columbine high school shooting essay

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Columbine Shooting

By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 29, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

The Columbine shooting on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, occurred when two teens went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others, before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide.

The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S. history and prompted a national debate on gun control and school safety, as well as a major investigation to determine what motivated the gunmen, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17. Subsequent school shootings, including at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, continue to raise questions about school safety and gun control in the United States.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris

At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in trench coats, began shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School, located in a suburb south of Denver. The pair then moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library.

By approximately 11:35 a.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 other people. Shortly after 12 p.m., the two teens turned their guns on themselves.

Investigators later learned Harris and Klebold had arrived in separate cars at Columbine around 11:10 on the morning of the massacre. The two then walked into the school cafeteria, where they placed two duffel bags each containing a 20-pound propane bomb set to explode at 11:17 a.m.

The teens then went back outside to their cars to wait for the bombs to go off. When the bombs failed to detonate, Harris and Klebold began their shooting spree.

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Columbine Shooting Victims

Victims of the Columbine shooting include Cassie Bernall, 17; Steven Curnow, 14; Corey DePooter, 17; Kelly Fleming, 16; Matthew Kechter, 16; Daniel Mauser, 15; Daniel Rohrbough, 15; William "Dave" Sanders, 47; Rachel Scott, 17; Isaiah Shoels, 18; John Tomlin, 16; Lauren Townsend, 18, and Kyle Velasquez, 16.

She Said 'Yes'

In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims.

It initially was reported that one student, Cassie Bernall, was asked by one of the gunmen if she believed in God. When Bernall allegedly said, “Yes,” she was shot to death. Her parents later wrote a book titled She Said Yes , honoring their daughter.

However, it later was determined the question was not posed to Bernall but to another student who already had been wounded by a gunshot. When that victim replied, “Yes,” the shooter walked away.

Columbine Shooting Investigation

Subsequent investigations determined Harris and Klebold chose their victims randomly, and the two teens originally had intended to bomb their school, potentially killing hundreds of people.

There was speculation that Harris and Klebold committed the killings because they were members of a group of social outcasts called the Trenchcoat Mafia that was fascinated by Goth culture. It also was speculated that Harris and Klebold had carried out the shootings as retaliation for being bullied.

Additionally, violent video games and music were blamed for influencing the killers. However, none of these theories was ever proven.

Through journals left behind by Harris and Klebold, investigators eventually discovered the teens had been planning for a year to bomb the school in an attack similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing .

Investigative journalist Dave Cullen, author of the 2009 book Columbine , described Harris as “the callously brutal mastermind,” while Klebold was a “quivering depressive who journaled obsessively about love and attended the Columbine prom three days before opening fire.”

Did you know? The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place on April 16, 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself at Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Columbine Massacre Aftermath

In the aftermath of the shootings, many schools across America enacted “zero-tolerance” rules regarding disruptive behavior and threats of violence from students. Columbine High School reopened in the fall of 1999, but the massacre left a scar on the Littleton community.

Mark Manes, the man who sold a gun to Harris and bought him 100 rounds of ammunition the day before the murders, was sentenced to six years in prison. Another man, Philip Duran, who introduced Harris and Klebold to Manes, also was sentenced to prison time.

Some victims and families of people killed or injured filed suit against the school and the police; most of these suits were later dismissed in court.

The list of school shootings in the United States grows longer every year, and includes the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, the Robb Elementary shooting in 2022, the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018, the Santa Fe High School shooting in 2018 and the Umpqua Community College shooting in 2015, among others.

Gun control and disagreements over the interpretation of the Second Amendment continue to be a controversial issue in the United States, where 45,000 people die from gun-related injuries each year.

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The lasting legacy of the columbine massacre.

It’s been 24 years since two teenagers opened fire at a high school in Littleton, Colorado.

Go beyond the headlines.

Your weekly briefing on gun violence..

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Twenty-four years ago today, two teenagers opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and killed 12 students and one teacher. The massacre shocked a nation that has now grown accustomed to violence at schools: Since 1999, according to a Washington Post tracker, there have been 377 campus shootings, and more than 349,000 students have experienced gun violence at school. 

Many of those attacks were directly influenced by the “Columbine effect.” Four years ago, Mother Jones reported that at least 100 mass shooting plots and attacks since 1999, including the Sandy Hook and Parkland massacres, were directly influenced by Columbine; that number, which relied on public records, was likely an undercount. But Columbine wasn’t America’s first school attack. Why has it inspired so many mass shooters?

According to criminal justice researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley, Columbine’s potent legacy can be attributed to the dawn of contemporary mass media: It took place during the beginning of the 24-hour news cycle and the “year of the net.” “This was the dawn of the digital age of perfect remembering,” Peterson and Densley wrote for The Conversation , “where words and deeds live online forever.”

“At the time, Columbine was considered a once-in-a-generation type of tragedy — one that few other people in our country would ever have to contend with,” wrote survivor Craig Nason in an essay for NBC Think last year. He continued: “I think about how we vowed to ‘never forget’ Columbine. How we would make sure the next generation would be safer. The opposite has happened. … It is a burden too heavy.”

What to Know Today

ICYMI: As more politicians lose friends and family to gun violence, will it change how they govern? [ The Trace ]

How can Chicago prevent outbreaks of violence among young people? Public safety experts and youth advocates have some ideas — and most of them don’t involve policing. [ WBEZ ] Context: Last summer, teenagers talked to The Trace’s Justin Agrelo about their experience of Chicago’s gun violence crisis, and how they think the city should address it.

Two Texas cheerleaders were shot outside an Austin-area grocery store after one of them mistakenly entered the wrong car. The incident follows two similar high-profile shootings that occurred in the past week: Homeowners shot Ralph Yarl, in Kansas City, Missouri, and killed Kaylin Gillis, in upstate New York, after each victim mistakenly approached a house. [ NBC ]

Seven mass shootings — defined as an incident in which four or more people were injured or killed, excluding the shooter — took place on April 15, the most of any day so far this year. The U.S. has already seen more than 160 mass shootings in 2023, with attacks taking place in almost every type of public and private space. [ CNN / Stacker ]

Gun reform proponents in Congress plan to again push for tougher firearm laws, but they aren’t optimistic that the fight will yield any results. [ The Hill ]

Tennessee lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that would further shield gun companies from civil liability lawsuits; the legislation now heads to Governor Bill Lee. The bill comes as Lee’s administration has been urging the General Assembly to pass a red flag law . In a letter, dozens of Nashville musicians — including Sheryl Crow, Kacey Musgraves, and Jason Isbell — joined the governor in calling for an extreme risk protection order law. [ Associated Press / The Tennessean ]

In Michigan, the Democratic-controlled Legislature sent a red flag bill to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s desk. Whitmer signed legislation expanding background checks and mandating safe firearm storage into law last week. [ Detroit Free Press ]

Family members of children killed in the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde waited more than 12 hours to testify before a Texas House committee on a bill to raise the age to purchase some semiautomatic rifles to 21. [ The Texas Tribune ] Context: Uvalde families have rallied around the push for a raise-the-age law . They view it as a compromise, grounded in the reality that Texas is a gun state.

An Ohio grand jury decided that eight Akron police officers involved in last summer’s killing of Jayland Walker, whom the officers shot 46 times, will not face criminal charges. In response to the decision, Democratic U.S. Representative Emilia Strong Sykes, of Akron, said she will request a Justice Department investigation into the Police Department. [ Akron Beacon Journal ]

Three people, including two teenagers, were arrested and charged with murder in connection to the mass shooting at a Sweet 16 party in Dadeville, Alabama. Per the local district attorney, the teens will be tried as adults. [ USA TODAY ]

A Shooting Survivor Who Refuses to Let a Massacre Define Her : Anne Marie Hochhalter was a Columbine High School junior eating lunch with her friends when two gunmen stormed the lawn. (February 2016)

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Philly’s District Attorney Convicts Cops for Wrongful Killings. Critics Say He’s Driving Up Crime.

