On April 20, 1999, the country was shocked as 12 students and a teacher were killed at a high school in Columbine, Colorado. The shooting raised questions about school culture, desensitization from the growing number of first person shooter games, and finally mental health. It was the shooting that brought school shootings to the forefront of conversation in schools across the nation, but it was by no means the first mass school shooting in America.
Outside of shootings that would have constituted mass shootings from precolonial America, the first school shooting that constituted a mass shooting in modern US history was the University of Texas shooting in 1966, even though there were lower profile shootings sprees from the early 20th century where either only a couple students died or three or four faculty etc were targeted. The ex-marine sharpshooter killed 13 and injured 30 more, bringing the term 'mass shooting' into situations outside of war and into the vocabulary of the everyday American.
In 1976, at SCU Fullerton, seven people were killed and two more were injured in a shooting spree by a thirty-seven year old schizophrenic.
In 1989, two decades before Sandy Hook, five children were killed and twenty-nine others were injured at an elementary school in Stockton, California when a man shot 106 rounds into the playground with an AK-47. Most of the victims were Southeast Asian war refugees.
In 1991, four faculty members and a student were killed at the University of Iowa by another graduate student in a rampage after his financial aid ran out.
In 1998, an eleven year old and a thirteen year old killed four students and a teacher at a middle school in Arkansas after pulling the fire alarm.
These are just examples of the types of variety of gun violence in schools seen before Columbine, not an exhaustive list, but showing that mass shootings at schools has been prevalent in modern US history and not a new occurrence, albeit rising in frequency.
Columbine differentiates itself from these other mass shootings because it was one of “the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age.” The nature of this horrible incident was quite eye opening to authorities because of all the information they had uncovered once they went deeper into investigation only to find out that the perpetrator was a definite psychopath with a psychopath like wired brain at such a young age, for this to have been carried out by such a young person it was an incident that was put up for debate.
ReplyDeleteThe event itself is a tragedy, however, what was more horrible was the media frenzy and business exploitations that came afterwards. For example, the book "SHE SAID YES" was created after the mass suspicion that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims. The parents of Cassie Bernall heard that before their daughter had died, she was asked if she believed in God and when she allegedly responded with the word "yes", she was shot. However, after the church's promotions and speeches given to honor Bernall it was discovered that it was another student and when that student said yes, the shooter walked away.
ReplyDeleteYou make good points in your post, because Columbine was definitely not the first school shooting in the United States. What probably scared people the most was that the High school was posh, rich, and that the two kids had no exterior motives to kill their classmates. This is an example of pure psychosis and a superiority complex.
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