After three school shootings in a week and at least seven deaths, is there anything the US can do to prevent it happening again, asks Denis Staunton in Paradise, Pennsylvania
Four times this week, a long black ribbon of horse-drawn buggies moved across the low hills of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County to the Amish cemetery in Georgetown to bury the victims of Monday's shootings at a one-room school. The five dead girls, who included sisters aged seven and eight, could soon be joined by a sixth, as one of five other girls injured in the attack was due to be taken off a life-support machine yesterday and taken home to die.
Monday's murders shocked an America that had already seen two fatal school shootings in less than a week, leaving many parents wondering if their children's school would be next. The attacks in Colorado and Wisconsin showed that violence could strike in the suburbs as easily as in the inner city, but the bloodbath at the Amish school suggested that nowhere, however isolated from the modern world, was safe.
"Suburban and rural schools are in some ways more vulnerable because they think it could never happen here. Schools in the city know there's a problem and a threat and they have to do something about it," says Kenneth Trump, a school security consultant with National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland, Ohio.
Nobody suspected that Charles Carl Roberts, a devout Christian who was apparently happily married with three children, could become a killer who targeted young girls. He planned the killings carefully, however, buying equipment almost a week in advance and drawing up a checklist of items he needed to restrain his victims.
He arrived at the school, which had no electricity and no telephone, armed with three guns. After separating boys from girls, he told the boys and the adult women to leave. He then lined the 10 girls up in front of the blackboard and bound their feet with plastic cuffs.
Roberts's checklist included sexual lubricant, and detectives believe he intended to sexually assault his victims but panicked when police closed in around the school. He shot the girls in the head at close range, before killing himself. A coroner said later that every desk and chair in the room was covered in blood.
In a phone call and suicide note to his wife, Roberts said he was angry about the death of their prematurely born daughter some years before and was troubled by the memory of sexually abusing younger female relatives when he was himself a child.
Police believe that Roberts chose to attack an Amish school because its isolation and lack of security made it an easy target.
With their beards and broad-brimmed hats, their bonnets, buggies and horse-drawn ploughs, the Amish are a popular tourist attraction in Lancaster County, where almost 30,000 of them live. Their ancestors were driven from Europe by persecution in the early 18th century, and the 200,000 Amish now living in the US have succeeded in preserving their life apart, despite the unwelcome attention of outsiders.
They avoid most modern technology, including motorised transport and electricity, and live according to a strict code with non-violence and the submission to God's will at its centre.
Prof Donald Kraybill, who lectures in Anabaptist and Pietist studies at Lancaster County's Elizabethtown University, believes that their faith makes the Amish more capable than most of dealing with this week's tragedy.
"They would place even acts of violence like this under divine providence, the idea that there is a bigger and higher purpose and this is part of God's will, even if we don't understand it," Kraybill says.
After the shootings, when the surviving girls were taken to hospitals in Hershey and Philadelphia, their Amish parents refused to travel by air but consented to go by car to visit them. They have agreed that the wounded girls should receive the most advanced medical treatment available, a sign perhaps of what Kraybill sees as the flexible Amish approach to modernity.
"Their success really involves keeping sharp boundaries and sharply defined fences with the world, in their clothing and behaviour for example. But they reach through the fences and are making cultural compromises all the time," he says.
The victims' parents have already made it clear that they forgive Roberts, and Kraybill believes they will find a way to reach out to the killer's widow. With about 150 one-room Amish schools in Lancaster County alone, Kraybill does not believe that Monday's shootings will prompt a major security review.
"I don't think they'll make many changes. They'll see this as a random, isolated act. This is not an epidemic of violence against Amish schools. I don't think they'll change things just because of one stupid man," he says.
ROBERTS'S ATTACK ON the Amish school was strikingly similar to an attack the previous week in Bailey, Colorado, when a gunman took six girls hostage and sexually assaulted them before shooting and fatally injuring one girl.
The shooting at Platte Canyon High School unfolded just a short drive away from Columbine, the site of the US's deadliest school shooting, when 15 people died in 1999.
