April 20, 1999
At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in trench coats, began shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School, located in a suburb south of Denver. The pair then moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library.
By approximately 11:35 a.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 other people. Shortly after 12 p.m., the two teens turned their guns on themselves.
There have been 231 U.S. school shootings since the Columbine massacre in 1999. Those shootings have resulted in more than 300 dead and hundreds more wounded. We have averaged more than 10 school mass shootings over the last 22 years.
There have been school shootings in the US since the mid-18th century, but never at the rate we have seen in the modern era. Some of the more infamous events include Charles Whitman’s sniper killings from a clock tower at the University of Texas in 1966, Brenda Spencer’s shooting spree at a San Diego elementary school in 1979 (Spencer’s comment to a reporter inspired the song, “I Don’t Like Mondays”), and Patrick Purdy firing over 100 rounds in 4 minutes in Stockton, CA killing 5 and wounding 30.
We have seen an increase in the number of fatalities for school shootings. About 10 years ago, the Virginia Tech shooting became the deadliest mass shooting in America of any kind. (That title has since been dwarfed by the Las Vegas shooting and the Orlando nightclub shooting, both of which happened outside of schools.) In 2012 20 elementary school children and six staff were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17. Red Lake HS, Santa Fe HS and Umpqua Community College all find a place on the list of deadliest US school shootings.
There’s a catch to how we look at the data about school shootings. If we focus solely on major school shootings by year or on a list of school massacres with higher numbers of deaths, we miss the bigger picture. That means missing the thwarted attempts, the one-off murders, and the high frequency of smaller events between the massacres with increasingly higher death counts. We miss situations like the school attack in East Greenbush, New York, which only resulted in one injury but had the potential to kill many more if it wasn’t thwarted. The student perpetrator has since gone on to praise both Parkland student activists and the teacher who tackled him to the ground, saying he is “a hero who I owe my life to.” That was a near-miss that could have been much worse, but those near-misses also need to be a part of the conversation about guns and schools.
Whenever a school shooting, or any other mass shooting event, reaches the national news, it sparks a new round of calls for gun control legislation. There are debates, sometimes angry, all over social media. Congress, state and local legislators scramble to the cameras and microphones to publicize which “side” they are on in this Great Debate. Then a few days or weeks pass, the story leaves the front page, the news shows move on to the next big story and nothing changes. Families and friends are left to mourn the dead, the wounded begin a sometimes lengthy course of recovery, and nothing changes. Blood is cleaned from floors, bullet holes in walls are repaired, and nothing changes.
Every time there is a mass shooting and nothing changes, permission is given for the next one. And there is always a next one. Even as the number of school shootings was on a frightening rise, Congress allowed a 10-year old assault weapons ban to expire 2004. In the 17 years since then, school shootings have become even more frequent and deadlier. Some haphazard and scattered attempts have been made by states and local communities to restrict the gun supply. But when the neighboring community or state fails to do the same thing, those efforts are doomed to fail. Opinion polls all show that a large majority of Americans favor some form of gun control and limitation. But the same people who claim to be in favor of control also vote for legislators who refuse to vote for the laws we all want and so desperately need. Countries who have taken steps to sharply control their guns are rarely, if ever, faced with the tragedies we have faced over the last 3 decades. But America rarely learns from the example of others.
Changing America’s gun culture should not be seen as punishment. Changing America’s gun culture should not be seen as an attempt to make the citizenry weak. Changing America’s gun culture must be seen as an attempt to save lives. This a public safety issue. In the last year, we have been brought to our knees by an epidemic, a pandemic. Guns represent the next epidemic we must all face. Masks and hand-washing won’t solve this one. There will be no vaccines. The gun epidemic will only be cured by removing the problem directly. Just as many Americans are showing they cannot be trusted to follow simple guidelines to fight a deadly virus, many Americans are showing they can’t be trusted with a gun. Nothing has changed since Columbine. Something has to.