Larry Krasner has arrested four city police officers for on-duty killings since 2018, winning two convictions so far, including the city’s first murder conviction for an officer at work.

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Columbine at 20: how school shootings became 'part of the American psyche'

It was an attack that could have been exception. Instead, its brutality has been made routine

W hen the US’s glaring failure to respond to gun violence was spotlighted – again – after 50 people were killed and dozens wounded in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, Tom Mauser looked on in pain.

Not only was the Christchurch attack a brutal reminder of the assault at Columbine high school that left his 15-year-old son, Daniel, dead, in 1999, but New Zealand’s decisive action to ban assault rifles threw into stark relief decades of US inaction.

“In America, we often see ourselves as this great model for the rest of the world in so many arenas, but this is not one of those arenas,” said Mauser. “… We do nothing, we just shake our heads and say our thoughts and prayers and wait for the next one to happen.”

Mauser spoke with the Guardian from Colorado, ahead of the 20th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine high school. The attack on 20 April 1999 saw two boys murder 12 students and one teacher before killing themselves.

It was an attack that could have been exceptional.

Instead, its brutality has been made routine. The series of mass killings that followed Columbine have failed to result in a dramatic change to US gun culture, unlike similar events in comparable countries.

“ It’s not so much the sheer numbers of voters who support the very extreme view of gun rights and are pro-gun, it is more that that group is incredibly mobilized politically,” said Philip Cook, the co-author of The Gun Debate.

“If you ask any of the pro-gun people: ‘have you written to your congressional representative, have you made a contribution, have you gone to a public meeting’ … the answer is more likely to be yes for somebody who is pro-gun.”

Columbine was not the first school shooting in the US, but it was the most deadly since 1966 . The media sprinted into the tempest of confusion and shock, firing out inaccurate reports about a “trenchcoat mafia” and how Marilyn Manson’s music influenced the shooters.

Eventually, the public learned other people bought the shooters’ guns and that their actual goal was to kill hundreds more people with poorly made bombs police found in the cafeteria and parking lot.

In its wake, mass shooter drills became a normal part of the education system. And the federal government froze.

From 1994 until February of this year, not a single gun restriction bill advanced in Congress. The drought ended with a bill to expand federal background checks to all gun buyers and most gun transfers, closing a loophole that allows unlicensed gun sellers to not run background checks. That bill is unlikely to be taken up by the Republican-held Senate, and the president has said he would veto it.

“ The USA is failing to protect individuals and communities most at risk of gun violence, in violation of international human rights law,” Amnesty International warned . “The right to live free from violence, discrimination and fear has been superseded by a sense of entitlement to own a practically unlimited array of deadly weapons.”

Public spaces: from sacred to killing grounds

School shootings are not the leading cause of gun deaths in the US. In 2017, there were 39,773 gun deaths in the US , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – about 60% of those deaths were suicide.

But the idea that public spaces such as schools, churches and music festivals can be turned so quickly into killing grounds is one of the many outliers in the US attitude towards guns.

Last month, a student at Columbine during the attack, Craig Scott, said at an anniversary event that he worried school shootings have become “a part of the American psyche”.

When 10 students and teachers were killed in a shooting at Santa Fe high school in Texas in May 2018, a reporter asked a 17-year-old student, Paige Curry: “Was there a part of you that thought this isn’t real, this wouldn’t happen in my school?”

Curry answered, with chilling calm: “No, there wasn’t. It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like eventually it was going to happen here, too.”

Today’s teenagers were born after Columbine. They were children during Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook . They saw conservative politicians resist change after each attack, tightening the gun lobby’s grip on government, refusing to back even moderate gun reform.

And in 2018, they asked why an atrocity depicted in their textbooks continued to take place.

The February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school , ended the lives of 17 students and staff in Parkland, Florida.

Teenagers at the school broadcast their disgust on social media and to television cameras, spurring the most prominent movement against gun violence in decades.

The students delivered impassioned speeches and challenged critics, while also building up what would be one of the largest student demonstrations in US history – the March for Our Lives . Hundreds of thousands of people gathered at marches and walked out of class, including at Columbine high school, in March 2018 in support of stronger gun control measures.

‘There is hope’

The groundswell of public support wasn’t just in the streets, but also represented in March for Our Lives’ demands, which included universal background checks for all gun sales and a ban on the sale of high-capacity magazines in the US, both of which are supported by a majority of Americans . In the 2018 midterm elections, Democratic candidates were more outspoken about guns, and won.

“There is hope on the part of folks that support reasonable regulation on guns and gun safety,” Cook said. “There has been some shift, maybe partly as the result of Parkland, and the remarkable effectiveness of those students in garnering attention and support.”

Mauser said the Parkland kids have had a “tremendous” impact, particularly in strengthening gun control in Florida. But Mauser has seen so many glimmers of promise before, that each one inspires a breath of caution.

“I really have to add, I’ve seen other things come up in the past. You think you are going to make some progress and it doesn’t sustain itself,” Mauser said. “I think these young people have the capability to keep it sustainable, but they have to keep working at it.”

Mauser knows better than most what it is like to tread through the muck of the gun control fight in the US.

Ten days after Daniel was killed, Mauser joined thousands of others to protest outside the National Rifle Association (NRA)’s annual convention in Denver, 15 miles from Columbine.

The NRA has for decades steered elections towards pro-gun candidates , despite being less financially powerful than other lobbies. It relies on a minority of impassioned individuals to block laws and regulations favored by most Americans.

Mauser for 20 years has come up against that dedicated minority while pushing for stronger gun control in Colorado. At the moment, he is supporting a “red flag” law that allows law enforcement or family to ask a judge to block someone considered to be in danger of harming themselves or someone else from purchasing a gun.

At key moments in these campaigns, Mauser wears the same shoes his son was wearing when he died in April 1999.

But the climate has changed since then, he said, with people who oppose gun restrictions more deeply entrenched than they were in the wake of Columbine, when he was able to speak with Republicans about possible gun restrictions.

“In the case of the red flag law, not a single Republican voted for the bill,” Mauser said. “The level of resistance and the intensity of the opposition has gone up significantly.”

No matter how badly Mauser wishes this all to change, the Columbine anniversary is simply another day without his son.

He and his family will steer clear of public events, instead privately remembering Daniel, a quiet, thoughtful boy who liked BBQ chicken and his dad’s homemade waffles .

“He was extremely shy and yet he chose to join the debate team at Columbine, where he had to get up and talk in front of people,” Mauser said. “That’s been the inspiration for me – if Daniel can do it, as tough as it is to do what I do and to talk about it, he took it on so I can take it on too.”

• US school shootings
• US gun control
• March for Our Lives
• Parkland, Florida school shooting

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Retro Report

20 Years After Columbine, What Have We Learned?

A horrifying mass shooting that unfolded onscreen in real time has become a recurring nightmare with a well-worn script.

By Clyde Haberman

Columbine wasn’t the first. There had been other mass shootings at American schools. One in 1997 killed three students and wounded five others at a high school in West Paducah, Ky. A 1998 massacre at a middle school in Jonesboro, Ark., left five dead and 10 wounded.

But no earlier burst of gun insanity shattered the national psyche like the carnage on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., outside Denver. The very name Columbine — rooted in the Latin word for dove, an enduring symbol of peace — was instantly transmogrified into a metaphor for a nation gone haywire in its embrace of devastating weaponry. Twenty years later, the attack remains as vivid as yesterday for many Americans, and not only because of its appalling casualty count: 13 killed and 21 wounded, excluding the heavily armed shooters, teenage students who took their own lives.

