Back on this day in the spring of 1999, following the wave of shock in the aftermath of what then seemed to have stopped the nation in it's track. Of course, I am talking about the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
At the time, it seemed like sensible gun control laws surely would come to fruition in the aftermath of this tragedy. The shock value was not quite on the level of the September 11th attacks which followed fairly shortly afterwards, but it actually was relatively close. Sometimes, it is difficult to remember such a time, when Americans were, in fact, truly and seriously and sincerely shocked by a mass shooting like that.
Maybe it was that this happened in a very typical, suburban community, or maybe it was the scale of the horror (at the time, it was the worst school shooting in this nation's history). Maybe it was the fact that two otherwise seemingly normal teenagers, both just literally weeks away from graduating high school, actually worked together and plotted this attack for literally a year, sending clues that seemed rather obvious and quite alarming in retrospect. Maybe there were other factors involved, including one seriously injured kid being dragged out of a second story window, an image captured by news helicopters that were on the scene. Maybe it was how long it took the police to finally clear the building. Who knows?
All I can tell you (or remind you, if you were old enough to remember that event) was that it did shock and horrify a suddenly morbidly fascinated nation. It seemed that, for about a week afterwards, the nation (and possibly the world) spoke of almost nothing else. Yes, it was that big of a news story. There actually was kind of a numb feeling that it seemed we all felt, so shocking this story was.
Nowadays, when mass shootings have become much more of the norm, I doubt that it would have anywhere near the same impact. We have become numb in a different sort of way to such mass shootings. Any kind of serious national attention to mass shootings only seems to begin when the number of victims only reach into double digits. And serious attention is paid when the mass shootings begin to have dozens of victims, such as the shootings at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, the Orlando nightclub, and Las Vegas, just to name a few.
If you told me then that mass shootings would become a kind of normal in the United States shortly thereafter, starting in fact that very year and continuing for literally decades to come, I think I would hardly have been the only one to be shocked and horrified by this. In fact, there likely would have been stunned disbelief.
Yet at the time, while we had seen mass shootings before, there was something very different about Columbine. It happened in a predominantly white, affluent neighborhood. It was an organized effort by two kids, and was a year in the planning, without anyone managing to read any of the warning signs (and I seem to remember that there were some, which apparently became clear only in retrospect). We had not (yet) seen a school shooting with so many victims before. The two kids were part of something called "the Trenchcoat Mafia," which seemed very puzzling and ominous when it was first revealed within the first hours after the event. As it turns out, the two kids also were fascinated with white supremacy, and the date for which they planned this - April 20th - was no accident. That was the anniversary of Hitler's birthday. Yet, one of the kids, Dylan Klebold, was evidently part-Jewish himself. Again, so many things about this did not seem to make any sense. How could two seemingly relatively normal American teens be filled with enough hate to launch such a senseless attack?
Also, I remember some of their other plans. They had made homemade bombs, and had hoped to cause a lot more damage than they actually managed to do, with expectations of killing maybe 500 kids. If they got away - how they thought they could possibly get away is another matter - then the two kids hoped to hijack a plane and crash it into Manhattan, a fact that is often overlooked, yet which would feel quite eerie given what would happen on September 11th, just two and a half years later. Again, given the racial aspects of this event, since the two kids identified as white supremacists, it can seem particularly shocking that they almost seemed to hope (and half plan) for a September 11th style suicide attack involving crashing a hijacked plane into Manhattan. After all, the people responsible for September 11th all were Muslims with foreign backgrounds and very foreign sounding names. The two kids who planned and executed what was then the biggest and most shocking school shooting in history looked by all appearances to be the boys next door. Typically American in every way. So the fact that they went ahead and not only planned this attack, but actually went through with it, and hoped for far, far more damage, was truly shocking on a level which, frankly, would be difficult to imagine today.
I remember the shock value of the attacks. Then, it was almost even more shocking for a week or so afterwards, as more and more details were revealed about these two kids and how they planned it, and just how much more damage and far more victims, even, they had hoped to inflict than what actually wound up happening, as bad as it was.
