Much as I hate stereotypes, I grudgingly recognize that they fill a human need. Sometimes it seems that the absence of a stereotype can be worse than the worst stereotypes, and this is especially true when something awful happens.

When I heard about the school shooting yesterday, my initial reaction was to hope that the shooter was not Amish, as it seemed he might have been. That's because I don't like stereotypes, because stereotypes are often accompanied by unbearable moral lectures I don't want to hear. God only knows what we'd be hearing today had an Amish man gone berserk and shot children in a school.

I was also relieved that the shooter was neither a Goth, nor a punk, nor a gun-obsessed "militia" type. Nor did he sport sleeves of tattoos, multiple piercings, or a funny haircut. Why, he wasn't even wearing a trenchcoat, as far as I can tell.

He was a nerdy-looking milkman, who had just dropped his own kids off at school. No criminal record, apparently no history of mental illness, and his guns not only weren't "assault weapons," they were purchased legally years ago.

I mean, how much more of a relief can all of this be when you hate stereotyping?

The problem for me is that it's not a relief at all. In some ways, the complete absence of stereotypes makes this worse. It causes people to "look deeper" for answers, and search far and wide for what it is that can cause anyone -- even the totally peaceful man next door -- to suddenly just lose it and go on a suicidal shooting spree.

At least if people have funny haircuts and trenchcoats, there's something to hang it on, something to look for. Small comfort I know. But isn't small comfort better than no comfort?

There's a human need for answers, and there aren't any here. At least, they aren't staring me in the face.

But while the answers might not be staring me in the face, they are certainly staring the leading academic experts in the face. To them, the absence of stereotypes doesn't seem to be a problem, because the problem is a toxic society.

"Unfortunately," said James Alan Fox, "the contagion effect can surface very quickly. And the bad news is, things could get worse."

Fox, professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, said yesterday that a similar wave of copycat shootings occurred after two students from Columbine High School in Colorado killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher in 1999.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of schoolchildren identified with the victims," Fox said. "But a small percentage identified with the shooters because, not only did they get even with bullies and nasty teachers, but they got famous for it."

A study of subsequent shootings in the months after Columbine found that "all involved white kids in small towns," Fox said. "The copycat effect would be most pronounced when there is a similarity between the perpetrator and the ones they are idolizing and modeling."

Whatever the short-term effects have been in setting off a cascade of similarly staged acts of violence, several experts suggested that the national focus belongs on the larger context. That is, the need to reach troubled people, provide mental health services, and address the normalizing of violence in American society.

Fox, the author of The Will to Kill: Explaining Senseless Murder and Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, said schools carried a symbolic power as targets.

"If you want to find young kids and get even with society - a school is an ideal place for doing that," he said. "They represent a place where people may have felt unhappy, their self-esteem was threatened, where they were bullied, and where they decide to get revenge."

But, (continuing in the Inquirer), if you don't agree with Dr. Fox's copycat, normalization-of-violence theory, a top Harvard expert and medical school professor says that the problem is guns, which are inextricably intertwined with our "toxic society":

"The copycat theory must be considered since these attacks happened in such close proximity to each other," said Deborah Prothrow-Smith, assistant dean at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of Murder Is No Accident. "But the copycat theory tends to minimize the true cultural aspects of this."

Prothrow-Smith said, "You've got a socially toxic environment that glamorizes guns and violence."

Video games, television, films and news constantly project images of people "justifying their wrongs or emotions with violence," she said. "You mix guns in a culture where people are not good at handling difficult emotions like anger, fear, guilt and grief... and you have a toxic social environment."

Having said this, Prothrow-Smith added there was nothing inevitable about the psychological chemistry leading to attacks like this.

"We have a sick man with a gun in a society that justifies violence," she said. "Something was going to happen. What he decided to do might have been influenced by the copycat phenomenon, but normal, healthy people in normal, healthy situations don't watch this on TV and go do it the next day."

So in the absence of an obvious stereotype, it must have been the gun, right?

I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but now that I'm really thinking about it, what do all shootings have in common?

Why, it's the GUNS, dummy!

Elsewhere, Dr. Prothrow-Smith expounds on this obvious connection. In her view, violence is everywhere, spreading in waves. All that's needed is a "precipitating event" -- plus a gun:

"This epidemic of youth violence appears... to now have a second wave," she continued. "It is in small towns and rural communities. The second wave is a bit different, but there are some striking similarities to the first wave: If you take a troubled child, a child at risk, and you take a society that glamorizes explosive responses to anger, add guns and a precipitating event - whether it is he said/she said, a boyfriend/girlfriend issue or a child being ostracized - all of that equals a dangerous situation whether you are in an urban context, a suburban, context or a small town."

If this epidemic is like others, such as the AIDS epidemic, the second wave probably won't peak as high as the first wave, but may follow the same pattern unless there is some intervention, Prothrow-Stith said.

After the second wave, Prothrow-Stith warned, "It is not unthinkable that there may be a third wave to this epidemic that has to do with girls and violence. One quarter of juveniles arrested for violent crimes are girls. That is very unusual."

Seeking to explain why girls are now engaging in violent expressions of anger, Prothrow-Stith cited social-cultural issues as a factor.

It's... It's.... The Power Rangers! In pink!

"The Power Rangers are [dressed] in pink, yellow and light blue...There are movies now where women are getting beat up and beating people up. It is an interesting challenge for those of us who are looking for testosterone poisoning, Y-chromosome problem or genetic influences [as an explanation for youth violence]; we can't ignore social-cultural issues."

The most robust risk factor for youth violence, according to Prothrow-Stith, is being a witness and/or a victim of violence. She also warned about our society's glamorization of violence.

"This is a society that celebrates violence, that celebrates the super hero choosing [to blow] people up to solve problems. So we teach our children to admire violence and to feel justified by any use of violence as long as they are solving a problem that they have," she said. "It is a very interesting set of messages. Television and movies come to mind almost immediately...but it is not just television and movies; it is in some ways who we are. Mean is popular in the United States...phrases like 'in your face' are an example. It is in our sports and politics."

Besides, the expert from Harvard already made it perfectly clear how she feels about guns. She hates them:

"My own view on gun control is simple. I hate guns and I cannot imagine why anyone would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns," that is, guns for self-defense, "would be banned."

As a gun owner, I feel threatened. Unfairly stereotyped.

And all because of a lack of the usual stereotypes.

(Can't the mild-mannered milkman have at least listened to Judas Priest or something?)

UPDATE: Jeff Soyer looks at what the Harvard experts seem to have missed -- a thing called perspective:

People who don't like guns, and there's nothing wrong with that in itself, will say that firearms made it easy and we should ban them. Aside from the fact that banning guns will be about as effective as banning illicit drugs (so how's that war going?) it doesn't address the problem. We can ban cars but there will still be drunks. We could go further and ban alcohol but since we've already tried that...

Anyone reading the news these days would think that we live in a world completely filled with mutants. Well, there are plenty of them around but the good news is that while four psychotic individuals -- three in the U.S. and one in Canada -- shot up schools in the past few weeks, 332 million other people didn't. That's the combined populations of the U.S. and Canada and regardless of whatever grudges or childhood scars they were carrying around with themselves, they didn't find any to be of sufficient cause to murder innocents.