Today was the 16th anniversary of Columbine

[ttt]

I can't believe its been so long. I was a senior in high school and I remember the news vividly. It was horrifying, incomprehensible. Now it's not even the most horrific school massacre in my lifetime.

This is an article from the 10th anniversary:

www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/17/columbine-massacre-gun-crime-us

[gpw]

Wow. I can't believe it's been that long. I still put it right at the top of most horrific school massacre. I don't know why, but the images from that day are burned forever in my brain.

[NewOrleans]

Sigh.

[penguingrrl]

So sad. I was also a senior in HS and it was like as a nation our innocence was broken. Like you, I thought that was the worst school massacre we would ever see.

[josieposy]

Oh wow.

[FloFTW]

I was 16. Half my life.

[erbear]

Something about Columbine is hard to let go of for me. I was in college, student teaching and I remember being scared shitless to go into my school the next day and being super worried about my mom, because she taught in rural Maryland and was like ground zero for school shooters in my mind. 

Has anyone read the book "columbine"? It was fascinating.

[jln]

I distinctly remember this. I was a Junior. But living in Oregon we had already experienced Kip Kinkel's shooting and our state was still dealing with the aftermath of that.

[taratru]

And nothing is better. *sigh*

[One Girl In All The World]

I will never forget sitting on the arm of the couch watching in horror at the news coverage. I was a junior, I think, that year. 

[nikki25]

Gah...that is so crazy. I will always remember walking into my afternoon job after school and seeing the news coverage. And nothing has changed with this country, fucking god, I need to move.

[bugandbibs]

Apr 20, 2015 20:39:48 GMT -5 jln said:

I distinctly remember this. I was a Junior. But living in Oregon we had already experienced Kip Kinkel's shooting and our state was still dealing with the aftermath of that.

I was a senior-just about to graduate when Thurston happened. I remember staring at Kip Kinkel's face one day thinking he just looked like any other kid in my group. This coupled with a bunch of my childhood friends getting arrested for armed robbery really made me confront how naively I viewed the world.

I hate to think of the day my kids have this awakening.

[LoveTrains]

I was also a senior in high school that year.

[underwaterrhymes]

It's a shitty month for anniversaries.

Columbine, Oklahoma City, and Boston. Isn't there some sort of a study that shows April is a bad month for suicides? I wonder if it is also bad for mass killings or terrorism too.

[josieposy]

Apr 20, 2015 22:12:33 GMT -5 underwaterrhymes said:

It's a shitty month for anniversaries.

Columbine, Oklahoma City, and Boston. Isn't there some sort of a study that shows April is a bad month for suicides? I wonder if it is also bad for mass killings or terrorism too.

Didn't Waco end in April too?

[underwaterrhymes]

Apr 20, 2015 22:17:52 GMT -5 josieposy said:

Apr 20, 2015 22:12:33 GMT -5 underwaterrhymes said:

It's a shitty month for anniversaries.

Columbine, Oklahoma City, and Boston. Isn't there some sort of a study that shows April is a bad month for suicides? I wonder if it is also bad for mass killings or terrorism too.

Didn't Waco end in April too?

Yes, I think the same day as Oklahoma City because Timothy McVeigh did it in retaliation.

[MrsAxilla]

Unless we move (unlikely), Ben will go to Columbine. We drive by it literally every day. The local news today was all Columbine and 4/20. Then I heard that Columbine closes on the anniversary every year and I thought of all those stoner kids out of school on Stoner Day in a recreational state....it was a jarring juxtaposition.

[ladybug2002]

I can't believe it's been that long. I was finishing my freshman year of college and could not believe that this had happened at the hand of people close to my age.

Speaking of Waco, I just saw that I'm now older than David Koresh was when the siege went down. I was 12 at the time and he seemed so old to me. Weird feeling.

[ECB]

Apr 20, 2015 20:41:12 GMT -5 taratru said:

And nothing is better. *sigh*

i heard a story yesterday about it and there was a comment about how columbine put a spotlight on the issue of school violence and I was like "and...?" Oh yeah, there is no follow up, is there. We talk about it but nothing changes.

[bigoleworm]

Here's my theory, there are no consequences any more. A kid fails a class, it's the teachers fault! A kid skips school, it's the parents fault! A kid shoots another kid, it's the violent video games fault!
We had a kid miss 64 days of school last year. Supposed to be held back because you can only miss 20. Parents threatened to sue the school if he was left back, so he was promoted to the next grade.
We need to get back to holding people accountable.
And I can't believe it's been 16 years since Columbine.

[cinnamoncox0]

Apr 21, 2015 5:23:56 GMT -5 bigoleworm said:

Here's my theory, there are no consequences any more. A kid fails a class, it's the teachers fault! A kid skips school, it's the parents fault! A kid shoots another kid, it's the violent video games fault!
We had a kid miss 64 days of school last year. Supposed to be held back because you can only miss 20. Parents threatened to sue the school if he was left back, so he was promoted to the next grade.
We need to get back to holding people accountable.
And I can't believe it's been 16 years since Columbine.

