Award Date
12-2023
Degree Type
Honors Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Criminal Justice
Advisor 1
Dr. David Tannenhaus
Advisor 2
Dr. Maria Jerinic-Pravica
Advisor 3
Dr. Terance Miethe
Number of Pages
93
Abstract
This thesis is a case study of the emergence and framing of “the school shooter” as one part of the larger problem of American youth violence during the 1990s. This decade forever changed the way school safety is viewed. Although the annual number of school shootings largely remained the same from the 1970s to the early 1990s, a spike in fatalities in 1993 occurred during a fraught historical moment. A wave of youth violence, beginning in the late 1980s, helped to set the stage for new security measures, such as zero tolerance policies in schools, and the development of new social categories. These included the concept of the “super-predator” in 1995, and then creation of the category of “school shooter” soon thereafter. On April 20th, 1999, two teenage boys would commit the deadliest school shooting of the 1990s, Columbine. In 2000, the FBI would publish a school shooter profile, utilizing Columbine as framework. The thesis analyzes ten case studies of major school shootings from 1996-1999, where this new category of violence coalesced. Although the phenomenon predated Columbine, this shooting became the lasting image of a school shooter, and the lens to analyze the shootings that came before it. By analyzing the etiology of school shooters through the lens of criminological theories, the thesis seeks to explain the nature of this type of crime and how to critically think about school safety in a world where school shootings are becoming our reality.
Controlled Subject
School shootings; School violence--Prevention; Violence--Psychological aspects
Disciplines
Criminology | School Psychology | Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance
File Format
File Size
1053 KB
Language
English
Repository Citation
Jimenez, Rebecca Maria, "The Emergence of “The School Shooter” as a Category of Analysis: What the 1990s Can Teach Us About Youth Violence" (2023). Honors College Theses. 32.
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/honors_theses/32
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Included in
Criminology Commons, School Psychology Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons