Why Kids Kill is a useful and informative book on the psychological foundations of rampage school shooters, but I would hesitate to categorize it as "a breakthrough analysis of the psychological causes of school shootings." Beyond the obvious fact that no objective observer can truly know what young mass murderers like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold or Seung Hui Cho were thinking, Dr. Peter Langman's investigative resources are rather limited.

For one thing, he chooses to examine only a small sub-set of school shooters (10 in all, varying in age from 11 to 23), of whom only a few left behind personal writings that helped reveal the depths of their psychological torment. Furthermore, most of the 10 shooters took their own lives and could not be psychologically analyzed after the fact, and the author has not interviewed any of those surviving shooters personally. That being said, Langman does succeed quite well in extrapolating useful insights from his study and does a convincing job of classifying the shooters under three different typologies. This information is then enhanced by his own personal experience working with (and needing to identify) potential school shooters sent to him for professional analysis. Finally, although it doesn't fall under the main scope of his study, he lays out a number of useful suggestions for teachers, administrators, parents, students and others to assist them in looking for the warning signs of potential shooters in need of psychological help.

I must admit I was a little disappointed in Langman's analysis of the 10 school shooters he chose to examine in this study. Some of this material seemed repetitive, as Langman's summaries tend just to repeat the disparate information he had assembled on each individual (which, I must admit, is largely due to the fact that he oftentimes had to rely on secondhand information). That being said, Langman does do an impressive job of classifying these various shooters into three typologies: the psychopathic, the psychotic and the traumatized. He lays out his definition of these three groupings quite clearly and does a good job of demonstrating the differences between them, particularly in terms of how they see themselves, their peers and the world. Perhaps ironically, the Columbine killers serve as the best examples of the psychopathic (Harris) and the psychotic (Klebold), largely because they left behind a lot of revealing videos, journals, short stories and other writings. The traumatized school shooters would seem to be the most understandable of the three types, given the kinds of long-term abuse that defined their young lives, but there are some rather strange complexities at play here, as well.

One of the first points that Langman makes is that we must look beyond the sound bite to understand the psychology of school shooters. Much of what the media reports at the time of a shooting is speculative and wrong. Not only is it overly simplistic to describe these school shooters as lonely boys who were bullied, it is oftentimes simply incorrect. Langman points out the fact that many of the shooters in his study did have an active social life; even a Dylan Klebold had friends, and some of the shooters were active in sports. In the same vein, there was little evidence that some of them were bullied or made fun of to any significant degree -- although some of them may have felt that way due to psychological problems such as paranoia, hyper-sensitivity and a horrible self-image. A few of these shooters were, in fact, bullies themselves who enjoyed exercising power over others.

One of the saddest facts about most if not all of the cases Langman examines is the fact that most of the shootings could have been prevented if individuals in the young mens' lives would have seen the many warning signs and acted on them properly. In several cases, other students knew that something was going to happen -- and in a couple of cases, friends and relatives actually egged the boys on, essentially convincing one boy to kill others rather than simply kill himself. In one case, school policies were ignored because the kid who brought a loaded gun to school one day was the son of a teacher -- that boy went home and killed his parents, then came back to school the next day and shot four people, killing the principal and a teacher. These sorts of tragedies can be avoided, according to Langman (even the psychopath is not a lost cause) -- but only if society knows how to recognize the warning signs of the potential shooter and follows through in getting that individual the psychological help he needs. His suggestions on how to go about doing that make this book a particularly important read.