Columbine was more than the deadliest assault till then on a high school in the United States. It was a defining horror of the nascent digital age. Much of it unfolded onscreen in real time. Cowering students used cellphones to report what they had seen or heard. The possible impact that violent video games and internet trawling had on adolescent minds came wrenchingly to the forefront of debate.

In line with its mission of examining the past to try making sense of the present, the Retro Report series of video documentaries recalls Littleton’s nightmare on its 20th anniversary to explore what we have learned about school shootings across the years — and have yet to learn.

Among the unknowns is just how severe the threat is to America’s vulnerable young and their teachers. Some analyses show an increase in Columbine-like episodes, others a decline. Researchers disagree even on methodology. Do you include gang fights in the tally of misery? How about incidents that take place near school grounds but not on them?

But the knowns are self-evident, and unspeakable. From their writings, we know that Columbine became a touchstone for some of this country’s most unhinged. It inspired the armed young men who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 and 26 first graders and their instructors at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. Less clear was its influence on the shooter who took 17 lives last year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Still, the madness spoke for itself.

The derangement extends beyond schools to other venues once considered sanctuaries against a raging world. Concertgoers at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas came under fire in 2017, with 58 of them killed. Houses of worship are no longer havens. Witness the 9 shooting deaths in 2015 at a black church in Charleston, S.C. , the 11 deaths last year at a synagogue in Pittsburgh , the 6 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. , in 2012, and the periodic assaults on mosques, even if none in this country have approached the carnage last month in Christchurch, New Zealand , where 50 Muslims were gunned down at prayer.

For people fearful of falling victim themselves someday, the question is no longer “Why me?” but, rather, “When me?”

Gun Violence Archive , which tracks the mayhem online, defines a mass shooting as one with four or more casualties. Through April 10, the archive had recorded 80 incidents in the United States this year, with at least 103 people killed and 284 wounded. Last year’s numbers were 340 mass shootings — an average of nearly one a day — with at least 373 deaths and 1,347 wounded. The Washington Post calculated earlier this month that in schools alone, in the years since Columbine, more than 223,000 children have been exposed to gun violence during classroom hours. Over the last 50 years, more Americans have been killed by guns (about 1.6 million through homicide or suicide) than in all United States wars combined (about 1.4 million).

By now, mass shootings are so ingrained in the national character that they come with their own well-worn script. Political and religious leaders dutifully send “thoughts and prayers.” News organizations deconstruct the killers’ lives, investigations that invariably boil down to the painfully obvious: these people had come unglued. Television anchors debate whether the shooters should be publicly identified. And the National Rifle Association stays calculatedly quiet for a day or two, then truculently reasserts its absolutist opposition to any form of gun regulation.

There was a time when federal lawmakers were sufficiently sickened by the violence to act. In 1994, Congress passed a law banning assault weapons. But that statute expired 10 years later. Since then, the government has done nothing but gladden the N.R.A.’s heart. Federal law now largely protects the firearms industry from lawsuits, though Sandy Hook families are trying to test the extent and depth of that shield. For its part, the United States Supreme Court has strengthened gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment.

And through it all, death keeps calling. Last month, two teenage Parkland survivors psychically scarred by their ordeal took their own lives , as did the father of a Sandy Hook first-grader who was killed. “He was a brokenhearted person,” said another father who lost a child in the massacre. “As we all are.”

The video with this article is part of a documentary series presented by The New York Times. The video project was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report, led by Kyra Darnton, is a nonprofit media organization examining the history and context behind today’s news. To watch more, subscribe to the Retro Report newsletter , and follow Retro Report on YouTube and Twitter .

Gun Violence in America

Guns in Schools: Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill to allow teachers  and other school staff members to carry concealed handguns on school campuses. The measure, if it becomes law, would require those carrying guns to go through training, but parents would not be notified.

Background Checks Expansion: The Biden administration has approved the broadest expansion of federal background checks in decades to regulate a fast-growing shadow market  of weapons sold online, at gun shows and through private sellers that contributes to gun violence.

A Grieving Mother’s Hope: Katy Dieckhaus, whose daughter was killed in the 2023 Covent School shooting in Nashville, is pleading for compromise with those who see gun rights as sacred .

A Historic Case: On Feb. 6, an American jury convicted a parent for a mass shooting carried out by their child for the first time. Lisa Miller, a reporter who has been following the case since its beginning, explains what the verdict really means .

Echoing Through School Grounds: In a Rhode Island city, gunshots from AR-15-style weapons have become the daily soundtrack for a school within 500 yards of a police shooting range. Parents are terrified, and children have grown accustomed to the threat of violence .

The Emotional Toll: We asked Times readers how the threat of gun violence has affected the way they lead their lives. Here’s what they told us .

Columbine killers’ diaries offer chilling insight

Hundreds of pages of hate-filled diary entries, maps and documents released Thursday offer a chilling insight into the minds of the Columbine High School killers in the days and months before the 1999 massacre.

On a calendar entry dated the day of the attack, April 20, the time 11:10 is written across the top — an approximate reference to when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold pulled out their weapons inside the suburban high school and started firing.

The two killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives in what remains the deadliest school attack in U.S. history.

Elsewhere in the calendar are notations including “get nails” and “get propanes, fill my clips” and “finish fuses.”

The newly released documents include a tirade by Eric Harris in which he wrote that he and Klebold hoped to carry out an even bigger attack. He said that they wanted to torture and kill the family of a former friend and hoped learn enough about bombs to be able to set off hundreds around houses, roads, bridges and gas stations.

“It’ll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together. ... I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” he wrote.

Since the Columbine attack, more than 20,000 documents and videos have been released, and some of the details in the more than 930 pages of documents released Thursday by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office had been reported before.

Videotape not released Several names, some song lyrics and other parts of the documents were blacked out before they were released. Sheriff Ted Mink also decided against releasing videotapes the two gunmen made before the massacre over concerns they could encourage copycat attacks.

Some of the documents include references to graffic video games, such as Duke Nukem and Doom.

In one school paper, Harris writes about Nazism. Another document is an essay he wrote for a court-ordered anger management class he attended after he and Klebold were convicted of breaking into a van in 1998.

“I believe the most valuable part of this class was thinking up ideas for ways to control anger and for ways to release stress in a non-violent manner,” he wrote.

Entries in a journal kept by Harris’ father, Wayne Harris, were also released Thursday. Some addressed threats made by his son against a classmate more than a year before the attack. Brooks Brown reported that Harris had threatened him sometime in early 1998.

“We feel victimized,” Wayne Harris writes in the journal. “We don’t want to be accused everytime something happens. Eric is not of fault. Brooks Brown is out to get Eric. Brooks had problems. ... manipulative con artist.”

Brian Rohrbough, whose son Daniel was among those slain, said he had not yet read the documents. He was struck by the fact that Wayne Harris had kept a diary tracking his son’s problems.

“It tells you this kid was dangerous,” Rohrbough said. “The premise that these are families that didn’t know what was going on in their homes is completely refuted by this journal. They used all the influence they could muster to keep their kids out of trouble.”

Wayne Harris’s attorney did not immediately return a call seeking comment Thursday.

A federal judge years ago threw out lawsuits brought by victims’ families against sheriff’s officials and school administrators over the rampage, suggesting they should have known the teens were a threat.

'Kick natural selection up a few notches' In Eric Harris’s tirade about a bigger attack, first reported in 2001, the teenager wrote that he and Klebold would start by torturing and killing the Brown family.

“Sometime in april me and V (Klebold) will get revenge and will kick natural selection up a few notches,” Harris wrote. “We will be in all black. Dusters, black army pants ...we will have knifes and blades and backup weaponry all over our bodies.”

Remarking on the possibility that he and Klebold would survive the Columbine attack, Harris wrote the two would try to escape to a foreign country where they couldn’t be extradited.

“If there isnt such place then we will hijack a hell of a lot of bombs and crash a plane into NYC with us inside (f)iring away as we go down. just something to cause more devistation.”