For weeks and perhaps even months later, there were some lively debates as to the causes. It seemed that gun advocates conveniently blamed musicians and video games, without bothering to explore the seemingly too easy access to guns that the two teens had on that day. Marilyn Manson was blamed in a knee-jerk kind of way, although the facts later showed that neither of the two shooters actually were fans of Marilyn Manson. As it turns out, and to his credit, Manson was intelligent and polite, and gave thought-provoking responses to what sure appeared to be tough questions by interviewers intent on grilling him.
People blamed the two kids for mistaking real life for video games. Movies were given some measure of blame, as well. Perhaps there are some valid points to be made in this regard. Yet still, what the rest of the world sees clearly continues to elude the most extremist gun activists here in the United States: that gun access sure seems to be too easy. Far too many nutcases somehow manage to get their hands on deadly assault weapons, like semi-automatic guns. Meanwhile, gun enthusiasts seem to believe that a serious and extensive knowledge of all sorts of guns should be a qualifier for the gun debate. If you fall into that trick, then you have to try to gain as much knowledge as these gun enthusiasts do about guns. To me, that hardly seems like a prerequisite to expect reasonable measures to be taken to protect our society from the kind of gun violence that we have regularly seen in the United States. It is preposterous to assume that it would be.
Meanwhile, gun violence statistics remain outrageously higher here in the United States than in any other supposedly peacetime nation, and among countries with advanced economies. It is not even close. It seems that all of the other nations with advanced economies combined do not come close to the number of fatalities that we see in this country every year from guns. Mass shootings might have been addressed after the shock in the aftermath of Columbine. Yet somehow, not much changed, and gun violence is pretty much as bad as it always was. This is particularly true of these kinds of mass shootings, which happen here far more often than they do seemingly anywhere else in the world. And again, most other advanced economy countries seem to address their problems with mass shootings with commonsense laws restricting some gun access. It seems to have solved their problems. But we seem to be unable to make any progress on this issue here in the United States.
Hard to believe that it was 25 years ago on this day. At the time, I thought that we might make some serious progress in addressing senseless acts of mass violence like this. But we didn't. In fact, it feels like the problem is even bigger nowadays, which is why it feels a bit shocking that this story would itself not be nearly as shocking had it happened today. And that, too, is a tragedy worth reflecting on, since we have had many, many similar kinds of tragedies since.
Below I added a blog entry from November of 2012, in the aftermath of yet another horrific mass shooting in suburban Colorado, near Denver and only a few miles from Littleton and Columbine High School. Here, I believe for the first time, the parents of at least one of the mass shooters at Columbine spoke out. It seemed worth sharing again here today.
Parents of Columbine Killer Speak Out
Originally published on November 16, 2012:
It was an unthinkable tragedy. A moment that was almost, perhaps just short of, the kind that defines a generation, like September 11th or the Kennedy Assassination. I don't remember exactly what I was doing when I first heard the news, like I remember first hearing about the attacks on the World Trade Center. Yet, I remember it, and remember the aftermath.
Of course, school shootings were already nothing new. There had been numerous such shootings before Columbine, and there have been numerous school shootings since. There was one in Germany that had more victims, and there was another one at Virginia Tech that also proved even more deadly (it remains the deadliest school shooting in history).
Yet, Columbine was the one that had the biggest impact of them all (unless you remember the one in Scotland in the nineties, which also had a huge impact, but not as much in the United States as in Britain), and I am guessing this was mostly because of the shock value. There were a lot of oddities about that day, and the specifics relating to the story. Two kids, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, working together to produce a massacre. They had purposely chosen April 20th as the date, because it was Hitler's birthday, although one of the kids, Dylan Klebold, apparently was partly Jewish himself. The two boys, who were just a couple of months from graduating that very high school that they hated so much, had been severely picked on and bullied at times, yet they killed their victims seemingly randomly. Initially, there were reports that the killings had been because of something called the "Trenchcoat Mafia", yet as it turned out, it was just two neighborhood kids who had appeared perfectly normal just the day before, although the media would go on to scrutinize everything so much as to make the signs of impending massacre appear almost obvious. Obviously, the media did. What the media also managed to do was make it a live story, and we the viewing audience were given access to images of kids running out of the school in a panic, and of a kid crawling out of a window, and being yanked out to safety. Later, there were brief images of some of the actual shootings themselves. Perhaps the oddest thing about it was the scale of their plans. They hoped to kill 500 people in the school, and if they were able to escape, they wanted to make their way to Denver Airport, hijack a plane, and then fly it to Manhattan, where they would crash it into some buildings in the downtown - something that resonated and seemed rather eerie a just about two and a half years later, when terrorists would fly airplanes into the two tallest skyscrapers in the city - the Twin Towers.
