What about Columbine? Spotlight on the Rise of Deadly Gun Violence in America
Before Uvalde, Parkside, Sandy Hook, and the long list of other school shootings now engraved in public memory in the United States, two students stepped onto the campus of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and shot 12 of their fellow students and one teacher to death. They wounded more than 20 other people. Both shooters then turned their guns on themselves. Two decades ago, such horrific, senseless brutality and loss of human life had more power to shock than it does today.
There had been school shootings before Columbine. But what happened at Columbine, a middle-class suburban—and largely white—high school, changed the way we look at school shootings. For plenty of us, it made the issue personal in ways that continue to reverberate in our own lives, and in our body politic, today.
What Happened
It was April 20, 1999. The two Columbine shooters, 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold, began their shooting spree just outside the school at about 11:19 a.m. After entering the building, they continued shooting, killing many of their victims in the school library. The massacre took approximately 16 minutes. By about 12 noon, the gunmen had also killed themselves.
The event, the worst school shooting up to that time in American history, led to a stepped-up nationwide conversation about gun violence and the safety of schoolchildren. Unfortunately, that conversation has yet to reach an effective solution.
The Killers Shattered Stereotypes
Journalist Dave Cullen wrote a definitive investigation of the tragedy. His 2010 book is simply entitled Columbine. Cullen’s exhaustive investigative work, and that of psychologists specializing in adolescent development, violence, and social pathology, have destroyed the narrative that built up around the event almost immediately after it occurred.
We now know that Harris and Klebold had friends, a regular part-time job at the same local pizza joint, and active social circles. While they weren’t at the top of the school’s hierarchy, they certainly weren’t at the bottom. They experienced some bullying incidents with other students, but they weren’t being consistently picked on. They—especially Harris—were often the bullies, rather than the bullied.
These revelations shattered initial media portraits of a couple of misfit “outcasts” driven by their torments, fueled by media and a “goth” subculture, to take revenge on the classmates who had taunted them.
Differing Motivations
The two teens, near-opposites in personality, formed a close relationship in which the temperament of one reinforced that of the other. Both were intelligent. Their creative writing assignments were often extremely well-written, even while often displaying disturbingly violent imagery.
Klebold was as the shyer of the two. He could be awkward and had trouble getting up the courage to ask for dates. Often depressed, he could also be excitable and erupt in anger. He was a compelling actor and has been described as a “live wire” prone to outbursts.
Harris was extremely self-possessed and charming in public, and he had plenty of dates. He was skilled at talking his way out of situations when he and Klebold were caught engaging in criminal mischief. He also exhibited the traits that have led most experts to classify him as a psychopath.
Harris demonstrated zero empathy for others. His diaries and other writings show a grandiose sense of self and a desire to inflict pain and suffering on others without remorse. Klebold’s self-doubts and Harris’ cold calculation seem to have reinforced each other. Parents, teachers, classmates, and the local authorities who had already dealt with the two students didn’t seem to have picked up on any warning signs.
The pair planned their assault on their school and classmates for a year. The morning of the attack, they arrived separately and planted propane bombs in the cafeteria. When the bombs didn’t go off, they began shooting.
Change Is Hard
At Columbine High School today, the library—where most of the students were killed or wounded—has been rebuilt. There’s a memorial plaque, dedicated to these victims, at its entrance.
Columbine changed the way Colorado schools provide mental health care. But it also gave future school shooters a template that to follow. Websites glorifying the killers still proliferate in today’s even more media-saturated age. Columbine, and 9/11 two years later, led to future generations of students growing up with deep-rooted anxiety about their safety and their future.
Many argue that Columbine should have resulted in serious, long-lasting changes in national policy on gun control. But it didn’t. The number of mass shootings in the U.S. since 2009 is now approaching 300. The thousands of survivors continue to live with the aftermath: anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, lack of trust in the very institutions that ostensibly are there to protect them.
The emotional blows delivered by mass shooting after mass shooting since Columbine are traumatizing us all. This is particularly true for the survivors of that April day in 1999. Many, now parents themselves, continue to startle at unfamiliar noises. They feel floods of insistent memories when they turn on the news. They think twice before sending their own children off to school.
They have spent the intervening decades hoping, praying, begging, that when we as a nation said, “Never again” after each of these horrific events, one day we’d finally mean it. As Columbine survivor Craig Nason wrote in an NBC News piece published June 1, 2022, days after Uvalde: “It is a burden too heavy.”