Authorities had disclosed the diary’s reference to a New York City crash shortly after the school shooting.

The documents were released after The Denver Post sued to force their release. The Colorado Supreme Court left the decision up to the sheriff’s office, and the Harris and Klebold families did not challenge the decision.

The Journal of the NPS Center for Homeland Defense and Security

Examining Trends, Impacts, Drivers, and Policy Implications of Active School Shooter Incidents: A Research Overview

By Mollie Mercado

In the context of alarming trends in school shootings and mass shootings experienced today, school districts, practitioners and policymakers need to adapt to combat this evolving threat. To understand the gaps in existing research, it is necessary to examine the trends, drivers, impacts, and policy implications of active shooter incidents. This essay offers a review of recently published academic research on active shooter incidents, with a focus on school shootings. The first section highlights publications on drivers and impacts of active shooter incidents. The second section reviews some of the latest scholarly evaluations of policies put in place to counter school shootings and mass shootings broadly.

Suggested Citation

Mercado, Mollie. “Examining Trends, Impacts, Drivers, and Policy Implications of Active School Shooter Incidents: A Research Overview.” Homeland Security Affairs: Pracademic Affairs 3, Article 3 (Sept, 2023). www.hsaj.org/articles/22337.  

Active school shooting trends.

Active school shooting incidents remain a major threat to homeland security and public safety in the United States. The term “active school shooter” is defined as  the act of an individual’s firearm being brandished, fired, or when a bullet hits school property for any reason regardless of the number of victims, time of day, day of week, or motivation. [1] During the first ever recorded attack in 1767, four Lenape American Indian men entered a school in present day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, which resulted in eleven deaths and two injured. [2] 255 years later, the number of school shootings has exploded. In 2022 alone, there were 302 school shootings, a 90.40% increase from 2000. [3] Since 1970, over 2,232 active shooter incidents have occurred within a K-12 school environment and disturbingly, over 1,554 K-12 school shootings have been recorded since 2000. [4] The tragic school shooting incident that set a foundational need for stricter school security is the 1999 Columbine High School shooting which killed thirteen people and injured twenty-four others. [5] Since 2020, a total of 681 school shootings have been recorded which marked the highest increase in school shooting incidents recorded in United States history. [6] Though statistically rare in occurrence, more than 331,000 students have fallen victim to gun violence at school since Columbine. [7] On average, the United States has experienced approximately forty-one school-targeted shootings every year since 1970. [8]

Sadly, active shooter incidents in American schools are part of a ubiquitous threat associated with mass shooting and gun violence. Mass shooting is defined as four or more individuals shot and/or killed at the same time and place not including the shooter. [9] In 2022 alone (as of December 31), there were 648 recorded mass shootings in the U.S. [10] This represents a 57.87% increase compared to 2014. Current trends in the number of casualties are also alarming. In 2022, a total of 1,672 children and teens (age 0-17) were killed, and 4,476 children and teens (age 0-17) were injured during mass shooting attacks between January 1 and December 31. [11] These casualty numbers represent a 50.50% increase compared to 2014. In comparative terms, these trends make the United States an outlier among developed countries. Australia, for instance, recorded twelve mass shooting incidents from 1981 to 2013 while the U.S. recorded seventy-three incidents over the same period. [12] In Scotland, 682 cases were recorded over a twelve-year span (2010-2022) in comparison to 599 cases in a single year (2022) in the United States. [13] These comparative differences further highlight the magnitude of mass shooting rates in the U.S. This essay aims to examine the trends, impacts, drivers, and policy implications of active shooters while offering recommendations for prevention practices.

Impacts of Active Shooter Incidents

Beyond the detrimental impacts, existing research has provided evidence showing that school shootings produce additional devastating consequences for American society. For instance, the trauma endured following an event can impact the economic outcomes of students. A recent study found that students exposed to incidents are 6.3 percent less likely to be employed and will lose approximately $115,550 in their total lifetime income. [14] From a social standpoint, the intensity of active shooter drills in schools impacts the psychological well-being of students, faculty, and staff. As these drills increasingly seek to mimic real-life scenarios, participants are exposed to high risks of stress and anxiety. Following a school shooter drill, a study found, students and faculty might respectively see a forty-two and thirty-nine percent increase in stress and anxiety and depression. [15]

Drivers of Active School Shooters

Recent scholarship on the drivers of school shootings and of the broader issue of mass shootings focus on the psychological, socioeconomic, and structural factors that motivate violent behavior and influence the extent to which perpetrators commit violent acts. For instance, a group of researchers recently examined the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and violent behavior displayed by current students. [16] Using the 2013 Minnesota Student Survey, they examined household and family characteristics, with a focus on reported ACEs and negative household and family exposures, to see if exposure to ACEs caused an increase in school violence. They found that fifteen percent of students reported verbal abuse, thirteen percent reported physical abuse, eleven percent reported parental substance abuse, seven percent reported parental intimate partner violence, six percent reported an incarcerated parent, and three percent reported sexual abuse. Furthermore, subgroup participants reported thirty-nine percent of victims, forty percent of perpetrators, and sixty-two percent of perpetrator-victims reported one or more household/family ACE. Out of this subgroup, the rate of on-campus violence increased significantly .

Other recent studies have examined risk factors such as social capital, social ties within the community, income inequality, socioeconomic status, and others to better understand the correlation of risk factors and mass shootings in general. In a study published in 2019, Daniel Kim used geolocated gun homicide incident data and U.S. census data from 2010 to 2015 and found that individuals living alone in poverty-stricken communities with little to no social ties to the community are correlated with a twenty-seven percent increase in gun homicides. Additionally, the increase in income inequality and social mobility were linked to a fifteen percent increase in firearm related mass shootings. A decrease in these social determinants lowered the risk of gun-related homicides by thirty-two percent. The lack of accessible resources and funding in welfare and education over time has contributed to an increase in mass shooting incidents, especially in young children and adults. [17]

In a recent investigation of the link between income inequality and mass shootings, Roy Kwon and Joseph Cabrera analyzed data from the U.S. Census, FBI, and media outlets from 1990 to 2015 across a sample of 3,144 counties in the United States. They found that counties that experienced a decrease in income inequality also experienced a decrease in mass shootings at a rate of six per one thousand counties. Additionally, the researchers found that the increase in income inequality leads to anger and violence, which directly influences the risks of mass shootings. On the latter, counties that experienced an increase in income inequality also experienced an increase in mass shootings at a rate of thirty per one thousand counties. [18]

Recent studies on mass shootings have also examined the role of fear factors. For instance, Maurizio Porfiri and his colleagues were interested in investigating whether individuals purchase firearms for self-protection because they fear being the next victim of a mass shooting. The researchers examined the correlation of mass shooting fear factors and firearm acquisitions at the state level. In a state-level study that relied on databases from the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and FBI reports, they found that media coverage increased fear associated with  the lack of firearm background checks, especially in Connecticut and Hawaii, as no background checks were reported for an extended period which in turn increased firearm purchases for self-protection. [19]

Policy Response and Implications to School Shootings

Research has revolved around the Safe School Initiative. The result of a collaborative effort launched by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education in June 1999 following the attack at Columbine High School, the Safe School Initiative sought to examine school shooting incidents to understand the thinking, planning, and other behaviors engaged in by perpetrators. [20] Since Bryan Vossekuil and their colleagues’ publication of the initial report in 2002, a Safe School Initiative Act has been adopted in numerous local and state jurisdictions in the hopes of providing a safer school environment for all students and faculty by implementing mental health counseling and resources within school districts. [21] To support the overarching goal of the Safe School Initiative Act, threat assessments, which provide information regarding the extent of which a student poses a risk to themselves or others, have slowly been adopted across states. [22] Threat assessments serve as a mitigation tool by identifying leakage and the ability to accurately intercept prior to an incident. As the debate continues as to whether threat assessments should include leakage and mental health together, policy and program implementation have both been vastly understudied and underfunded.