What made Columbine unique were all these things, as well as the scale of it. Nothing quite like it had happened before. It was all of these strange points, and more, mentioned in the previous paragraph. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention to the long-term dangers of resentment from bullying and harassment, as if these things had been minor matters before, perhaps just part of life's unpleasant realities. After Columbine, all of that changed. Everyone was worried about copycat incidents. Suddenly, the possibility of your child being harmed in your neighborhood seemed very real, and security measures in countless schools were stepped up several notches. There were threats. There was even a school shooting about one month later near Atlanta. But nothing since has quite reached the scale of Columbine, where almost everything else -all the news of the world - seemed to halt briefly, for a week or two, while the nation discussed what had happened, and why, and what needed to be done now.
Sometimes, frankly, I wonder what made Columbine so unique. Yes, it was huge, and it was shocking. But let's be honest: mass shootings, with some crazy (or in this case, crazies) killing people seemingly at random, is nothing new in America. Particularly in 1999, when there seemed to be shootings all of the time, all over the place. I mentioned school shootings, but of course, they happen outside of school, as well. Think of some of the recent shootings (and these are only the recent shootings, within the last couple of years or so): the shootings in Arizona targeting Congresswoman Giffords, the massive shooting (and bombing) in Norway last year, or the Aurora movie theater shooting earlier this year in the premiere for the new Batman movie. That one happened near Littleton, Colorado, the site of the Columbine school shootings. Why aren't these as shocking to us? Why doesn't life seem to stop after such incidents? Have we grown immune to such incidents, shrugging our shoulders and resigning these tragedies on an epic scale to be among the inevitable realities of modern day life? If so, what does that say about us?
Now, there are a lot of questions regarding mass shootings. We often hear from survivors, or surviving family members of victims, who struggle to try and make some sense of it all. Of course, what we hear is how painful it is, and the struggles, physically and emotionally, to try and move on. For the rest of us on the outside, it all seems surreal, hard to imagine.
But can you imagine being the parent of one of the kids who did the killing on that day? What can you be thinking? What was your reaction on that day?
I vaguely remember that Dylan Klebold's father had placed a call to 911 and told the operator that he believed his son was involved. But that was it, for the most part. Plenty of people blamed them, and the parents of Eric Harris. But nobody seemed to actually here from them.
Until now.
In a truly amazing article by Jessica Ferri of Parenting Magazine, we get to hear directly from the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenage murderers responsible for Columbine.
Normally, I would include quotes and such, and talk about my own reaction to reading such an article. But, I think it would be better for you, the reader, to just read this article yourself. You get direct quotes from both parents, the mother and the father. It is unbelievable, and it's hard to imagine living your life after such a thing. The mixture of grief and, most likely, guilt, at being associated with these events.
This article is amazing, and it is because of a book by Andrew Solomon, titled "Far From The Tree", that explores unusual kids, and there is a chapter that discusses violent children who commit crimes.
Here is the link to the article, titled "Columbine Shooter Dylan Klebold's Parents Speak Out":
http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/columbine-shooter-dylan-klebold-8217-parents-speak-191300537.html
Of course, school shootings were already nothing new. There had been numerous such shootings before Columbine, and there have been numerous school shootings since. There was one in Germany that had more victims, and there was another one at Virginia Tech that also proved even more deadly (it remains the deadliest school shooting in history).
Yet, Columbine was the one that had the biggest impact of them all (unless you remember the one in Scotland in the nineties, which also had a huge impact, but not as much in the United States as in Britain), and I am guessing this was mostly because of the shock value. There were a lot of oddities about that day, and the specifics relating to the story. Two kids, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, working together to produce a massacre. They had purposely chosen April 20th as the date, because it was Hitler's birthday, although one of the kids, Dylan Klebold, apparently was partly Jewish himself. The two boys, who were just a couple of months from graduating that very high school that they hated so much, had been severely picked on and bullied at times, yet they killed their victims seemingly randomly. Initially, there were reports that the killings had been because of something called the "Trenchcoat Mafia", yet as it turned out, it was just two neighborhood kids who had appeared perfectly normal just the day before, although the media would go on to scrutinize everything so much as to make the signs of impending massacre appear almost obvious. Obviously, the media did. What the media also managed to do was make it a live story, and we the viewing audience were given access to images of kids running out of the school in a panic, and of a kid crawling out of a window, and being yanked out to safety. Later, there were brief images of some of the actual shootings themselves. Perhaps the oddest thing about it was the scale of their plans. They hoped to kill 500 people in the school, and if they were able to escape, they wanted to make their way to Denver Airport, hijack a plane, and then fly it to Manhattan, where they would crash it into some buildings in the downtown - something that resonated and seemed rather eerie a just about two and a half years later, when terrorists would fly airplanes into the two tallest skyscrapers in the city - the Twin Towers.
