Savage Spawn by Jonathan Kellerman Page A

do demand and receive a tremendous amount of attention. But there can also be defensive value in scapegoating and concentrating solely on the identified patient, as it allows everyone else to ignore their own problems.
    Could that have been part of what was going on when Bill and Faith Kinkel rewarded their flagrantly dangerous son with an instant collection of lethal weapons? Was there some need to keep Kip
bad
? Or had these poor parents simply been beaten down by years of threats and rage and finally relented out of fear of what Kip might do if they continued to frustrate his lust for guns?
    Whatever the reason, giving in was a tragic error that signed their death warrants and those of two children.
    The backgrounds of Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson, though not as conspicuously psychopathic as Kinkel’s, are also in accordance with what we know about dangerous kids. Initial accounts of the Arkansas pair described two normal-sounding country boys—Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn with speed loaders. But as information filtered in, quite another picture materialized.
    Andrew’s grandmother described him as an all-American kid, but neighbors labeled him as mean-spirited and recalled his strutting around the neighborhood with a hunting knife strapped to his leg (67).
    â€œWe knew the kid was evil,” said one local, “but never that evil.”
    Like many juvenile slayers, Golden grew up in a household obsessed with firearms. His father was an officer of the Practical Pistol Shooters club, and he introduced Andrew to lethal weapons at a very young age, snapping photos of the boy at six, staring, rather cold-eyed, down the barrel of a pistol. Andrew’s grandfather, from whom most of the Jonesboro massacre weapons were stolen, bragged about Andrew’s killing his first duck the previous year—bragged
after
the schoolyard shootings. Even allowing for rural norms that encourage hunting and shooting as male-bonding experiences, all this seems more than a bit worshipful of bloodletting.
    Mitchell Johnson, claimed by his mother to be just a regular kid from a regular family, was anything but. A police chief in the Minnesota town of Grand Meadow, where Mitchell spent his early childhood, described the boy as highly troubled, with a chronic tendency to wander away from home that suggests early neglect.
    During a visit to the Johnson house, this same officer noticed a .357 pistol sitting on the kitchen table, in full view and reach of eight-year-old Mitchell, and warned the parents about it. The officer forbade his own children to associate with Mitchell.
    Paternal risk factors also loom large in Mitchell’s history. His father was fired for theft. His mother, a prison guard, obtained a divorce and moved with Mitchell to Jonesboro in order to join her new boyfriend, an ex-con incarcerated for drug and firearms crimes at the very prison where she’d worked. Shortly after, she married this felon and he became Mitchell’s stepfather.
    Mitchell had long attracted attention as a troubled kid. He bragged that he smoked heroin and had joined a gang, warned he might commit suicide, and finally, broadcast his intentions by exclaiming, “I’ve got a lot of killing to do.”
    Neglectful parenting, broken home, criminal father, criminal stepfather, a mother whose choices—selection of two criminals as spouses, leaving a loaded pistol in front of a grade-schooler—suggest less than optimal judgment, guns, guns, guns. Sound familiar?
    These are the kids we teach to speed-load and to shoot semiautomatic weapons?
    Which leads us to the single most important step we can take, in the short run, to preventing child criminality: Restrict access to firearms.
    No matter how much time is spent drilling young psychopaths in the art and etiquette of “practical shooting,” they will inevitably use firearms to victimize others, precisely the way Kip Kinkel utilized his karate skills. Given the