The initial study explored pre-attack behaviors and communications associated with 37 incidents involving 41 perpetrators that occurred in the United States from 1974 through 2000. The findings indicate that, in most of the cases, other individuals (classmates, teachers, friends, parents) reported a noticeable change in perpetrator behavior and even had knowledge that an attack may occur. Additionally, seventy-eight percent of the perpetrators had never received a mental health evaluation despite having a history of exhibiting mental health symptoms and behaviors. [23]

The 2002 Safe School Initiative report brought to light two factors that are still being investigated by academic researchers today. Findings of earlier studies showed that eighty-one percent of cases involved at least one person knowledgeable of the thinking or planning of a school attack by another person. [24] More recent studies have corroborated these results. Researchers Adam Lankford, Krista Adkins, and Eric Madfis for example, found that fifty-nine percent of cases involved two or more people having knowledge of the thinking and planning of a school attack. [25] When examining forty-one reported cases of targeted school violence that occurred in K-12 schools in the U.S. from 2008 to 2017, a 2019 study by the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) found that all cases examined identified some form of leakage either in violent behavior or through verbal communication. [26]

Other studies seem to confirm the idea that proper understanding and management of the leakage phenomenon could help prevent school tragedies. All these studies commonly point to the critical role of leakage in relation to efficient intelligence analysis within local law enforcement agencies. In their studyof Active Shooter Incidents in the U.S. between 2000 and 2013, researchers James Silver, Andre Simons, and Sarah Craun found that out of the thirty recorded active shooter cases in 2017, each perpetrator displayed four to five concerning violent behaviors that were noticeable to others over time, thus leaking their violent intent. In terms of reporting behaviors to law enforcement, the researchers also found responses included fifty-four percent of the population not reporting and forty-one percent reporting behaviors to law enforcement. [27]

The ongoing conversations on the role of leakage suggest that several challenges must be overcome before an instance of leakage can be successfully turned into a prevention tool. First, third parties (e.g., parents, classmates, teachers, and school administrators) must accurately identify cues leaked by the perpetrators. It is thus important, from research and policy standpoints, to shed light on the drivers of and barriers to accurate identification of leaked cues. It should be noted that just because forty-one percent reported violent behaviors, it does not mean the leakage was considered or mitigated against by local law enforcement. While tying together active shooters and the presence of leakage, this problem area could greatly benefit from understanding how reporting leakage in the context of human behavior impacts intelligence gathering operations at the local level and the ability to mitigate against a foreshadowed event.  

Both studies showed that leakage clues were not intercepted due to lack of training, funding, and accountability. In opposition to the supporting arguments, researcher Linda McCash found that school districts in Florida were not in favor of implementing school-based mental health programs due to key challenges such as difficulty determining organizational placement of the program, authority and accountability, organizational support, ongoing funding to maintain the program, and unclear program procedures, thus inferring that there was no governmental guidance on how to adopt and maintain this critical policy to its fullest capability. Aside from the overall difficulty of maintaining such programs, other researchers have questioned the accuracy of threat assessments. [28] Contrasting arguments expressed at the National Summit on K-12 School Safety and Security included the likelihood of targeting groups that are not actual school threats and missing those who fall under the high-risk category. Wrongly targeted groups include children of color, children with disabilities, and low-income families and households. Safety directors who attended the summit also argued that threat assessments should include a whole child approach rather than one that is structured around a mental health emphasis. [29] Threat assessments should not become profiling tools to avoid the potential increase within the school to prison pipeline. An apparent gap within the study of threat assessments includes the lack of data on human behavior and the impacts of leakage. Much of the previous research includes studies pertaining to human perception but does not answer the questions on human behavior in terms of reporting crime, effectively reacting to the threat, and taking a more proactive approach in deterring school shooting events when foreshadowed clues are available.

Some of the research on policy responses to active school shooter incidents have revolved around the provisions of HIPAA’s Privacy Rule. If done diligently, school threat assessments could mitigate against the risk and probability of a school shooter event. Law enforcement organizations can utilize school threat assessments as a proactive prevention tool that models data in real world settings. [30] Research has questioned whether mental health information should be included in assessments but it is presently considered a separate factor.  

As threat assessment teams strive toward accurately identifying leakage, sharing information, and mitigating against potential threats, HIPAA’s Privacy Rule sets boundaries on  under what circumstances protected health information, specifically mental health records, is disclosed to law enforcement. The term “leakage,” is defined as an instance when a perpetrator of school shooting, intentionally or unintentionally, reveals cues to feelings, thoughts, fantasies, and attitudes through verbal or nonverbal communications that may signal an impending act of violence. [31] In the case of a high-risk student, the Privacy Rule authorizes defined medical agencies to disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials without written consent when responding to an off-site medical emergency with the purpose of alerting law enforcement about criminal activity. From an ethical standpoint, professionals are only permitted to disclose information to law enforcement when imminent danger is perceived, and the interception would prevent or lessen the posed threat to the individual or to others. [32] What appears to be lacking within the policy discussion is understanding the barriers between HIPAA and diverse law enforcement ethical standards that limit what investigations take place, roles within investigations, and jurisdictional capabilities. [33] Key conceptual terms, such as imminent danger and criminal activity, are not clearly defined. As definitions may vary across organizations, the criteria to meet the standards of the definitions become unclear and up to interpretation, which can result in missed opportunities, loss of life, and law enforcement prevention and response failures.

In the context of privacy challenges within school threat assessments, researchers Nicole Jones and Angel Gray utilized a case study approach to identify the ethical and legal challenges faced by law enforcement during the investigatory information gathering process in North Carolina. It should be noted that all identification information was redacted from the case study. While focusing on the case background investigation section, the researchers examined a threat assessment that identified a high-risk male student who leaked written detailed plans of a school shooting at his high school. The student also had a repeat history of extreme violence, aggression, involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations, and substance abuse along with numerous psychiatric diagnoses. While conducting interviews, law enforcement experienced a lack of cooperation amongst hospital staff regarding patient health records during all hospitalizations. [34] The researchers found that even though HIPAA’s Privacy Rule permits the disclosure of protected health information to law enforcement, the North Carolina General Assembly enacted a statutory provision that made any confidential medical disclosures to law enforcement where information used could prevent or reduce the imminent danger nonmandatory. [35] It can be suggested from a legal standpoint, that any information obtained by law enforcement outside the scope of public records was considered in violation of HIPAA’s Privacy Rule and North Carolina’s statutory provision, due to the student not meeting the hospital criteria for an evaluation or commitment for treatment. [36] This highlights why medical disclosures to law enforcement are often underreported, as some hospital staff wanted to report concerning behavior but did not in accordance with the statutory provision. It is unclear how imminent danger was defined as there was a detailed plan, previously identified violent history, and extensive mental illness history.

While the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) provided ethical and practical guidelines to threat assessment teams, they also recognized that ethical standards vary by profession. The researchers found that ethically, that state only permits law enforcement to collect information for their investigation from public records to ensure confidentiality. [37] From a law enforcement prevention perspective, it can also be inferred that the ethical and legal challenges combined limited the capabilities of the threat assessment teams’ investigatory capabilities. [38] A possible explanation for the limited capabilities stems from how broadly written the ATAP’s Code of Ethical Conduct is. Broadly defined standards make it unclear what the intended roles of law enforcement are and may be of limited use in making quick-thinking decisions on ethical practices within threat assessments. [39] In essence, because threat assessments are a newly adopted school mitigation approach, law enforcement ethical codes have not adapted to reflect the current threat which contributes to the failures seen in prevention and response efforts.