I was barely 20 at the time and my ds was only a few months old. I was barely out of high school and that combined with being a new parent this scared the shit out of me.
However I dont recall it being about their parents not being willing to hold the kids accountable, was it? I thought they were bullied (?) and mentally disturbed, one being more of a ringleader than the other.
I've seen some documentaries on it, one was disturbed and the other one's parents weren't real thrilled with them hanging around but they didn't forbid it.
It's disgusting to me that nothing at all has changed, just more school shootings to add to the list.
Ugh. Bless those families.
I had family in littletonCO. They've moved recently but it seemed like a real sweet calm place.
You just never know what is going on behind closed doors.

[NewOrleans]

Pretty much. ttt



16 Years After Columbine, How "Never Again" Became "Oh, Well"

Welcome to America, the land of blue jeans, rock and roll, and sporadic meaningless mass murder.

Note: This article was originally published on April 20, 2014, the 15th anniversary of Columbine. It has been updated slightly to reflect that, well, hell, another year has passed.

On April 20, 1999, two teenagers walked into a suburban high school outside of Denver and shot 13 people to death. The massacre at Columbine was not the first mass shooting in America. It was not the first mass shooting at an American school. Indeed, Peter Jennings began the news that night, "The reaction of so many people today was 'Oh no, not again.'" But Columbine was different. It became a national trauma in a way the others hadn't. Yes, it was the deadliest American school shooting on record at the time—though it is no longer—but what really amplified its significance was the fact it was the first mass shooting that played out in real time on television. The shootings began at 11:19 a.m. By noon, local television stations had broken into regular programming with uninterrupted media coverage. Millions of people across the country turned on CNN and watched the story develop.

Here's how America watched the chaos of Columbine: There were reports of a shooting and it was at a school and the body count began going up and witnesses said they were two shooters with shotguns and rifles and pistols and there had been an explosion across town and it had been a diversion maybe and pipe bombs, something about pipe bombs, and the body count kept rising, and booby traps, and then Clinton gave a speech and then the shooters were in a mafia that wore trench coats and maybe there were more than two and then, no, there were only two and they were dead and the bomb squad finished the initial sweep of the building at 4:45 p.m. and it was over, but not really because then there was the CCTV footage, the witness interviews, the search for motive, they had been bowling, they had been bullied, they had said something about Hitler and they listened to Marilyn Manson and they wanted to one up Timothy McVeigh and What Does It All Mean?

After Columbine there was a general sense that something had to be done. That kids getting killed at school was a thing we weren't going to be okay with. "Never again," as they say.

It wasn't some fanciful impossibility. The British did it after Dunblane. And so we did that. Everyone got together and passed sweeping gun control legislation and there was never another mass shooting in America.

Except not really. Because the "never again" response—though shared by many—was not shared by all.

On May 1, Charlton Heston came to Denver and made a much-discussed speech where he said, "We have work to do, hearts to heal, evil to defeat, and a country to unite. We may have differences, yes, and we will again suffer tragedy almost beyond description. But when the sun sets on Denver tonight, and forever more, let it always set on we the people, secure in our land of the free and the home of the brave." Say what you will about that speech, but as far as predictions go it was spot on. It's a fait accompli. There were more shootings. We mourned and then did nothing because we seem to have accepted that occasional mass murder is the cost of America.

Both responses, "never again" and "don't bother trying," offer statements about the USA. The former says "America is the greatest country on Earth. We went to the moon. Surely, we can stop kids from getting shot to death at school! If the Brits can do it, so can we. " The latter says, "No, we can't. We're America. The greatest country on Earth and the cost of the liberty that makes us so is that our kids may get shot to death at school."

Every time there is another mass shooting and nothing happens it becomes a little easier to believe that the "don't bother" crowd is right.

Nothing changed after 13 people were killed at Columbine, or 33 at Virginia Tech, or 26 at Sandy Hook. Each of those tragedies came with the same breaking-news urgency as Columbine, but none generated the same sense of expected action because fewer and fewer people actually believed things could change. The last 16 years have been a lesson in how "never again" can be cowed into "I need a drink."

And that's insane.

Sixteen years after Columbine rattled America to its core, people still get shot while they're at school. People get shot while they're at work. People get shot eating. People get shot drinking. People get shot watching movies, shopping, driving, swimming, skipping, and playing baseball. It's 2015 and in America people get shot doing basically any goddamn thing you can think of.

They don't have to.

[bigoleworm]

I wasn't saying columbine happened because of all of that, I was saying that it continues to happen because of it.

