AZspot

In 1995, the guy who's now on the phone with me seemed a frightening aberration, a kid who had crossed one of society's invisible lines and violated the safe haven of public education--with gunshots. It was the first time there had ever been a shooting inside a Seattle public school. It was also one of the first school shootings in the nation to get lots of media attention, though the media attention it got was almost exclusively local.

Neither of the two students shot at Garfield that day were killed, but in Seattle there followed weeks of handwringing about America's gun culture, talk of metal detectors at school entrances, and regret over missed warning signs. In many ways, it was a prelude to the emotions and debates that would surround the series of suburban school shootings soon to come--in Moses Lake, Washington, in 1996; in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997; in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998; at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999; in Lake Worth, Florida, in 2000; in Santee, California, in 2001--shootings that, unlike the one at Garfield, captured the attention of the national press in a big way.

I've always assumed the shooting at Garfield failed to cause any great gnashing of the national teeth because it happened at an inner-city (read: black) school. It stemmed from an argument between two black students, and was therefore seen by many as not surprising--just a typical example of urban black-on-black violence.

But strip away the racial and urban components of what happened that day at Garfield and what you find is a script identical to those of the later, better-known school shootings: A young, troubled boy, small in stature, victim of humiliation at the hands of bigger boys, gets hold of a family gun and comes to school to teach everyone a lesson. And when you ask the Garfield shooter what he was thinking that day, it turns out that his motivation was the same as the motivation ascribed to many of the suburban school shooters: He wanted to send a message, a warning against picking on him.