Recommended Prevention Practices

Over the past two decades, a growing body of literature has identified and challenged the overarching failures seen during previous school shooting events. As the focus has shifted towards implementing threat assessments, missed opportunities have accentuated the negative consequences of ineffective information sharing methods, training, and response efforts. Researchers James Fox and Jenna Savage used the Virginia Tech shooting as a case study to provide recommendations on best prevention practices. The researchers compiled seven recommendations, but only two will be discussed for the purpose of understanding HIPAA, threat assessments, interagency relationships, and crisis communication specifically. In terms of privacy, the researchers recommended that all campus personnel should be trained on HIPAA’s Privacy Rule and its functionality before, during, and after school shooting events. Not being trained on the limits and allowances of the Privacy Rule can cause underutilization of critical information received which can carry a significant loss while at the same time, overreaching can reduce trust, and increase unnecessary student profiling and campus litigation. As HIPAA permits disclosures without consent in extreme cases, there is still confusion regarding when to report extreme violent behavior and what criteria must be met to legally override student privacy. [40] Like the previously mentioned study, there is a lack of defined standards as to what actions constitute exceptions to HIPAA’s Privacy Rule.

From a preparedness standpoint, researchers James Fox and Jenna Savage recommended certifying mutual aid agreements with local health agencies and additional key stakeholders to increase resources and response efforts. As there are currently some mental health resources on college campuses, certifying necessary relationships with external agencies would drastically increase the type of mental health resources available and how quickly they can be drawn upon when needed. [41] It has been suggested in research that establishing effective interagency relationships will support the flow of information sharing, and hopefully encourage reporting to law enforcement. Establishing interagency connections will allow for a more cohesive training and exercise practice where the roles of each responding agency are clearly defined. [42] While the research study could have benefitted from defining what the missed opportunities were in the recommendations, the research still highlights a common gap within HIPAA’s Privacy Rule and its impact on school shooter prevention and response efforts.

The research discussed so far has shown the qualitative findings and recommendations in current research but has overlooked the benefit of presenting quantitative data. The researchers offered recommendations from the Virginia Tech shooting but did not clearly define the missed opportunities that influenced the recommendations made. [43] For instance, they discussed the need to train campus personnel on HIPAA’s Privacy Rule and the exceptions to the policy in imminent situations and to establish interagency relationships with relevant healthcare professionals and external stakeholders but did not discuss the failures noted during the actual event that would have influenced the recommendations provided. [44] This would have made the literature clearer to the audience which  is unfamiliar with the events that took place. As previously mentioned, recommendations were made of seventy percent of the previous reports, but they never provided information on who is included within that seventy percent population. [45] On a broader scale, research within this sector could greatly benefit from quantitative data. While focusing on the overall limitations, it is important to conduct quantitative studies to understand what drives individuals to report crime (or not) to law enforcement in correlation with HIPAA. This will allow researchers to examine specific drivers, impacts, and policy challenges that influence underreporting which in turn, can clarify the limitations to HIPAA during school shooting threat assessments.

While examining school shooting events, researchers Jaclyn Schildkraut and her colleagues utilized a case study approach to examine the events leading up to the Parkland shooting to identify the challenges and failures experienced. Additionally, they used the Path to Intended Violence Model to illustrate the perpetrator’s journey toward violence that foreshadowed the devastating events seen. This model was originally used to assess the behaviors of individuals who had assassinated or were at high-risk of assassinating public figures, but over time, the model found overlapping similarities in pre-attack behaviors by school shooters. The model consists of variables such as grievances, ideation, research, planning, preparation, breaching, and policy implications— all of which are considered factors in school threat assessments. [46] As various sources were utilized for the case study, the perpetrator’s mental health records were not included in accordance with HIPAA, but HIPAA’s Privacy Rule was overlooked in terms of the reporting to law enforcement in imminent events prior to the incident. In fact, the model found that approximately thirty people had first-hand knowledge of the violent behavior prior to the shooting but were downplayed as jokes and never followed up on by local or federal law enforcement agencies. [47] A possible explanation could be due to the bystander effect, in that individuals were not taking responsibility since an abundance of others were aware of the displayed behaviors at the same time, or they feared the potential consequences of reporting and the perpetrator finding out.

To summarize the findings from the model, the researchers found the Parkland perpetrator experienced chronic and prolonged stressors that intertwined with a lack of social support, which exacerbated the effects of the event. In terms of ideation, the perpetrator was leaking suicidal tendencies that date back to his childhood. During the research and planning phase, the perpetrator had the school bell schedule on his phone which showed the times students were in the classroom versus in the hallway changing classes. He also researched combat breathing techniques. Preparation is mostly uniform across school shooting events in that it includes obtaining a firearm(s) and ammunition to carry out the act. In this case the perpetrator used an AR-15 with numerous rounds of ammunition that were purchased over time. Lastly, there was no prior breaching involved, meaning that officials did not find the perpetrator conducting a dry run of the attack. [48] The summarized findings highlight the substantial evidence that support the value of threat assessments and their ability to identify and mitigate against potential catastrophic events. While applying what has been discussed about school threat assessments and HIPAA’s Privacy Rule, it can be presumed that the overall missed opportunity was the nonexistent threat assessment and the lack of reporting from medical professionals to intercept the events that occurred. Given the detailed analysis of events leading up to the school shooting, there is a disconnect between law enforcement and medical professionals. The recommendations offered by researchers James Fox and Jenna Savage can be applied to the Parkland case while focusing on training, education, and interagency relationships. The research did not give reasons to why only HIPAA was applied in terms of confidentiality and not the Privacy Rule, considering the extensive mental health history that was later publicized after the shooting and trial, thus furthering the gap in understanding the drivers and causes of underreporting.

School shootings highlight the impact of chaos on individuals and systems to effectively execute plans. As most school shooting cases to date contained leaked evidence that foreshowed the incident along with extensive mental illness histories, the abruptness of each case has also identified its negative impact on preparedness, prevention, and response efforts to reduce the number of lives lost. The challenges discussed surrounding HIPAA’s Privacy Rule showcase a small portion that contribute to the overarching problem: the unclear understanding of underreporting and the lack of accountability taken due to broadly written policies.

Unfortunately, active school shooting incidents are a unique issue growing rapidly in the United States today. The alarming trends dating back to the Columbine school shooting in 1999, highlighted the significant and impactful increase of such catastrophic events. Examining the drivers and impacts of school shootings provides researchers with a comprehensive discussion of active school shooter incidents and the areas needed to be further explored in future research. Both the Safe School Initiative Act and HIPAA’s Privacy Rule were discussed to highlight the successes and failures of current policy enacted to mitigate against the next school shooting incident. Collectively, this research overview provided a review of research and studies that highlight critical components for understanding the active school shooter phenomenon. For instance, school shootings have increased 90.40% from 2000 to 2022. [49] Research has also examined the impacts of school shootings and found a loss of total income earned over a lifetime, and increased psychological effects such as stress and anxiety. Research has also found  psychological, socioeconomic, structural factors that correlate with increased trends over time. Empirical studies are needed to advance the literature on active school shooters to influence policies to better protect our schools and students.

About the Author

Mollie Mercado is a current doctoral student pursuing her Doctor of Science in Civil Security, Leadership, Management, and Policy at New Jersey City University. Her research focus is on active school shooter training and the cognitive framework of human behavior and reporting leakage to law enforcement to mitigate against future school shootings. Mollie is also a graduate of Purdue University where she received her Master of Science in Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Her capstone research interest included understanding the effectiveness and cost benefits of green mitigation strategies versus structural controls for coastal communities. She may be reached at [email protected] .

[1] .  David Riedman, “Active Shooter Situations at K-12 Schools: 1970-2022,” K-12 Shooting Database, accessed March 1, 2023, https://k12ssdb.org/active-shooter .

[2] . Ibid.

[3]. Jillian Peterson, “Mass Public Shootings in the United States, 1966-Present,” The Violence Project Mass Shooting Database, last modified March 2021, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database/ ; Riedman, “Active Shooter Situations 1970-2022.”

