Clearly, I have a somewhat morbid fascination with the topic of school shootings and what sort of incidents, circumstances, and detached individuals it takes to cause one of these horrific events to pan out. Having read a lot of Columbine-centric works, such as The Columbine School Shootings, Columbine: A True Crime Story, A Mother’s Reckoning, and No Easy Answers—I figured it was time to branch out of the most well-known of shootings and investigate others that preceded April 1999’s infamous attack.
This led to me reading Fast’s Ceremonial Violence, a book that seeks to explore not only the phenomenon of what it calls ‘school rampage shootings’, but also chronologically examines thirteen unique attacks in the United States between 1974 and 1999. Predictably, the one from 1999 is the aforementioned Columbine Massacre. In fact, eleven of the selected shootings take place in the 1990s, which should indicate the concerning trend of growth that occurred in the final decade of the 20th century regarding these violent spectacles.
For the most part, I enjoyed Fast’s way of approaching the topic and how he split his book up into digestible and tangible sections. It begins with a fairly brief overview defining what constitutes school rampage shootings, the importance of studying them, and why they are an increasing phenomenon in Western schools, particularly in America. He also touches on the strange fascination the press and public have with these violent, community-destroying events. This introductory overview lays the groundwork and questions that the rest of book’s explorations seek to build upon and answer through fairly extensive examination.
And ‘fairly extensive examination’ is no hyperbolic term. Fast begins by giving brief summaries of each of the thirteen shootings in chronological order, providing readers with the basics they ought to know about the perpetrators and happenings of each shooting. However, after this, Fast returns to five attacks in particular (the ones he finds most notable or valuable upon examination) and explores, in greater detail, the lives of the perpetrators, alongside the events and factors beforehand, during, and following their respective attacks. The perpetrators looked at in this more extensive, information-rich section include: Brenda Spencer (1979); Wayne Lo (1992); Evan Ramsey (1997); Luke Woodham (1997); Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (1999).
After unloading this barrage of information on the reader, the author wraps up his work via a condensed exploration of the many ways to tackling school shootings. This not only relies on prevention through recognising warning signs and factors that encourage youths to carry out public acts of violence against peers, but also intervention and stopping an in-progress attack as efficiently as possible through procedures and police response. Fast also references what he calls ‘postvention’, which aims to reduce the grief and disruption of survivors’ lives in the aftermath of an attack, effectively healing a torn community as best as it can.
Across the entire work, and continuing into this wrap-up section, Fast makes a repeatedly good point of highlighting the many errors and oversights made in the thirteen attacks he covers. Such highlighting continuously conveys how there was ample opportunity for someone to have identified the risk factors and prevented most of the shootings through cautionary prediction, or through sheer common sense in some obvious instances where the shooter was known to have (access to) a gun, or gave outright warning to friends days before carrying out the act. I suppose one could also argue that Fast is pointing out the problem of being an accessory to such attacks through silence or not reporting any potential signs of a would-be shooter.
One thing I can praise the author for, and appreciate this work because of, is the recognition of bullying, social influence, romantic issues, and disruptive or disturbed home life, in being catalysts for these rampages. Fast, relying on statistics and definitions from scholars and government bodies, identifies that most shooters generally exist on the lower rungs of the social ladder and lack sense of belonging or greater purpose within their lives, family, or meagre circle of friends. They often feel isolated, without place or meaning, or aim to create a sense of meaning through the infamy and historical impact their evil, murderous actions will bring. Few other things I have read on school shootings explore this topic, beyond loosely insisting that the perpetrators were socially insignificant and sought power through violent means, so I appreciate the author’s willingness to explore these social disparities and the depraved motivations that result from them.
As you would expect, there is also an exploration of gun access, but, rather idiosyncratically, a brief breakdown of gun technology and its progression, commentating how each advancement introduced more deadly and easy to operate firearms. This felt more mature than what some other works do by simply advocating that all, or at least most, firearms be removed from the hands of all public persons not affiliated with law enforcement or in need of personal protection. Such stances, while they make sense in their own ultra safe and restrictive way, generally lack any backbone to their argument other than ‘guns kill, and if you like guns, you may as well be advocating for murder,’ or something to that general effect.
