According to the text, what helps to explain why only male students have committed rampage school shootings,

Fantastic news! We've Found the answer you've been seeking!

Question:

According to the text, what helps to explain why only male students have committed "rampage school shootings," and what helps to explain why these killing have occurred only at rural and suburban, not urban, high schools? Lastly, what policies or programs would you implement to address these school shootings?

references, please. I have attached the assigned reading:

The 1990s will be remembered for attention to a relatively new kind of violence: "rampage school shootings." During this period, a "wave" of shootings by white males in middle and high schools occurred across the rural and suburban (but not urban) United States. Between 1994 and 1998, there were approximately two hundred violent deaths: 83 percent homicides, 13 percent suicides, and 4 percent combinations of the two (Hammond 1999). In peak years like 1998, forty-two school-related homicides happened. Among the homicides, there were no particular groups targeted by the all-male adolescent and preadolescent perpetrators of these killings (Newman et al. 2004). (The 2006 shooting at an Amish school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, did involve five female victims, but a man did it in his thirties and not a student peer.)

While media attention to school violence has declined, preliminary data for 2010-2011 show that among youth of ages five to eighteen, there were thirty-one school-associated violent deaths (twenty-five homicides and six suicides), or about one homicide or suicide of a school-age youth at school per 3.5 million students. Youth homicides at secondary schools remained less than 2 percent of the total number of youth homicides (Robers et al. 2013: 6). This is consistent with other years surveyed as well. There have also been a handful of acts of homicide and suicide on college campuses during the first decade of this century, the most infamous at Virginia Tech.

Those analysts who pay close attention to the wider organizational and societal features of community relations tend to distinguish between the more familiar revenge killings and the rampage shootings. The latter assaults involve a special kind of attack on multiple parties, selected almost at random. "The shooters may have a specific target to begin with, but they let loose with a fusillade that hits others, and it is not unusual for the perpetrator to be unaware of who has been shot until long after the fact" (Newman et al. 2004: 15).

These explosions are not attacks aimed at the popular kids, bullies, athletes, and/or harassers per se, as many commentators and pundits have suggested. Instead, they are attacks on whole institutionsschools, teenage pecking orders, community social structuresand they represent "backlash" or "blowback" effects from male adolescents who are unable to successfully navigate the treacherous waters of doing teenage masculinity. Schools are the selected sites for these culturally played-out scripts of "becoming a man" and performing violence because "they are the heart and soul of public life in small towns" where there are "high levels of background violence, dysfunctional families, chaotic schools, [and] distracted adults too busy with town lives to pay attention to the local teens" (Newman et al. 2004: 15). These rampage school shootings thus contradict our most firmly held beliefs about childhood, home, and community: "They expose the vulnerable underbelly of ordinary life and tell us that malevolence can be brewing in places where we least expect it, that our fail-safe methods (parental involvement in children's lives, close-knit neighborhoods) do not identify nascent pathologies" that may be part and parcel of patriarchy, gender, and coming of age for socially and marginally adolescent males living in the nonmetropolitan United States (Newman et al. 2004: 15).

Many popular explanations for these rural and suburban shootings include mental illness, family problems, bullying, peer support, culture of violence, violent media, availability of guns, and the copycat effect. But most of these explanations on their own do not hold up, while some of these explanations in combination with others and with qualificationsuch as peer support and culture of violenceare more helpful. But what is missing from these types of analyses is that "the majority of school-based mass murder attacks in the U.S. are perpetrated by young, white males" (Agnich 2015). Thus, since masculinity should be a central part of the investigationand certainly if all the perpetrators had been girlsthe question would be "what's going on with girls?" (or "girls gone wild!") rather than "school violence" and "what's wrong with kids?" (Katz 1999).

