The article specifically listed school shootings as one connection! One thing I noticed as I read through results was that animal abuse before the age of ten seems to be a very definite indicator of adult violence. I did not find anything on Los Angeles laws, but I was ready to look at the various cases of random violence.
I searched on this term in all the same places and came up with nothing useful until I added the word "schools." Even then, the results showed far too much. In fact, random violence is far more prevalent than I thought, so my topic narrows again to random school violence. However, these results were very difficult to find. So I tried searching on Columbine and Dawson College in hopes to get more. There is lots written on these, though Dawson is so recent that these are mostly news articles. Most of the books on Columbine deal with prevention of violence at schools, and do not focus on the characteristics of the shooters.
A search for "childhood AND animal AND cruelty AND adult AND random AND violence) AND (school AND shootings) AND (Columbine)" brought up 74 books and no other sources, no journal articles or news. However, when searching within the first 20 books listed on the term "animal cruelty" yielded nothing so I tried several combinations and finally got two books with: "Conduct disorder" "school shootings" "animal cruelty"
Healthy Anger: How to Help Children and Teens Manage Their Anger (Golden, Bernard 2003) is a very comprehensive book on the early sign of Conduct Disorder and he includes cruelty to animals as one. The book is quite helpful in understanding how to predict this kind of behavior, but it still did not answer my question. The second book by Lemond and Allen mentions animal cruelty as a contraindication of trouble. (Lemond, Tim and Allen, David 2002)
The most productive searches were on animal cruelty and most articles...
Searching on the actual new items did unearth some evidence of this, but most articles concentrate on security issues and social ills. Mostly I learned how difficult it may be to research this topic thoroughly enough for a convincing essay. However, what I read convinced me that there is a connection between animal cruelty by children to future violence as adults. All the news stories I read which mentioned causes or characteristics of the perpetrators mentioned animal cruelty as children as one sign somebody might have seen, so I would say there is evidence enough to indicate that when we find children being cruel to animals we need to get them some help. It certainly cannot hurt and it might help a lot.
References
Arkow, Phil. 2006. Bibliography of the Link Between
Animal Abuse, Child Abuse and Domestic Violence. http://www.animaltherapy.net/Bibliography-Link.html
Hoffman, Frank L. 2006. SHOOTING OURSELVES IN THE FOOT
The Sanitizing of Violence in Our Society
PetAbuse. Cruelty Connections. 2006. http://www.pet-abuse.com/pages/abuse_connection.php
Bender, William N.; Shubert, Terresa H.; McLaughlin, Phillip J.
Invisible Kids: Preventing School Violence by Identifying Kids in Trouble.
Intervention in School and Clinic v37 n2 p105-11 Nov 2001 ISSN: 10534512
Golden, Bernard. Healthy Anger: How to Help Children and Teens Manage Their Anger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Questia. 10 Nov. 2006 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=103188286.
Lemmond, Tim, and David Allan Verhaagen. Sexually Aggressive Youth: A Guide to Comprehensive Residential Treatment / . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Questia. 10 Nov. 2006 http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=102089415.
