FIGURE 9-1 Lethal school violence and school rampages as adjunct sets.

mary emphasis on a very small number of cases. Moreover, it turned out that suburban and rural schools were much more significantly represented in these cases than inner-city schools, where many of the incidents of school violence involved single victims. That was not because we thought these cases were unimportant; the committee held the opinion that the special attention given to the relatively few incidents involving multiple victimizations might distort society’s picture of lethal school violence in general. It was, instead, that we had been directed by Congress to give special, but not exclusive, attention to this apparently new form of violence. We also recognized that a significant amount of public and scholarly attention had been devoted to lethal youth violence in urban areas, and that less had been focused on trying to understand this new and unexpected phenomenon.

A Venn diagram is also helpful in showing the relationship between the kind of violence that was our primary focus and the other categories of violence with which it was being compared. Figure 9-2 embeds Figure 9-1