Fast, through use of a hypothetical scenario, indicates how it is not only a matter of keeping firearms out of dangerous youths’ hands, but also in ensuring they are not familiar with how to operate a firearm in the first place—something that, thanks to violent video games and media, is now better understood by those with no firearm experience, making them more deadly or able to kill by default. This, in my opinion, is a very good point to highlight, and I am actually making it more obvious because Fast doesn’t outright say any of this. Instead, the author limply implies the concern of non-firearm holders knowing how to operate a gun through seeing others do it. This is a rare case of me wishing the author was a bit more blunt or patronising!
Of course, in the 251 pages of actual written content (the final eighty-two pages are covered top-to-bottom in a supremely vast list of sources), there is much more information than I am mentioning. Everything is balanced quite well, even if the summary sections are not dissimilar to pulling up the corresponding Wikipedia page for each shooting.
But, despite the clear effort of this work, there are issues. Factual issues. Ones that not only discredit the work through suspicion of accidental misinformation, but tarnish the magnitude of that stupendously long list of sources that the author relied on. By extension, Fast’s factual errors also raise suspicions about those sources, creating a peculiar loop of doubt and mistrust for readers who notice these falsehoods.
I can only speak about the mistakes I noticed when reading the book’s longest chapter on Columbine, and that is because I am familiar with it through the four books I mentioned in the introduction of this review, plus other resources I have scoured. What upsets me most is that the errors are silly, almost typo-like in their binary wrongness. There are ones so easy to fact-check and correct that it almost makes you think Fast was too engrossed in his ego or self-assuredness to double-check anything, or that he was in some kind of hurry to wrap up this book for its publishing deadline. Why these mistakes crept in, I do not know, but I do know that they started to reduce my opinion of this work and make me doubt what I had read in all preceding chapters where I lacked prior knowledge of the perpetrators or events.
The errors I noticed are as follows: reported Eric Harris as 17 in the autopsy (he was 18); misreported Harris as having scratched a school locker and having to pay $70 to repaint it (it was actually Dylan Klebold, as stated in A Mother’s Reckoning); states Harris is wearing a blue wind-breaker in the March 1999 Rampart Range home video (it’s an oversized blue Broncos jumper); claims Klebold was armed with a ‘pump shotgun’ (it was a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun, Harris carried a pump-action shotgun); then claims Klebold’s ‘WRATH’ shirt was merchandise with the logo of the heavy metal band of the same name (it was a custom t-shirt with ‘WRATH’ printed in a different font, with no proof that Klebold ever knew of the referenced band); claims that Craig Scott was Rachel Scott’s ‘older brother’ (he was two years younger than her, Rachel Scott was an eighteen-year-old senior student when she was killed. If Craig Scott was older, he would have already graduated from Columbine High School).
As I implied, my issue is how easy these errors are to correct. Glaring ones like the Scotts’ age difference and Klebold’s type of shotgun have no real excuse for being reported wrongly; Ceremonial Violence was published in late-2008, nine years after Columbine, where most basic information was readily available and accessible to the public. A PhD-bearing author would likely have increased financial and credible leeway in accessing more obscured documents and reports, so failing to correctly compile basic information mars his factual integrity, especially when he is trying to educate others on the specific topic he is speckling with misinformation.
I am not only concerned or paranoid that other parts of the book are littered with these small, presumably accidental pieces of misinformation, but bothered by how such misinformation now lives on in seemingly credible print, authored by a doctor of philosophy. Readers who do not recognise these errors will likely take all they read as pure fact, unknowingly perpetuating the existence of these journalistic errors in any discussions they may make about the thirteen school shootings covered by Fast. That is not their fault, but the fault of the author and any proofreaders who assisted him.
Fortunately, this ordeal does not ruin the work, merely hurts it and hampers my willingness to recommend it. For the most part, Ceremonial Violence is a worthwhile read for those interested in the topic. I would assume, however, that if you already know a great deal about one specific attack (e.g. Columbine) you are unlikely to learn much new information through this specific book and can effectively skip its whole dedicated chapter. That also means ignoring, or not engaging with, the unnecessary blemishes of misinformation that may appear in said chapter.
Still, if you want an overview of notable school shootings from the final three decades of the 20th century, alongside a solid exploration into motivations and factors that create a shooter, then Fast’s publication can still provide a good place to begin when getting into this morbid and pervasively terrifying topic. For those who are already engrossed in this weird subsection of true crime, perhaps look to more precise and single-focused publications instead of this more generalised, summary-like approach to a myriad of attacks.
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