Long before the schoolyard shootings, there were media images of tough teen-agers who played the system's weaknesses.

They're thinking about the normal gory schoolyard shootings or the Jon-Benet Ramsey case, but my children were recently exposed to something even more unsettling: the Jersey joke.

They did not believe that murder was related to the schoolyard shootings.

An unsentimental reflection by Andrew Sullivan on schoolyard shootings, the Matthew Shepard murder, genocide and the easy consensus on hate crimes.

In conversations at the town's firing range, gun shop, high school and video store, residents revealed that they were wrestling with schoolyard shootings, an issue that is gripping rural America this summer.

The half brother of the defendant in the schoolyard shooting, himself a suspect in another slaying, was said to be tracking down witnesses.

The summer of the schoolyard shooting, though, the police in Brooklyn were investigating him in a second murder, from 1999.

For the most part, he said he blamed violent movies for the surge in schoolyard shootings by children.

At the first of the trials, his half brother, Mr. Sykes, was convicted of the schoolyard shooting.

Had the youngsters in the celebrated schoolyard shootings of 1997Ð98 not had access to guns, some or all of the people they killed would be alive today.