Then, in April of 1988, a San Gabriel, California, high school student named Jeff Cox walked into his English class, declared that “urban terrorism is fun,” and held his fellow students hostage with a Korean-made .223 assault rifle. He had a few modest demands: sodas, cigarettes, sandwiches, and a million dollars in cash. He fired several shots, but into the walls and ceilings rather than at the kids. “I don’t think I can kill anyone,” he said. “I don’t think I can do it.” One of the students jumped him while he was gabbing on the phone, and disarmed him. When police asked where he’d gotten the idea, he told them from an airliner hijacking story on TV. Oh, and from a paperback novel called Rage.
Seventeen months later, a shy 17-year-old named Dustin Pierce burst into a World History class at Jackson, Kentucky, High School with a .44 Magnum and a shotgun. He shot into the ceiling and told teacher Brenda Clark and about a dozen of the students to leave. He held 11 others hostage while police surrounded the building and a SWAT team was flown in by helicopter. Pierce, meanwhile, flipped through Clark’s grade book and remarked, “Look how smart I am. Why am I doing this?” One by one, Pierce let his hostages go, and by 4 p.m., it was just Dustin and his Dirty Harry revolver. “I became increasingly afraid he would kill himself,” said hostage negotiator Bob Stephens. “He seemed to be carrying out the scenario of a book he had been reading.” The book was Rage. Dustin Pierce didn’t kill himself or anyone else. He threw out his guns and emerged with his hands up. What he really wanted, it turned out, was to see his father. And for his father — maybe for the first time — to really see him.
In February of 1996, a boy named Barry Loukaitis walked into his algebra class in Moses Lake, Washington, with a .22 caliber revolver and a high-powered hunting rifle. He used the rifle to kill instructor Leona Caires and two students. Then, waving the pistol in the air, he declared, “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” The quote is from Rage. A phys ed teacher, in a commendable act of heroism, charged Loukaitis and overpowered him.
In 1997, Michael Carneal, age 14, arrived at Heath High School, in Paducah, Kentucky, with a Ruger MK II semi-automatic pistol in his backpack. He approached a before-school prayer group, paused to load his gun and stuff shooter’s plugs in his ears, then opened fire. He killed three and wounded five. Then he dropped the gun on the floor and cried, “Kill me! Please! I can’t believe I did that!” A copy of Rage was found in his locker.
That was enough for me, even though at the time, the Loukaitis and Carneal shootings were the only Rage-related ones of which I was aware. I asked my publishers to pull the novel from publication, which they did, although it wasn’t easy. By then it was a part of an omnibus containing all four Bachman books. (In addition to Rage, there was The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Roadwork — another novel about a shooter with psychological problems.) The Bachman collection is still available, but you won’t find Rage in it.
According to The Copycat Effect, written by Loren Coleman (Simon and Schuster, 2004), I also apologized for writing Rage. No, sir, no ma’am, I never did and never would. It took more than one slim novel to cause Cox, Pierce, Loukaitis, and Carneal to do what they did. These were unhappy boys with deep psychological problems, boys who were bullied at school and bruised at home by parental neglect or outright abuse. They seem to have been operating in a dream, two of them verbally asking themselves afterward why they did what they did. As for what was going on with them before they acted:
• Cox spent several weeks in an LA County psych ward, where he spoke of putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
• Pierce was collateral damage in an ugly divorce; his father left and his mother often talked to the boy about killing herself.
• Carneal was bullied. In addition, he suffered from paranoia so great he would cover the vents and windows in the school bathrooms, because he believed people were watching him pee. When sitting in chairs, he lifted his feet so no one hiding beneath could grab him.
• Loukaitis wrote poems about how worthless his father was, and how he wished the man were dead.
All four had easy access to guns. Most of the weapons they used were in the home. Cox bought his at Wolfe’s Gun Shop in his hometown of San Gabriel, for $400 — easy-peasy. The clerk had no reason not to sell it to him; the boy said the semi-auto was a present for his father and was old enough under California law to buy a firearm.
Ryan Lanza’s mother bought her guns, as so many people do, for home defense. When young Lanza wanted them, he killed her.
My book did not break Cox, Pierce, Carneal, or Loukaitis, or turn them into killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken. Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.
Nevertheless, I pulled it with real regret. Not because it was great literature — with the possible exception of Arthur Rimbaud, teenagers rarely pen great literature — but because it contained a nasty glowing center of truth that was more accessible to me as an adolescent. Adults do not forget the horrors and shamings of their childhood, but those feelings tend to lose their immediacy (except perhaps in dreams, where even old men and women find themselves taking tests they have not studied for with no clothes on). The violent actions and emotions portrayed in Rage were drawn directly from the high school life I was living five days a week, nine months of the year. The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an asshole with no conscience.
As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity. For most kids, it’s a time of doubt, stress, painful self-consciousness, and unhappiness. They’re actually the lucky ones. For the bullied underclass — the wimps, the shrimps, and the girls who are routinely referred to as scags, bags, or hos — it’s four years of misery and two kinds of hate: the kind you feel for yourself and the kind you feel for the jackwads who bump you in the halls, pull down your shorts in gym class, and pick out some charming nickname like Queerboy or Frogface that sticks to you like glue. In Iroquois rituals of manhood, naked warriors were sent running down a gantlet of braves swinging clubs and jabbing with the butt ends of spears. In high school, the goal is Graduation Day instead of a manhood feather, but I imagine the feelings are about the same.
I had friends in high school — including a girlfriend who stood up for me when I needed standing-up for, God bless her — and I possessed a certain sophomoric wit that gained me respect (also a few detentions, which were a very acceptable trade-off). Those things got me through. Even so, I couldn’t wait to put high school behind me and meet people who did not consider giving wedgies to losers a valid part of social interaction.
If that was how it was for me, a more or less regular dude, how must it be for kids like Jeff Cox, Dustin Pierce, Barry Loukaitis, or Michael Carneal? Is it really so surprising that they would find a soul brother in the fictional Charlie Decker? But that doesn’t mean we excuse them, or give them blueprints to express their hate and fear. Charlie had to go.