[4] . Riedman, “Active Shooter Situations 1970-2022.”

[5] . Ibid.

[6] . Ibid.

[7] . Cox et al., “338,000 Experienced Gun Violence.”

[8]. Riedman, “Active Shooter Situations 1970-2022.”

[9] . “Total Number of GV Deaths- All Causes,” Gun Violence Archive, last modified March 8, 2023, https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls  .

[10] . Ibid.

[11] . Ibid.  

[12] . Bricknell et al., “Mass Shooting and Firearm Control: Comparing Australia and the United States,” Australian Institute of Criminology, accessed October 25, 2022, https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-06/draft_of_trends_issues_paper_mass_shootings_and_firearm_control_comparing_australia_and_the_united_states_submitted_to_peer_review.pdf .

[13] . “Recorded Crimes and Offenses Involving Firearms, Scotland, 2018-19 and 2019-2022.” Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans, last modifiedOctober 27, 2022, https://www.gov.scot/publications/homicide-scotland-2019-2020/pages/5/ .

[14] . Cabral et al., 2022, “Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes,” NBER Working Paper 28311, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA.   

[15] . El Sherif et al., Impacts of School Shooter Drills on the Psychological Well-Being of American K-12 School Communities: A Social Media Study,” Humanities & Social Science Communications 8, no: 1 (2021): 1-14, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00993-6 .

[16] . Forster et al., “Adverse Childhood Experiences and School-Based Victimization and Perpetration,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 35, no. 3-4 (2020): 662-681, https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260517689885 .

[17] . Daniel Kim, “Social Determinants of Health in Relation to Fire-Arm Related Homicide in the United States: A Nationwide Multilevel Cross-Sectional Study,” PLOS Medicine 16, no. 12 (2019): 13, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002978 .

[18] . Roy Kwon and Joseph F. Cabrera, “Income Inequality and Mass Shootings in the United States,” BMC Public Health 19, no. 1 (2019): 4, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7490-x .

[19] . Porfiri et al., “Self-Protection Versus Fear of Stricter Firearm Regulations: Examining the Drivers of Firearm Acquisitions in The Aftermath of Mass Shootings,” Patterns 1, no. 6 (2020): 9-10, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.100082 .

[20] . Vossekuil et al., “The Final Report and Findings of The Safe School Initiative: Implications for The Prevention of School Attacks in the United States,” U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs, last modified July 2004, https://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf .  

[21] . Rebecca G. Cowan and Rebekah F. Cole, “Understudied and Underfunded: Potential Causes of Mass Shootings and Implications for Counseling Research,” Journal of Social Change 12, no. 1 (2020): 128, https://doi.org/10.5590/JOSC.2020.12.1.10 .

[22] . Kingston et al., “Building Schools’ Readiness to Implement a Comprehensive Approach to School Safety,” Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review 21, no. 4 (2018): 436, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-018-0264-7 .   

[23]. Vossekuil et al., “Final Report of Safe School Initiative,” 21. 

[24] .  Vossekuil et al., “Final Report of Safe School Initiative,” 21. 

[25] . Lankford et al., “Are the Deadliest Mass Shooting Preventable?” 330.

[26] . Alathari et al., “Protecting America’s Schools: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Targeted School Violence,” United States Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, last accessed March 1, 2023, https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/Protecting_Americas_Schools.pdf .

[27] . Silver et al., “A Study of Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States Between 2000 and 2013,” accessed March 1, 2023, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/pre-attack-behaviors-of-active-shooters-in-us-2000-2013.pdf/view  .

[28] . Linda McCash, “Mental Health Services in Schools: A Qualitative Analysis of Challenges to Implementation, Operation, and Sustainability,” Psychology in Schools 42, no. 4 (2005): 365, https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20063  .

[29] . Mark Keierleber, “Can Educators and Police Predict the Next School Shooter?” The74, last modified November 2, 2022, https://www.the74million.org/article/can-educators-and-police-predict-the-next-school-shooter/  .

[30] . Nicole T. Jones and Angel E. Gray, “Threat Assessment and Management: Identifying the Ethical and Legal Challenges within a Law Enforcement Setting,” Journal of Threat Assessment and Management 7, no. 1-2 (2020): 98, https://doi.org/10.1037/tam0000145 .

[31] . Adam Lankford, Krista Grace Adkins, and Eric Madfis, “Are the Deadliest Mass Shooting Preventable? An Assessment of Leakage, Information Reported to Law Enforcement, and Firearm Acquisition Prior to Attacks in the United States,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 35, no. 3 (2019): 316, https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986219840231 ; Schildkraut et al., “Parkland Mass Shooting,” 1.

[32] . “Disclosures for Law Enforcement Purposes: When does the Privacy Rule Allow Covered Entities to Disclose Protected Health Information to Law Enforcement Officials, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, last modified December 28, 2022, https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/505/what-does-the-privacy-rule-allow-covered-entities-to-disclose-to-law-enforcement-officials/index.html .   

[33] . Jones and Gray, “Threat Assessment and Management,” 99-101.

[34] . Ibid., 105.

[35] . U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, “Disclosures for Law Enforcement.”. Jones and Gray, “Threat Assessment and Management,” 106.

[36] . Jones and Gray, “Threat Assessment and Management,” 106-107.

[37] “Disclosures for Law Enforcement Purposes,” U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

[38] . Jones and Gray, “Threat Assessment and Management,” 106-107.

[39] . Ibid.,100.

[40] . James Alan Fox and Jenna Savage, “Mass Murder Goes to College: An Examination of Changes on College Campuses Following Virginia Tech,” American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 10 (2009): 1472, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764209332558 .

[41] . Ibid., 1472.   

[42] . Ibid., 1472.   

[43] . Fox and Savage, “Mass Murder Goes to College,” 1472. 

[44] . Ibid.,1472. 

[45] . Ibid., 1472. 

[46] . Schildkraut et al., “The Parkland Mass Shooting and the Path to Intended Violence: A Case Study of Missed Opportunities and Avenues for Future Prevention,” Homicide Studies , (2022): 2, https://doi.org/10.1177/10887679211062518

[47] . Schildkraut et al., “Parkland Mass Shooting,” 6.

[48] . Schildkraut et al., “Parkland Mass Shooting,” 2-3.

[49] . Peterson, “Mass Public Shootings in the United States, 1966-Present,”

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The school shooting generation grows up

On the 10th anniversary of Sandy Hook, a look at the survivors of some of the earliest school shootings

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Part of the Memory Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

The details are embedded in Sam Leam’s memory, even though it happened more than 30 years ago, when he was just a kid. Recess on a chilly January day. Waiting with friends by the tetherball courts for a chance to play. A sound like the crack of fireworks, and a simple thought running through his head: It’s too early for Chinese New Year . Plugging his fingers in his ears. His classmates running and screaming. Following them into the school, and watching a panicked teacher drag students into his room. The teacher shutting the door on him. Continuing down the hallway. Falling, and being unable to get up. Crawling down the hall. Another teacher closing her door. Reaching his classroom, where his teacher pulled him in. Another kid, telling Sam that he’d been shot.

Leam was 7 when a man brought a semi-automatic weapon to Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, killing five children who were immigrants from Cambodia and Vietnam, and injuring about 30 others. Leam was one of them, shot three times, twice in the buttocks and once in his arm. The shooting took place in 1989. At the time, mass shootings at schools were incredibly rare. Leam couldn’t have known that tragedies like the one he experienced would, a decade later, be a horrible national trend, and that while uncommon , they would only continue, becoming more frequent in the decades after. At the time, he was just a kid, struggling to make sense of what happened.

It wasn’t easy. “My mom, coming from the killing fields of Cambodia and surviving her own trauma, didn’t want to talk about it. I remember asking her certain things about the school shooting,” he said, but “it was traumatizing for her, too.”

