Andrew Golden appears as a toddler posing with a hunting rifle on TIME’s cover, but he wasn’t too much older than that when he brought a gun to school and shot four of his classmates. Golden, then 11, along with his friend Mitchell Johnson, 13, took out their anger on their middle school classmates in Jonesboro, Ark. on March 24, 1998. By the end of their rampage, five people — four of them fellow students — had been killed, and ten injured. It horrified parents to think that teenagers could be mass murderers, let alone tweets. But the shooting in Jonesboro was the fifth of its kind — mass shootings carried out by children on school grounds — in a single year. TIME’s cover story painted a picture of Drew’s not-unusual upbringing in a society where guns are an everyday part of life:
Santa gave Drew Golden a shotgun when he was six. The home video of Drew as a tot, rushing to the backyard shooting range, has been played again and again, serving as metaphor and explanation, the macho little-boy equivalent of the dolled-up kindergarten beauty queen. Frontiersboy Drew learned to bait hooks and scope out prey with his father and grandfather, developing a taste for the chili cooked up after a successful deer hunt. He had a keen eye, improving his marksmanship at a shooting range and his reflexes at the video consoles of Wal-Mart and the local bowling alley.