Since 1982, there have been 28 cases of random school shootings in American high schools and middle schools. The authors find (a) that the shootings were not a national problem but a series of local problems that occurred in “red states” or counties (places that voted Republican in the 2000 election); (b) that most of the boys who opened fire were mercilessly and routinely teased and bullied and that their violence was retaliatory against the threats to manhood; (c) that White boys in particular might be more likely than African American boys to randomly open fire; and (d) that the specific content of the teasing and bullying is homophobia. A link between adolescent masculinity, homophobia, and violence is proposed. Finally, the authors offer a few possible explanations as to how most boys who are teased and bullied achieve the psychological resilience that enables them to weather adolescence without recourse to random school violence.

Drawing data from works of political non-fiction that help to reveal the moral and sensual underpinnings of political practice, this paper seeks to adumbrate a sensualist understanding of political engagement. After beginning with a brief discussion of Weber's seminal essay "Politics as a Vocation," I then construct an ideal type of political passion with which to highlight the inherent shortcomings that plague traditional explanations of political action. My argument is that these approaches are all vitiated by their reliance on Chinese-box epistemology. I go on to suggest that in order to obtain a genuinely sociological account of political engagement, one must develop methods that are true to the experiential specifics of politics while recognizing the conditions that shape the possibility of those very experiences. Keywords Political passion . Theories of practice . Political ethnographyMan is by nature a political animal -AristotleOne of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary social scientific research is that students of politics are hard pressed to find any evidence of man's nature as a political animal in the extant political science or political sociology literature. Certainly there is no shortage of scholarly exchanges employing the term "politics" or purporting to have arrived at a better "model" of political participation or political outcomes, just as there is any number of studies exploring the relative salubrity of modern democracies. Conspicuously missing, however, from most of these inquiries is any consideration or account of the political animal cum animal-a living, breathing, suffering, sensual being who is shaped by more than just rational calculations, symbolic exchanges, the dictates of public opinion, or any of the other more fashionable explanatory variables employed in current political research such as levels of partisanship, institutional structures, or one's degree of social capital. To put M. Mahler ( )

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This article presents an analytical reconstruction of the day before Election Day on the Johnson for Congress Campaign. It uses an extended first-person narrative format to reconstruct the look, sound, and feel of politics-in-action. The article identifies three main dimensions along which the character and quality of political life are structured — politicos’ orientation towards being-known-in and connecting-with-the-world-out-there, the oppositional character of political life, and the practical challenge of inserting the politician’s self into the flow of daily events while maintaining control over that self — while bringing into relief the forms of know-how and skillful coping that those dimensions solicit from politicos.