Introduction

On March 24, 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden arrived at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, with an arsenal of highpowered firearms. Andrew pulled the school's fire alarm and the two boys waited for students and teachers to file out of the building before they opened fire. The boys killed four students and one teacher and wounded fifteen others. At the time of their arrests, Johnson was thirteen and Golden was eleven.

Compounding the horror of the events in Jonesboro is the fact that it is just another violent episode on a growing list of similar school shootings committed by children. On October 1, 1997, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham killed two students in his Pearl, Mississippi, high school. On December 1, 1997, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal killed three students and wounded eight others at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky. And on May 21, 1998, fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel opened fire in a crowded cafeteria at...