Of course, both boys and girls seek status, perform for peers, find identities, and cope with their parents and other adults. The point is that the process of finding a workable niche in society is distinctive along gender lines. The all-male club of rampage shooters shares at least in their own eyes and perceptions (if not in the eyes and perceptions of others, too) a dual failurefailing at adolescence and failing at manhood. For adolescent males, demonstrating masculinity is central to what makes a popular boy high on the social pecking order. As the authors of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings have stated,

To be a man is to be physically dominant, competitive, and powerful in the eyes of others. Real men exert control and never admit weakness. They act more and talk less. If this sounds like Marlboro Man, it is because adolescent ideals of manliness are unoriginal. They derive from cultural projections found in film, video, magazines, and the back of comic books. In-your-face basketball players, ruthless Wall Street robber barons, and presidents who revel in being "doers" and not "talkers" all partake of and then reinforce this stereotype. (Newman et al. 2004: 144)

The most powerful source of stigma for an adolescent boy coming of age in the United States today is being labeled "gay." The assumption is that being a man means being heterosexual, and even the specter of homosexuality compromises a boy's status and place on the social ladder because "gay" constitutes a failure at achieving masculine gender. "Gay" does not merely refer to a sexual orientation, preference, or reference, but also to a broader connotation now used as a slang term for any form of social or athletic incompetence and an array of other mistakes and failures. One fifteen-year-old girl explained, "Boys have a fascination with not being gay. They want to be manly, and put each other down by saying 'that's gay'" (quoted in Newman et al. 2004: 146). Thus for boys, "the struggle for status is in large part competition for the rank of alpha male, and any kind of failure by another boy can be an opportunity to insult the other's masculinity and enhance one's own. It's a winner-take-all society, and any loss one boy can inflict on another opens up a new rung on the ladder that he might move into" (146).

As for those socially marginal and psychologically distressed youth who end up at the bottom of the social pecking orders as a result of their real or imagined failure to do masculinity, a few of them ultimately find themselves trapped in a limited repertoire of cultural scripts or strategies of action that resolve their feelings of shame, humiliation, and inadequacy. Various rampage school shooters all felt at the moment of crisis that they had no other options but to come forth and fire their weapons. They had all considered suicide, but that wasn't the manly thing to do. Going out in a blaze, perhaps shooting it out with the police, would certainly allow them to go down in school infamy as full of machismo. And it is interesting how racial comparisons can be made about the "doing" of masculinity by whites versus blacks, that is, when black men who are gang members choose to "go out in a blaze" and "shoot it out with police," the ascription of purposeful and evil criminality is automatically applied without much consideration for the performance of machismo and perhaps their view of not having any choices. But they are, indeed, quite similar. In carrying out these scenarios of killing, it is useful to understand that both black men who are members of violent gangs and white adolescent males who are rampage shooters are not simply reacting to glorified violence but rather are immersing themselves in violent roles that they believed were powerful and would thus enhance their status as men.

In short, having violence, aggression, and domination as cultural norms for masculinity provides a framework for both black and white male behavior. These gendered rampage shootings (and drive-by gang shootings) provide these young males with a way to demonstrate their "anger with an entire social system that had rejected them. . . . For this purpose, any target [will] do just as well as any other, so long as the shootings [occur] on a public stage for all to see" (Newman et al. 2004: 152). In the process, these truly rare rampage killers and drive-by shooters, characterizing the extreme end of trying to do masculine gender, are able in a "twisted" way to claim the power and status their peers had denied them.

As with class and race, discussions of gender raise controversy. There's the F wordfeminismthat many men and women resist even as they endorse basic tenets of treating women with dignity, respect, and equality. Discussing sex and gender means exploring what we mean by equality when men and women are different biologically in ways that go far beyond racial differences like skin color or hair texture. This problem is most evident in issues around human reproduction and biology, but it is also present in debates about whether men and women are "similarly situated" and thus deserve equal treatment as a matter of law. Women are 51 percent of the population but are considered a minority and part of affirmative action plans. Should equality be based on what men were getting? Are both sexes to be treated equally based on what women are getting? Or is there another alternative?

One flashpoint in these ongoing debates was the comments of Harvard's former president and economic advisor to former president Obama, Lawrence Summers, about diversifying personnel in science and engineering. Although more than a decade ago, his comments capture much of the current debate because he suggested the reasons for the small number of women in these fields were, in order of importance, the following: (1) women do not put in the long workweeks over the long run because they value family and want to have children; (2) innate differences between men and women lead men to outperform women; and (3) discrimination and socialization (Summers 2005).

Critics pointed out that the number of women in science and engineering had climbed from 3 percent to about 20 percent in thirty years, and the female genome and DNA had not changed that much in a few decades, so innate difference could not be a major factor. Indeed, later research based on a test given in sixty-five developed countries around the world found that fifteen-year-old "girls generally outperform boys in sciencebut not in the United States" (Fairfield 2013). A major culprit is "the stereotype threat," which means that at around age four, children start to understand gender roles in occupations from an unequal society.

