However, by insisting on “family unification” at all costs, in many cases we are simply tossing bait to the sharks. Loving, warm, caring foster care and adoptive homes are optimal solutions, but bad foster homes are worse than good, or even mediocre, institutional care.
Though the notion of large-scale orphanages and similar group placements may evoke Dickensian images, well-designed group settings are significantly kinder and more helpful places and better vehicles for moral training for abused children than are bad homes (68). Some of the most productive and ethical citizens around are members of my parents’ generation, individuals orphaned during the world wars and raised in quality orphanages.
Along with vigilantly locating abused and neglected kids, we need to embark on an extremely aggressive search for, and identification of, youngsters at risk for violent criminality. There will be substantial overlap between the two processes.
With regard to picking out the dangerous kids, there is no need to fund commissions or to dissect the problem academically. We already know whom to look for: those who display precocious aggression and antisocial behavior, reactive or proactive, for whatever reason. A relatively tiny but important sample.
In some cases the families that spawn youngsters who lean toward criminality may be workable, and all attempts should be made to retrain bad parents as well as dangerous kids—but not at the expense of the children.
In other instances a draconian solution will be necessary: abrogation of parental custody and removal of children from
the violent, chaotic homes most likely to raise habitual criminals. This needs to occur well before adolescence. As noted, data about age as it relates to rehabilitation are absent. My clinical hunch is that by the time a seriously violent boy is eleven or twelve, in most cases it may be too late to modify his behavior meaningfully. And in fact, research has shown that police contact before eleven is an extremely strong predictor of a lifetime of criminality (69). This may be because of neurological changes that commonly occur in the frontal and prefrontal lobes around this period, “hard-wiring” patterns of behavior (70).
Assuming we locate high-risk youngsters, what next? Conventional, insight-oriented psychotherapy is of little use when dealing with antisocial behavior. Techniques do exist, however, that can help.
High-risk kids need to be placed in very structured, loving environments, free of abuse, where punishment is noncorporal and is used at a minuscule level. Nonviolent behavior needs to be taught to them as if they are majoring in morality, using explicit lessons delivered by warm, caring adult disciplinarians who control the rewards their young charges receive. Goodies must be contingent upon attainment of prosocial behavioral goals mapped out in detail, such as courtesy, empathy, kindness, and nonviolent problem solving, as well as academic achievement.
Yes, we’re talking about behavior therapy. Notwithstanding the sad case of Alex, the recidivist fictional thug-hero of A Clockwork Orange, behavior therapy works extremely well when properly and consistently directed at children young enough to still be emotionally and ethically malleable, and when combined with backup treatments that address biological deficiencies. (Burgess’s novel featured a specific type of aversive Pavlovian conditioning, punishment for bad thoughts—a technique that would not be expected to work very well with psychopaths. And Alex was already far too old for any kind of “treatment.”)
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