On May 1998, 15-year-old Kipland Kinkel killed his parents at home and later on two of his friends, and wounded 22 in the school cafeteria in Thurston high school in Springfield, Oregon, USA.

This crime was a big shock for USA and the world, so there were a lot of discussions, writings and analyses about it by the courts, media, communities and criminologists.

In this essay I shall try to apply some criminological theories to this crime in order to find out about the reasons behind this crime, according to these theorists.

According to the functionalism theory of crime, all the institutions in society are related to each other in a strong relationship similar to the organic relationship of human body. When an organ is not working well it affects all the body.

In the Kip Kinkel’s crime, according to this theory, there are malfunctioning and failure in many social institutions such as family, school, community and government paved the way for Kip to commit his crimes. Functionalists such as Durkheim put responsibility upon Kip’s family, because the family didn’t start with putting the shared values and disciplines in to the conscience of the child. This of course, should be followed by good education, community and government actions together, as they argue, in order to have a healthy society. The social institutions all together could control the selfishness of human nature, such as kip’s, to avoid egoism and chaos. In Kip’s example the family let him to possess knives and guns, he hide his weapons in the school’s lockers and the government is not trying to control guns. The society tolerates and accepts violence as being apart of life. A house full of guns is a gate towards crime. Kips father bought him a 9 mm Glock semi-automatic pistol in a time which Kip was under treatment.

Functionalists such as Merton may argue that Kip was in a strain between what he desires and what he actually got. His father put a lot of stress upon him and he found these goals as unobtainable. When a child is allowed to possess a knife he definitely tries to get a pistol and a proper gun later. This leads to arise his selfish desires at the expense of others and leads to entering forbidden territory of crime. Kip Kinkel is an example of such a child according to Merton; a struggle between father and son leads to killing father by son.

According to another functionalist theorist who is Hirschi, Kip Kinkel was not attached to the family and school and society in a good way. He was involved in lone more than society. His isolated negative qualities make a suitable ground for involving in crime.

Some functionalists talk about the positive sides of crime, Kip’s punishment may count as one of these, as may keep some other young people from taking a gun to school and giving the society a big warning about the egoism and anomie among the people.

From the psychoanalyst view, Kip’s crime is much more personal case. Kip has psychological problems before and was under treatment, although the medicine he was taking (Prozac) criticized by many people as pushing the children to more violence. The psychoanalysts such as Freud may argue why this particular youth did the crime and there were a vast majority of others. They think that there are a small percentage of people who decided to be bad and committing crimes.

According to these theorists his id pushes Kip to commit the crime, because he was an abnormal person. They argue that Kip was hearing strange voices and he himself put the blame on these damned voices! Kip says many times that he is alone he don’t know who he is. This means he was searching for his ego, he was under the control of his id. After his crime his conscience hurts him very much, this means that at that special time his superego appears. He says that he is horrible, his head is not working properly and he wants to end his life, these symptoms are good reasons for the psychoanalysts, such as Freud, to argue that the reason behind Kip’s crime is psychological and personality not anything else.