The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,98

Police found an arsenal of fifteen guns and rifles in his home. Joseph DeGuzman, in Cupertino, California, planned an attack on his school in January of 2001, and later told police that the Columbine gunmen were “the only thing that’s real.” Three boys were arrested in Kansas the following month, and police found bomb making materials, rifles, and ammunition in their homes, including three black trench coats just like the coats worn by the Columbine gunmen. Two days later, in Fort Collins, Colorado, police found another cache of ammunition and guns. The boys involved had been overheard plotting to “redo Columbine.”

In the press, this wave of shootings and would be shootings has sometimes been portrayed as part of a larger wave of violence. But that’s not true: In 1992–93, there were fifty four violent deaths on public school campuses around the United States. In 2000, there were sixteen. The Columbine wave happened in a period when violence among students was down, not up. Much attention has also been paid to the social circumstances of the children involved in these incidents. Andy Williams was a lonely and often bullied boy, the product of divorce and neglect. Time magazine summed up his world as a place where “getting stoned on super strong weed like ‘bubblegum chronic’ is for some a daily deed and where ditching school to rub shoulders with the Aryan Brothers gang in the skate park is an unexceptional life choice.” But to have kids growing up in disaffection and loneliness is hardly a new development. Millions of kids who grow up just as emotionally impoverished as Andy Williams don’t walk into their school one morning and start shooting. The difference is Columbine. Andy Williams was infected by the example of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, just as the suicides of Micronesia were infected by the example of that first dramatic love triangle. It is a mistake to try to make sense of these kinds of actions by blaming influences of the outside world — in terms of broader trends of violence and social breakdown. These are epidemics in isolation: they follow a mysterious, internal script that makes sense only in the closed world that teenagers inhabit.

The best analogy to this kind of epidemic is the outbreak of food poisoning that swept through several public schools in Belgium in the summer of 1999. It started when forty two children in the Belgian town of Bornem became mysteriously ill after drinking Coca Cola and had to be hospitalized. Two days later, eight more schoolchildren fell sick in Brugge, followed by thirteen in Harelbeke the next day and forty two in Lochristi three days after that — and on and on in a widening spiral that, in the end, sent more than one hundred children to the hospital complaining of nausea, dizziness, and headaches, and forced Coca Cola into the biggest product recall in its 113 year history. Upon investigation, an apparent culprit was found. In the Coca Cola plant in Antwerp, contaminated carbon dioxide had been used to carbonate a batch of the soda’s famous syrup. But then the case got tricky: upon examination, the contaminants in the carbon dioxide were found to be sulfur compounds present at between five and seventeen parts per billion. These sulfides can cause illness, however, only at levels about a thousand times greater than that. At seventeen parts per billion, they simply impart a bad smell — like rotten eggs — which means that Belgium should have experienced nothing more than a minor epidemic of nose wrinkling. More puzzling is the fact that, in four of the five schools where the bad Coke allegedly caused illness, half the kids who got sick hadn’t actually drunk any Coke that day. Whatever went on in Belgium, in other words, probably wasn’t Coca Cola poisoning. So what was it? It was a kind of mass hysteria, a phenomenon that is not at all uncommon among schoolchildren. Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist at King’s College of Medicine in London, has been collecting reports of this kind of hysteria for about ten years and now has hundreds of examples, dating back as far as 1787, when millworkers in Lancashire suddenly took ill after they became persuaded that they were being poisoned by tainted cotton. According to Wessely, almost all cases fit a pattern. Someone sees a neighbor fall ill and becomes convinced that he is being contaminated by some unseen evil — in the past it was demons and spirits; nowadays