School Shootings: The Luke Woodham Case

In October 1997, I heard on the radio that Luke Woodham, a sixteenyear-old, had killed two classmates and wounded seven others in a school shooting in Pearl, Mississippi. In a note, Luke declared: “I am not insane. I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day.”1 He explained that he was tired of being called a “faggot”; he was additionally enraged that his girlfriend—whom he killed in the shooting—had broken up with him. At the start of the Woodham case, I began examining school shootings. Two months after the massacre in Mississippi came a shooting in Kentucky, then one in Arkansas that same month, and then another in Arkansas three months later in March 1998. There was a shooting in Pennsylvania that April, in Tennessee