This trajectory is reinforced by stories of lone girls in AP physics classes, ostracized by male classmates. For example, the "counselor who recommends not taking an advanced math class because it would make the student's schedule too rigorous. The science teacher who never seems to call on the girl in the front row" (Cutler 2012). The same study, based on extensive interviews with experts in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, notes that the problem did not end with high school: "Unfortunately, gender discrimination is still a persistent and pernicious problem in higher education as well, as is made frightfully clear in a recent Yale study that showed both male and female science faculty exhibiting gender bias against female job candidates" (Cutler 2012). A 2017 study of women in astronomy and planetary science found that "both women of color (18%) and white women (12%) did not attend professional events (e.g., conferences, meetings) because they did not feel safe." In addition, "40% of women of color reported feeling unsafe in the workplace as a result of their gender or sex" (Eos 2017). These results are not just about discrimination or unwelcome comments, but women who felt unsafe in their workplaces and professional environments!

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, felt a sense of dj vu: "Spend any time at all studying the biology of behavior and you will find it riddled with similar, nature-based defenses of the often less-than-perfect status quo. In the days before women were admitted to college, male scientists insisted that girls were born too fragile and emotional to even handle higher education" (Blum 2005). In spite of supporters claiming he was the victim of political correctness, Summers (2005) wrote a series of apologies in which he said he never meant to suggest "that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science." He was just trying to be provocative, he claimed, and certainly did not wish to discourage talented girls and women, especially after all he learned about "the very real barriers faced by women in pursuing scientific and other academic careers" (Summers 2005).

Lost in the discussion was Summers's comment about women's willingness to put in the hours and sacrifice that it takes to get to the top, not only in engineering but in American corporations as well. At least in this respect, his comments were similar to the analysis in a cover story of Fortune magazine, which noted some reluctance of women to make sacrifices for power and who instead looked for jobs that were satisfying or personally meaningful. Still, in 2017, there were twenty-seven Fortune 500 companies headed by women, including Ursula M. Burns (the first African American woman to spearhead a Fortune 500 company like Xerox, which is ranked at no. 137), Indra K. Nooyi (an Indian American woman named one of the ten most powerful women in the world by the Forbes corporation in 2013), and Marissa A. Mayer (who runs Yahoo, which ranks at no. 513).

While this discussion has been about women in science and corporations, much of the same themes and lessons apply to criminology and criminal justice as well. One letter, signed by more than a hundred scientists in response to Summers's comments, noted, "If society, institutions, teachers, and leaders like President Summers expect (overtly or subconsciously) that girls and women will not perform as well as boys and men, there is a good chance many will not perform as well" (Anita Borg Institute 2005). Criminology recognizes the same phenomenon in labeling theory, and more generally the chapters in the third part of this book will review how stereotypes and expectations affect the treatment of men and women as both victims and offenders. Beliefs about women being too emotional and unable to handle the rigors of logic kept women out of law school and, consequently, the practice of law for many years. Concerns about women's weakness continue to exert influence on women in policing and positions as correctional officers. Gender discrimination shapes opportunities in legitimate criminal justice work and also shapes the opportunities in crime, where women tend to be at the lower end of criminal organizations and immersed in typically female-dominated crime, like sex work and being drug mules (carrying drugs for others).

In taking up the task of analyzing gender, we recognize that within the criminal justice system, men are the majority of offenders and victims. This may be due, at least in part, to the fact that women and girls have gone mostly understudied in these areas. "Criminology theories were constructed 'by men, about men' and explain male behavior rather than human behavior" (Belknap 2007: 3). Nevertheless, theoretical understandings of crime and violence up until recently did not consider why men have such high rates of offending relative to women, nor were theorists giving much attention to the roles of gender, socialization, and doing masculinity in decisions about crime. Women are certainly still a small minority of the criminal justice caseloads, but females are the fastest-growing incarcerated population. As a consequence, until recently not much attention was paid to the differential treatment of male and female offenders, including the different needs of female inmates.

Because people's treatment within the administration of justice is shaped by what takes place outside the criminal justice system, this chapter, like the previous two, locates its discussionthis time on genderin terms of the relevant gender terminology. The point from the previous chapter about racial privilege is revisited in terms of male privilegeand in terms of how racial privilege impacts feminism. Finally, the implications of these relations to the whole concept of equal justice are examined as well as the study of crime and social control.