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Sometimes, however, the judicious use of this "theme" can give way to lurid sensationalism. That's what happened in Emory's case, according a review by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, a think tank devoted to studying aggression. According to Karen Colvard, a senior program officer at the organization, the Emory readings were "too subjective, full of unexamined assumptions and strikingly unrepresentative of most of these crimes. These choices seem calculated to heighten the emotionalism with which students approach these issues, which can get in the way of rational understanding." Bellesiles disputes the organization's conclusions, but acknowledges that refraining from sensationalizing violence "is in some ways the core problem for an academic talking about the subject."

Though they may occasionally make use of its salacious appeal, the promulgators of violence studies do have a more sober mission in mind. They're out to understand violence and its causes in a way that parents concerned about their kids, and politicians concerned about the next election, never could. "Who else ought to be doing this?" demands Jack Levin, sociology professor at Boston's Northeastern University and director of its nascent violence studies program. "Are we going to leave it up to the government? We've done that, and what have we gotten in return?" he snorts derisively. "The V-chip!" Only academics, he argues, have the breadth and depth of knowledge to attempt such a wide-ranging investigation.

And indeed, the scholarly approach to violence yields some interesting insights, the first of which is the realization -- at once reassuring and dispiriting -- that the violence afflicting contemporary America is hardly an aberration. "When you read the Iliad and the Agamemnon and Tacitus and Livy all within the space of 12 weeks, suddenly you begin to get a very clear sense of the universality of this phenomenon," says Jackall. "Columbine didn't just happen out of the blue. We're talking about repeated patterns in human history."

A more dispassionate view of events like Columbine might help us comprehend them more fully, he suggests. "All the endless hand-wringing and pop-psychologizing that goes on about these incidents doesn't add a great deal to our understanding of the phenomenon itself," Jackall reasonably points out.

An objective and open-minded approach to violence may also help us avoid easy labels of "us" and "them." The study of the physiological and psychological bases of aggression, which many violence studies classes take as their starting point, makes clear that the capacity for violence resides in all of us. "It's important that we tell undergraduates about how violence is done by ordinary people, in ordinary times, to other ordinary people," Colvard emphasizes. "It's not simply a matter of the bad guys doing things to the good guys."

Beyond the content of violence studies, there's a lesson implicit in its very existence. Why, when violence has dogged humanity since its earliest days, is it only now becoming the exclusive subject of scholarly attention?

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