[ttt]

Apr 21, 2015 8:08:30 GMT -5 @stilljustash said:

Apr 21, 2015 5:46:09 GMT -5 cinnamoncox0 said:

I was barely 20 at the time and my ds was only a few months old. I was barely out of high school and that combined with being a new parent this scared the shit out of me.
However I dont recall it being about their parents not being willing to hold the kids accountable, was it? I thought they were bullied (?) and mentally disturbed, one being more of a ringleader than the other.
I've seen some documentaries on it, one was disturbed and the other one's parents weren't real thrilled with them hanging around but they didn't forbid it.
It's disgusting to me that nothing at all has changed, just more school shootings to add to the list.
Ugh. Bless those families.
I had family in littletonCO. They've moved recently but it seemed like a real sweet calm place.
You just never know what is going on behind closed doors.

no. eric harris was relatively popular. he was just a certified psychopath who hated all people, and took advantage of an impressionable, depressed teen in dylan. he (harris) slipped through the system, despite the parent(s) of other students repeatedly alerting authorities that he was fucking psycho (and violent).

Yep. This is all in the article I posted too, including that a teacher called the police about some things he had written in class about planning to murder people, but nothing happened. The police even had applied for a warrant to search his house but never acted on it. 

[ttt]

NewOrleans, I can't quite bring myself to like your post but it's spot on. And depressing.

[NewOrleans]

Apr 21, 2015 8:08:30 GMT -5 @stilljustash said:

Apr 21, 2015 5:46:09 GMT -5 cinnamoncox0 said:

I  about their parents not being willing to hold the kids accountable, was it? I  on it, one was disturbed and the other one's parents weren't real thrilled with them hanging around but they didn't forbid it.
It's disgusting to me that nothing at all has changed, just more school shootings to add to the list.
Ugh. Bless those families.
I had family in littletonCO. They've moved recently but it seemed like a real sweet calm place.
You just never know what is going on behind closed doors.

no. eric harris was relatively popular. he was just a certified psychopath who hated all people, and took advantage of an impressionable, depressed teen in dylan. he (harris) slipped through the system, despite the parent(s) of other students repeatedly alerting authorities that he was fucking psycho (and violent).

To be clear, he was not a certified psychopath.  The author of the account Columbine makes a good case for that, but Harris had no such official diagnosis.

but no, they were not bullied.  And the trench oat mafia wasn't really a thing.

[ttt]

Apr 21, 2015 5:23:56 GMT -5 bigoleworm said:

Here's my theory, there are no consequences any more. A kid fails a class, it's the teachers fault! A kid skips school, it's the parents fault! A kid shoots another kid, it's the violent video games fault!
We had a kid miss 64 days of school last year. Supposed to be held back because you can only miss 20. Parents threatened to sue the school if he was left back, so he was promoted to the next grade.
We need to get back to holding people accountable.
And I can't believe it's been 16 years since Columbine.

All of these are problems, but I don't know that they're directly related to mass shootings. Except our nation's collective denial that there's a connection between us having an ocean of guns and having periodic mass shootings. 

[ttt]

Apr 21, 2015 8:15:24 GMT -5 @stilljustash said:

Apr 21, 2015 8:13:08 GMT -5 ttt said:

Yep. This is all in the article I posted too, including that a teacher called the police about some things he had written in class about planning to murder people, but nothing happened. The police even had applied for a warrant to search his house but never acted on it. 

ha, i totally admit i didn't click on it. i'll go read now!

It's long but it's interesting. So much of the initial media accounts were just plain wrong. 

What's sad is that a lot *has* changed since then. For example, the way police respond to mass shootings, how now they storm the building immediately to minimize casualties rather than wait to try to negotiate. Or how this kind of thing used to horrify America and now it doesn't anymore. 

[NewOrleans]

Apr 21, 2015 8:18:07 GMT -5 ttt said:

Apr 21, 2015 8:15:24 GMT -5 @stilljustash said:

ha, i totally admit i didn't click on it. i'll go read now!

It's long but it's interesting. So much of the initial media accounts were just plain wrong. 

What's sad is that a lot *has* changed since then. For example, the way police respond to mass shootings, how now they storm the building immediately to minimize casualties rather than wait to try to negotiate. Or how this kind of thing used to horrify America and now it doesn't anymore. 

That is why the author of Columbine wrote that book. He said he felt, like all media members, that he had just taken information and run with that at the time. So he stated in the book that he wrote it to set the record straight. And give real facts and correct mistakes that were published at the time.

[mrshandy]

Apr 20, 2015 22:19:35 GMT -5 underwaterrhymes said:

Apr 20, 2015 22:17:52 GMT -5 josieposy said:

Didn't Waco end in April too?

Yes, I think the same day as Oklahoma City because Timothy McVeigh did it in retaliation.

And VA tech right? So fucking sad.