School shootings shock, disturb, and provoke enormous and controversial debate. The stories of perpetrators and victims cause huge public and media resonance, becoming the subject of intense discussion in political debates, pop culture, and scienti fi c research, as well as among numerous adolescents in the Some time ago Harding et al. ( 2002 ) listed the many diverse approaches developed by sociology, psychology, psychiatry, criminology, education, and medicine for understanding this extreme form of violence. Within this spectrum, disciplines often apply different de fi nitions of the phenomenon and set their own speci fi c explicatory priorities (socio-cultural in fl uences, institutional factors, pathological personality structure, etc.). As Muschert ( 2007 , p. 68) points out, this can lead to a counterproductive narrowing of perspective: "School shooting incidents need to be understood as resulting from a constellation of contributing causes, none of which is suf fi cient in itself to explain a shooting. The fact that many researchers have focused on a single causal dynamic has contributed to the lack of integration in the fi eld."While some of the research fi ndings and explanatory models fi t well together, others stand in fundamental contradiction to one another and appear irreconcilable. These differences are magni fi ed in the prevention and intervention sector, where polarization occurs over questions such as controllability (Böckler, Seeger, and Heitmeyer ( 2010 ) . Here, as elsewhere, researchers must acknowledge the ambivalence of control concepts (e.g., the possibility of early detection vs. the danger of
