Twenty Years from Columbine
Last weekend was the twentieth anniversary of the mass shooting of students at Columbine High School, near Denver. Eleven students and one teacher were killed, many in the school library. Police officers surrounded the building and tried to negotiate with the killers. Their efforts were in vain, the killers didn’t want to negotiate, they wanted to kill, and then die. They were equipped with two 9mm firearms, two twelve-gauge shotguns, a High Point 995 Carbine with thirteen ten round magazines, and a Springfield 67H pump action shot gun. They also prepared pipe bombs and rigged propane tanks to explode, but they didn’t go off.
The names of the killers are well known, but to respect the Parkland kids, who have demanded that murderers be denied notoriety, I won’t use them.
It wasn’t the first mass school shooting, but it had a very different tenor than the shootings in Springfield, Oregon and Jonesboro, Arkansas. The Columbine shooters spent many months developing their assault; practicing, purchasing more weapons, and creating a coordinated plan. They didn’t walk into the cafeteria and start shooting (Oregon) or pull the fire alarm, then hide in the woods outside of the school (Arkansas.) They planned, prepared, carried out the agenda, then died.
I was a high school teacher in Ohio during that time. We desperately tried to learn the lessons of Columbine, frantically trying to figure out how to avoid their fate. One lesson: the killers at Columbine had been “outliers” in the school, even having a page in the yearbook the previous year as the “Trenchcoat Mafia.” There were signs to see; for teachers, administrators, other students, and parents.
We learned that we had to know our kids, all of them, the good, the bad, and the silent. We had to try to reach every one. We might reach the potential attackers, or we might reach their friends who had an inkling of what was going on. When I later became the Dean of Students for the school, it was one of the most important aspects of my job.
In 1999 there was no Facebook, no MySpace, no Twitter or Instagram. Schools hadn’t begun to deal with those entirely different forms of communications. But one of the Columbine killers had a private website on America Online, and posted a blog. He wrote about his anger against society, and specifically against some of his Columbine classmates. He also included instructions on how to build pipe bombs. There were some who knew about the blog – but thought he was only “blowing off steam.”
We learned, even then, that we had to be attuned to social media, and as our current addiction to it developed, we had to listen to what kids said, and how they reacted. It wasn’t enough to say we weren’t interested, or try to ban phone use in school. Besides, if the worst happened and an attack was made, the kid’s phones might be the only warning.
And the police learned. They changed their strategy: no longer did they wait for hostage demands. The first officers on the scene are now trained to go in, ignore the dead and injured, and find the shooters. Columbine taught the hard lessons of time; we couldn’t give the killers more time to kill.
But what Columbine didn’t teach us is how do we control the weaponry used. Our national response to the attack twenty years ago was to try to change strategies during the attack, and to try to find potential attackers before they come through the school doors. But if anything, we have made it easier for them to get the weapons they want. We have rung our hands, sent “thoughts and prayers,” and allowed our laws regulating guns to become even more lax.
New Zealand was faced with their massacre in Christchurch only a few weeks ago. It took them seven days to institute a nationwide ban on assault weapons. Australia had their massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania. They “bought back” 643,000 semi-automatic firearms. The United Kingdom had a mass school shooting in 1996. The weapon of choice there were pistols with multiple shot magazines, within a year they were banned.
But in the United States we have allowed ourselves to be hamstrung by the Second Amendment, and the most effective pressure group in history, the National Rifle Association. The NRA claims to be about firearms freedom; but a look at their finances reveals it is about the gun manufacturer’s profits.
We have tried putting police in the schools. We have administrators monitoring social media. We have lockdown drills, and code word actions. We talk about putting more money into mental health (though we don’t seem to get around to doing it) and we talk about bulletproof backpacks for kids.
It’s been twenty years since Columbine, and we haven’t got it yet. We can look to our English-speaking cousins all over the world for the answer, but it isn’t “politically palatable” in our current environment. So on this terrible anniversary, we send our thoughts and prayers. It’s all we’ve got.
