25 years after Columbine horror, school shootings still happen

It was difficult to watch the April 20, 1999 surveillance footage from the school cafeteria at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The area shown in the video looks unnervingly similar to the Lower Commons at Linn-Mar High School, where I would lunch with friends and socialize before school during my four years as a student there, which started that same school year.

But in this video, the students aren’t sitting at the lunch tables. They’re crouched beneath them while a staff member speaks into a radio and motions for everyone to stay down. Moments later, the students stand up en masse and proceed frantically out of the area.

Like most surveillance videos at the time, there’s no sound. That’s likely a good thing. The silent, blurry version is chilling enough in the way it depicts the first moments when hundreds of teenagers realize that several of their fellow students are being gunned down right outside.

After beginning outside, the two shooters – themselves Columbine students – entered the school to continue their rampage. Using guns that were illegally obtained and illegally modified, they killed a total of 12 of their fellow students and one teacher before committing suicide in the corner of the same school library where they had slaughtered nine of their peers.

2 gunmen’s original plan could have resulted in far greater death toll

They had spent almost a year preparing for their killing spree. Their original plan was for the homemade pipe bombs hidden in duffel bags they had placed among other backpacks in the cafeteria to detonate just as the cafeteria was full of students. The bombs were set with timers to detonate at 11:17am. It is believed they intended to wait in the parking lot and shoot any surviving students while they fled the cafeteria, with additional bombs in their cars set to detonate afterward. When none of the bombs detonated, the assailants moved closer to the building and began shooting.

Were it not for faulty wiring and shoddy construction of the homemade bombs, the death toll could have reached into the hundreds. The carnage would have been unspeakable.

Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Columbine massacre. To many U.S. adults, the name “Columbine” is part of our lexicon, not only as the event itself, but as one synonymous with any mass shooting. It wasn’t the first at a K-12 school in U.S history, but it was the worst – at the time – and it was the first in the age of both cable TV and home Internet.

Those characteristics earned the Columbine massacre unprecedented media coverage. At one point, up to 500 reporters and 90 satellite trucks were on scene, parsing every piece of information they could find. To this day, troves of documents from the FBI investigation and the Jefferson County Sheriff's report remain accessible online.

Even after incidents with higher death tolls, many of us remember Columbine not only as the momentous event in which we came to terms with the indiscriminate killing of kids, but also as the one that generated theories about a school culture of bullying, and of potential accomplices who were part of the sinister “Trench Coat Mafia,” and ignited the ne’er-settled debate over gun culture and gun control. That debate continues today. It will never cease.

Shooting shaped school experience of Millennial generation

To people my age, Columbine was a momentous event in our lives because we, too, were kids in school. I was in ninth grade during the 1998-1999 school year. Even without smartphones and social media – hardly any of us even had one of those fancy flip phones – news of the shooting had made its way to Linn-Mar High School. I remember what class I was in when the school principal took to the intercom system to offer words of assurance to the student body about our safety and security. The shooting hadn’t happened to us, but reality was about to change for all of us.

I wrote about the “awful news of Columbine High School” in the pages of my teenage diary that week, making note of how it probably wasn’t a coincidence that they “did it on that jerk Hitler’s birthday.” The words are tucked in a rose-patterned notebook adorned with stickers, nestled between mentions of cute boys, an English test, and my blue ribbon-earning performance at the recent piano festival. I was 14 years old. Every teenager deserves a chance to be a teenager.

It was 25 years ago that the families of 15 people learned that their loved one was dead. One was a teacher with a wife, kids and grandkids. Twelve were students slain by fellow students. Two were the perpetrators, their parents’ grief peppered with the reality that their teenaged sons had murdered their own peers. 25 years ago – yesterday.

It was 25 years ago today that the parents of 13 million high schoolers sent their sons and daughters to school knowing that teenagers can be cold-blooded killers.

In a changing world, more shootings added to the history books

Most of my peers who were teenagers in 1999 now have children of their own in school. (I do not.) Some even have teenagers older now than we were when Columbine happened. They’re attending school in a world where mass shooting is just as tragic, but somehow less shocking as the names of more schools and communities are written in the history books.

Since Columbine, our world has evolved to the point where any person can broadcast every thought and feeling they have to the whole world. After a violent tragedy happens, the loudest chorus of public opinion is often quick to lay blame, believing that our advanced and enlightened society already has the means to prevent it from happening and our failure to do so is blood on our hands.

That evil simply exists in our world is one of the most incredibly difficult things a human being can ever accept or acknowledge. It offers no comfort, no satisfaction and no understanding. For many, it’s easier to demand legislative and executive action to prevent the next shooting.

Prevention measures can easily miss their target

But when focusing solely on prevention, it’s easy to forget that law and policy is never applied with precision. Preventative measures are a sieve – a filter on society, if you will, with the duty to both identify and catch what is dangerous while leaving what is not undisturbed.

It’s virtually (if not literally) impossible to get it precise. Take red flags on mental health, for example. If society’s filter is too sparse, behavioral signs that beg intervention slip through unaddressed. If the filter is too dense, a person’s privacy is imperiled, their civil and constitutional rights trampled, and their trust is lost.

Every state in the nation has laws restricting firearm possession for people with mental illness. Similar law also exists at the federal level. Many times, the law fails to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of unstable people. Sometimes it’s because the law lacks clarity for enforcement. And sometimes it’s because a person’s determination to use a firearm outweighs their willingness to follow the law.

When prevention fails, intervention could save lives

The idea behind the recent school security bill, signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday, is that intervention can save lives when prevention hasn’t worked. House File 2586 will require school districts with 8,000 or more students to employ either a school resource officer or a private security officer to guard each building in its district where students in grades nine through 12 attend, unless the school board votes to opt out.

If the district opts for a private security guard, the security official would need to take annual live scenario training- and quarterly live firearms training through the state Department of Public Safety. Districts with fewer than 8,000 students won’t be required to retain a security guard or school resource officer, but they will still be encouraged to do so. The bill also offers qualified immunity from civil or criminal liability should damaged be incurred from the reasonable use of force on the job.

In other words, a school resource officer or security guard wouldn’t be able to use a firearm in just any circumstance – especially without liability. But in the extremely unlikely event that a person entered a school with intent to act in a lethal manner, this new law allows the school to have a trained, certified, responsible person ready in place to use force in a manner that could save lives.

School shooting deaths remain incredibly rare. In 2022, Northeastern University criminologist James Fox put the odds that a child will die in a mass shooting at about 10 million to one. But when they happen, they can happen anywhere. We were reminded of that in Iowa earlier this year. Barely two months after the tragic shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa, an Iowa Poll showed that 65% of parents with school-age kids support armed security in schools.

Sometimes “anywhere” ends up being “here.” An idyllic community near Denver, CO learned that devastating truth a quarter century ago, and it altered reality for everyone across the country. Today, it’s our kids wanting to stay safe. Yesterday, it was us.

Comments: 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com