20 YEARS OF TEARS
Columbine was only the first of America’s gun horrors AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED
The images are indelible: Children pouring out of school in tears. Anguished parents waiting in a parking lot, hoping their children are among the lucky ones. Pictures of shooters, who look normal — disturbingly normal.
They’re a common sight now — disturbingly common — and we’ve seen them at a college in Virginia, an elementary school in Connecticut and a high school in Florida, to name some of the bloodiest school shootings.
This horror began 20 years ago at a high school in Littleton, Colo., just outside of Denver, when two students carried out their deadly rampage. From that day on, parents never felt the same about the safety of their kids in school, and the word “Columbine” became synonymous with tragedy.
Frank DeAngelis was in his third year as principal at Columbine High School in 1999. Twenty years after the attack — in which 12 students and a teacher were killed and 24 others were injured — DeAngelis recalls how few of the security measures that are so common to today’s schoolchildren were available to him. One police officer was assigned to the school. It conducted only mandatory fire drills.
Only two security cameras surveilled the campus. “We had one (camera) that went out to the student parking lot because there was some vandalism,” DeAngelis said. “And then I had a camera in the cafeteria because kids were leaving a mess in the cafeteria.”
The April 20, 1999, killings ushered in an era in which school shootings are sadly too common. A recent analysis found that America has seen more than 700 shooting incidents on school grounds in the past 20 years. The deadliest ones include Virginia Tech in 2007, Sandy Hook in 2012 and Parkland, Fla., in 2018.
While school buildings have become physically safer in the past 20 years — featuring remote-controlled door locks, metal detectors, bulletproof glass doors and other sophisticated security measures — experts and parents say schools are not actually safer than they were on the day of the attack.
Marsha Levick, co-founder of the Juvenile Law Center, finds that turning schools into high-security facilities and training children for active shooter scenarios have created “a false level of security.”
“Kids are doing all kinds of crazy drills,” she said. “We are creating a generation in which we are making fear and concern for public safety part of their daily lives.”
In the 2015-2016 school year, the most recent period for which data is available, about 95% of schools had drilled students on lockdown procedures, according to a report released this month by the National Center for Educational Statistics. Critics say the practice can provoke anxiety or even traumatize children.
Levick said that school districts have been forced to take dollars from counseling to fund physical security measures and active shooter training.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of one counselor per 250 students.
But the national average, as of 2016, was one counselor per 464 students.
Meanwhile, the country’s 10 largest school districts, including New York City, employ more security officers than counselors, according to an analysis by The 74, a nonprofit news website.
Counseling might be part of the answer to the problem.
A study issued in February and co-authored by Jillian Peterson, a criminology and criminal justice professor at Hamline University in Minnesota, found that more than 90% of school shootings are carried out by current or former students. She argues that lockdown drills don’t stop many student-led attacks because the attackers know how to get through security and get around during a lockdown.
“We’re kind of handing the script to kids and making them rehearse it,” she said.
Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who killed themselves after the attack, were seniors at the school.
While school shooting data can be inconsistent depending on the methodology used, one frequently-cited organization, the NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security, reports 730 shooting incidents on U.S. school grounds since 1999.
The analysis found that 2018 was the worst year for school shootings in modern history, with 97 incidents. So far this year, 22 incidents have been reported, about 10 behind 2018’s pace.
The Columbine gunmen obtained their weapons from a friend. Shooters in several other school killings also did not buy their firearms. Adam Lanza, who carried out the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, used his mother’s weapons.
Levick argues that gun control measures could prevent troubled young people from getting their hands on deadly weapons. She said it’s “silly” to think that restricting access to automatic and semiautomatic weapons wouldn’t reduce the risk of school shootings.
“The idea that we should, in everyday use, have access to weapons of war is really stunning,” Levick said.
Although states like Colorado, New York and Connecticut have implemented some of the strictest gun laws in the country since Columbine, the federal government has done little to curb access to firearms. Florida, meanwhile, took a different and more controversial approach following last year’s Parkland school shooting. State legislators voted this week to allow classroom teachers to be armed if they undergo training.
But armed or not, teachers work in a different world today.
Social media was in its infancy at the time of Columbine. Now there are places throughout the web allowing anger to foment into murderous rage.
Levick and DeAngelis worry that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have made cyberbullying more common and allowed hateful ideologies like white nationalism to influence teenagers.
“A lot of radicalization is really happening online,” Levick said. “It’s not unreasonable to extrapolate that social media can have a detrimental effect on students.”
It all started 20 years ago, and it hasn’t stopped.