What made Columbine unique were all these things, as well as the scale of it. Nothing quite like it had happened before. It was all of these strange points, and more, mentioned in the previous paragraph. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention to the long-term dangers of resentment from bullying and harassment, as if these things had been minor matters before, perhaps just part of life's unpleasant realities. After Columbine, all of that changed. Everyone was worried about copycat incidents. Suddenly, the possibility of your child being harmed in your neighborhood seemed very real, and security measures in countless schools were stepped up several notches. There were threats. There was even a school shooting about one month later near Atlanta. But nothing since has quite reached the scale of Columbine, where almost everything else -all the news of the world - seemed to halt briefly, for a week or two, while the nation discussed what had happened, and why, and what needed to be done now.
Sometimes, frankly, I wonder what made Columbine so unique. Yes, it was huge, and it was shocking. But let's be honest: mass shootings, with some crazy (or in this case, crazies) killing people seemingly at random, is nothing new in America. Particularly in 1999, when there seemed to be shootings all of the time, all over the place. I mentioned school shootings, but of course, they happen outside of school, as well. Think of some of the recent shootings (and these are only the recent shootings, within the last couple of years or so): the shootings in Arizona targeting Congresswoman Giffords, the massive shooting (and bombing) in Norway last year, or the Aurora movie theater shooting earlier this year in the premiere for the new Batman movie. That one happened near Littleton, Colorado, the site of the Columbine school shootings. Why aren't these as shocking to us? Why doesn't life seem to stop after such incidents? Have we grown immune to such incidents, shrugging our shoulders and resigning these tragedies on an epic scale to be among the inevitable realities of modern day life? If so, what does that say about us?
Now, there are a lot of questions regarding mass shootings. We often hear from survivors, or surviving family members of victims, who struggle to try and make some sense of it all. Of course, what we hear is how painful it is, and the struggles, physically and emotionally, to try and move on. For the rest of us on the outside, it all seems surreal, hard to imagine.
But can you imagine being the parent of one of the kids who did the killing on that day? What can you be thinking? What was your reaction on that day?
I vaguely remember that Dylan Klebold's father had placed a call to 911 and told the operator that he believed his son was involved. But that was it, for the most part. Plenty of people blamed them, and the parents of Eric Harris. But nobody seemed to actually here from them.
Until now.
In a truly amazing article by Jessica Ferri of Parenting Magazine, we get to hear directly from the parents of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenage murderers responsible for Columbine.
Normally, I would include quotes and such, and talk about my own reaction to reading such an article. But, I think it would be better for you, the reader, to just read this article yourself. You get direct quotes from both parents, the mother and the father. It is unbelievable, and it's hard to imagine living your life after such a thing. The mixture of grief and, most likely, guilt, at being associated with these events.
This article is amazing, and it is because of a book by Andrew Solomon, titled "Far From The Tree", that explores unusual kids, and there is a chapter that discusses violent children who commit crimes.
Here is the link to the article, titled "Columbine Shooter Dylan Klebold's Parents Speak Out":
http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/columbine-shooter-dylan-klebold-8217-parents-speak-191300537.html
Here is a link to another article, this one on the Aurora shootings and inevitable comparisons to the shootings that occurred at nearby Columbine ("With Aurora Massacre, Memories of Columbine Stir" by Alon Harish of ABC News):
http://news.yahoo.com/aurora-massacre-memories-columbine-stir-194551556--abc-news-topstories.html
http://news.yahoo.com/aurora-massacre-memories-columbine-stir-194551556--abc-news-topstories.html
No comments:
Post a Comment