On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed twelve fellow students and a teacher
and wounded twenty others before turning their guns on themselves.
The planned attack
That morning, seniors Eric Harris (1981–1999) and Dylan Klebold
(1981–1999) went to school clad in black trench coats. Beneath their
coats, they had hidden many weapons, including an assault rifle, sawedoff shotguns, handguns, and homemade grenades. At 11:15 AM, Klebold
and Harris opened fire in the parking lot, shooting randomly at fleeing
students. Walking slowly, they made their way into the building, leaving
behind the bodies of those they had shot. Once inside, they entered the cafeteria, and one of them tossed a pipe bomb into the room. Both attackers began firing on the students, who fled in panic.
Throughout the building, students scrambled for hiding places in
closets, bathrooms, and any spots that offered the hope of shelter from
the killers. Some called 911 from cell phones. Many managed to escape
the building. The sheriff’s deputy on duty full-time at the school radioed
for backup.
In the next few minutes, the two killers attacked the high school’s
choir room, auditorium, gymnasium, and library. Students later reported
that Harris and Klebold entered the library and demanded that all
“jocks” stand up. Then they shot them.
The shooting stops
The police arrived within twenty minutes, and they found several explosive devices around the school building. At noon, forty-five minutes after
the shooting began, ambulances began transporting wounded students
to hospitals as the parking lot filled with bomb teams, SWAT teams, fire
trucks, and paramedic units. At about 12:30 PM, the shooting stopped.
By the time it was over, the gunmen had killed thirteen people,
twelve students and a teacher. Then, in the library, Klebold and Harris
shot themselves. Their bodies were not located until 4:30 that afternoon.
The killers
Klebold and Harris had come from upper-middle-class families.
Classmates remembered them as fairly normal, though aloof. In recent
months, the boys had developed a number of disturbing interests, including Nazism (the day of the shooting was the 110th anniversary of
the birth of Nazi Germany leader Adolf Hitler), firearms, and an extreme
version of alternative heavy-metal music. Klebold and Harris had spent
countless hours on the Internet. Their parents apparently did not notice
their computer usage or their recent interest in guns and white supremacist ideology (the belief that white people should rule over people of
other races). As a result, some people perceived the parents as neglectful
and they would later become the focus of lawsuits associated with the
shooting.
The Columbine shooting was not the worst in American history.
The worst school massacre occurred long before, in Michigan in 1927, when a deranged school board treasurer killed thirty-eight students and
six adults with explosives. Nor was Columbine to be the last school
shooting in the United States, as witnessed in 2007 at Virginia Tech in
Blacksburg, Virginia (among other similar incidences), when a lone
emotionally disturbed gunman killed thirty-two people and wounded
many more. Columbine stood out because it took the country by surprise. In the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, most middle-class parents felt
safe when their children were at school. After Columbine, parents and
school personnel across the country were startled into discussions about
how to prevent another such tragedy, and steps were taken to provide
better communication and counseling. While the discussions led to improved safety on the one hand, there was bad news as well. Columbine
almost immediately provoked copycat killings by students around the
nation who had seen all the attention given to the dead killers and
wanted their own moment of celebrity.