Duane Morrison, a 53-year-old drifter who had lived around Denver for more than 10 years, walked into the school holding a handgun and announced that he was carrying a bomb in his backpack. Entering classroom 206, he fired the gun in the air and told most of the students to leave, but ordered six girls to stay behind and line up facing the blackboard.
As panicked students fled the building and a Swat (Special Weapons and Tactics) team closed in, Morrison molested each of the girls in turn, releasing them one by one before the police burst into the room. Morrison killed 16-year-old Emily Keyes by shooting her in the back of the head, then turned his gun on himself as he was hit by a spray of bullets from the Swat team.
The attacks in Colorado and Pennsylvania were dramatic and shocking, but the killing of a school principal in Wisconsin was more typical of school violence. Fifteen-year-old Eric Hainstock shot John Klang, principal of Weston School in Cazenovia, north of Madison, a day after the principal disciplined him for taking tobacco into the school.Hainstock, who came from a broken home and had been physically abused by his father, told police that he killed Klang because teachers at the school had done nothing to protect him from homophobic bullying.
Classmates acknowledged that Hainstock was frequently called "fag" or "faggot" and that bullies would often "rub against him" in a sexual manner, but some said he also picked on other pupils.
Hainstock stole a handgun and rifle owned by his father and arrived at the school before classes began last Friday. Pointing the rifle at Klang, he confronted him about the bullying. A janitor who saw what was happening grabbed the rifle, but Hainstock reached for the handgun and the janitor and the teacher took cover.
Klang tried to talk the teenager into putting down the gun and then tried to wrestle it from Hainstock's hand, and the two ended up on the floor. It was then that Hainstock allegedly shot the teacher three times before other teachers arrived on the scene and held the boy until police arrived. Hainstock has been charged with first-degree murder and will be tried as an adult.
SCHOOL SECURITY EXPERT Kenneth Trump says that the latest spate of school killings is unusual, not least because of the time of year.
"Typically we see them in springtime. It's around the Columbine anniversary, but more importantly, it's warmer weather and the students are out mixing together more," he says.
Trump trains schools to prepare for all kinds of emergencies, from natural disasters to shootings, designing plans of action for teachers and students to ensure that everyone knows what to do when something happens.
"The first and best line of defence is a well-trained student population greeting and challenging strangers and reporting anything unusual that could be a threat," he says.
After Columbine, many schools improved their mental health care for students, trying to spot those who were bullied or troubled in other ways. Trump maintains that, with the right precautions, most school shootings can be prevented.
"If you look at the one in Colorado, you had a man pupils saw in the parking lot for 20 minutes before he went into the school," he says. "If someone had raised an alarm, he might never have got in there. In many cases it can be prevented, but in cases like the Amish school it looks practically impossible to prevent."
What all three attacks had in common, of course, was the killers' use of guns, most of which were held legally. Of the three guns Roberts carried into the Amish school, only one was unlicensed, and the guns Hainstock stole from his father's cupboard were held legally and locked up properly.
Aggressive campaigning by the National Rifle Association has seen gun laws become more liberal in many states and despite the introduction of background checks, it's very easy to buy a gun in the US. Gun manufacturers have started marketing handguns as stylish consumer items, almost like the lethal equivalent of an iPod.
The latest killings have not provoked many calls for more gun control, perhaps because the congressional elections are only weeks away and neither Democrats nor Republicans want to antagonise the highly organised gun lobby.
Even Darrell Scott, whose daughter, Rachel, died at Columbine, this week refused to blame guns for his daughter's death.
"A gun would not have killed my daughter if there weren't two young men who made the decision to kill people behind it," he told Newsweek. "If I could find a way to never give access to guns to young people, I would do it in a minute, but I think it's an impossible task at this point. If they want to kill, they'll find a way to do it.
"So we have to start not with the weapon . . . we've got to go deeper than armed guards and gun control and metal detectors. I'm not against those things at all, but we have to start with the causes. What causes the violence in the first place?"
Trump agrees that metal detectors, while useful, offer only part of the answer to school violence. He argues that keeping schools safe involves constant vigilance and that many incidents can be prevented with the right approach. "Schools can be one of the safest places in the community, but it doesn't happen by magic or just by saying so."