The kids who lived through the start of the school shooting era have grown up. Most of them came of age in the late ’90s and the 2000s, when mass shooters started showing up in schools in Pearl, Mississippi; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Springfield, Oregon (though some, like Leam, survived them even earlier). Now adults in their 30s and 40s, many with children of their own, they are navigating a world in which what happened to them was not an anomaly but the beginning of a recurrent feature of American life. As children, they practiced tornado and fire drills at their schools. Because of what happened to them, their kids have active shooter drills, too.

There’s no real guidebook for recovering from what they experienced. What distinguishes the thousands of survivors of the early wave of school mass shootings from those who came after is that they experienced those shootings in a world wholly unprepared to deal with the aftermath. Few got the mental health treatment now considered necessary for survivors of mass violence. As a result, many were left on their own, to process their trauma in the countless years — and school shootings — since.

When Leam came back to school after the shooting, he remembers, a group of Buddhist monks were there to lead a cleansing ceremony in the cafeteria. A therapist used a large teddy bear with a moving mouthpiece to speak to him. He was comforted by it, and by the chance to say that he was afraid of the spirits that he worried might now be haunting the school. Beyond that, he didn’t receive any formal counseling for years.

His experience was not unusual. Missy Jenkins Smith was 15 years old when a classmate opened fire at her high school, in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. Jenkins Smith, who had just left her morning prayer circle, was shot and paralyzed. The shooting at Heath High School was among the first to receive widespread media coverage in the cable news era; three people were killed, and five were injured.

Jenkins Smith received thousands of letters and gifts from well-wishers around the world, which helped her feel supported in her recovery. There were specialists at the hospital who worked with her to adapt to using a wheelchair. But, she said, “I didn’t have anyone who focused on the fact that I saw someone get shot in the head.” Her twin sister, who also survived the shooting, tried group counseling, but the other children in the group were dealing with different problems (a parent making them practice piano when they didn’t want to, for example), which made sharing her own experiences feel absurd.

Instead of seeing a professional, Jenkins Smith and a few of her friends started an informal therapy group, supervised by their guidance counselor. They held sleepovers and created a safe space to talk about their memories. They stopped, 10 months after the incident, when the shooter pleaded guilty but mentally ill and was sentenced. His plea, they felt, seemed like a logical end point.

Even when schools had counselors on hand after a shooting, the survivors often didn’t feel comfortable using them. “I refused to see a counselor,” said Kristen Dare, who was 16 in 2001 when a classmate opened fire at her school in Santee, California. “I refused to talk about it. I didn’t want to open up.” Her peers, she realizes now, were struggling, too. The cultural understanding of mental health was totally different 20 years ago; the importance of seeking professional help wasn’t as widely acknowledged as it is now.

There was also a profound sense of alienation that teenagers felt then, trying to speak with therapists about an experience that was most likely new to them, too: How can I explain this to an adult who has no idea what I’ve been through?

If you, your child, or anyone you know is anxious, depressed, upset, or needs to talk, there are people who want to help.

The Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology has information on child emotional symptoms and disorders — and the evidence-based therapies that can help. The American Psychiatric Association has information on the treatment of trauma-related disorders, including child trauma.

Crisis hotlines in the US: Crisis Text Line : Text CRISIS to 741741 for free, confidential crisis counseling The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline : 1-800-273-8255 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration : 1-800-662-4357

Outside the US: The  International Association for Suicide Prevention  lists a number of suicide hotlines by country. 

“I only wanted to talk to people who understood. I didn’t want to talk to people who didn’t see what I saw or understand how I felt,” Dare said. “I found it more therapeutic to be among my peers who had the same understanding as me.”

Heather Martin, who survived the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 by hiding in a teacher’s office with her classmates, felt the same way. “I didn’t want to be around people who hadn’t gone through it,” she said.

I wanted to reach out to the adult survivors of school shootings because I have something in common with them. When I was in sixth grade, a student from my school brought a gun to a dance. He killed one of our teachers and wounded three other people. It happened in 1998 — a few months after the shooting in West Paducah, and almost exactly a year before Columbine — at which point our town’s tragedy was swept away in the public consciousness by other, even deadlier acts of violence.

I did not witness the shooting firsthand, but I was standing right next to the dance hall where the shooter was, and had to run and take cover in a concession stand when the shooter came outside with the gun. I crammed in with other students, crouched down on the ground, until an adult came and told us we were safe. Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about what happened, and about other kids who had these experiences. Back then, the phenomenon seemed so new that we didn’t have the language to discuss it. Talking to adult survivors was a chance to learn about their experiences. It was also an opportunity to better understand my own.

Because of my distance from what happened, I’ve never thought of myself as a survivor; to me, it would feel insulting to the students more directly affected. Some of those I spoke with also didn’t recognize themselves as victims who might be in need of help. Each shooting created concentric circles of trauma. Often, the further out someone was, the less justified they felt seeking treatment.

Hollan Holm was in the same prayer circle as Jenkins Smith in West Paducah, and he was shot in the head, though his injuries weren’t life-threatening. In the days following the incident, he remembers thinking that he needed to get back to class sooner than the other students who were more seriously hurt. He was in school again just a few days after the shooting.

Holm and his friend Craig Keene dealt with their injuries in a typical teenage fashion: They made jokes. Of the five students injured who survived the shooting, they were among the least seriously hurt, and dark humor is how they processed it with each other, ranking themselves by the severity of their injuries and teasing each other about it. I spoke to Holm and Keene on the same afternoon in September, and Holm pulled out his 1998 yearbook to read what Keene wrote: “sup number #5 I got an exit [wound]. #4 (craig)”

Keene, though, was unusual among school shooting survivors of the era: He recognized that he was struggling, and sought help. “I had this huge bandage that covered half my neck; it was like a highlighter for ‘the kid who was shot.’ While I had that bandage on, things went really well,” Keene said. “After that came off, people kind of stopped asking and caring, and that’s when things got pretty rough for me mentally. I felt invisible.” He lost interest in sports and had difficulty sleeping — he couldn’t shake the sense that he was still in danger. He doesn’t remember much of the details about those early therapy sessions, but he is certain that they helped.

For Holm, it would be decades before he sought treatment. “I guess I wasn’t injured enough to justify going to a trauma counselor, which is just kind of insane and sad,” Holm said, reflecting on his attitude at the time. He remembers going to see his pastor once to discuss it. “It was really grossly inadequate. That’s what you get when you let a 14-year-old boy lead his own mental health response to a crisis.”

Jenkins Smith doesn’t remember there being much conversation about what happened outside of her group. She got a sense of why when she connected with classmates at her 20-year high school reunion. “They felt like for them to have a problem was ridiculous because there were people that were worse than them.” Jenkins Smith felt tremendous sympathy for them, and then she felt something unexpected. “I felt kind of lucky,” she said. “Because I was a victim, because I was injured, it did give me that ticket to heal.”

Each survivor was trying to make sense of an experience with mass tragedy with a brain that was still developing. They’d spend years processing and reprocessing the trauma as they got older. Experts still don’t have a complete picture of the different ways that brain development can affect the processing of trauma. “As a field, we’re still figuring it out,” said Laura Wilson, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Mary Washington and editor of The Wiley Handbook of the Psychology of Mass Shootings .

Still, the field of psychology has come a long way in understanding how children and teenagers might experience post-traumatic stress. “Young people are in a lot of ways more resilient,” Wilson said, but they also have less life experience to help them make sense of violence, making them more susceptible to destabilizing shifts in their worldview. It might be harder for young people to feel safe again after experiencing a mass shooting.

Mass shooting trauma can be different from the kind of trauma experienced after natural disasters, because the traumatic event was caused by another person. “You have more individuals that may develop something like PTSD, depression, or anxiety following a man-made disaster,” said Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist and professor at Duke University Medical Center and a member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network .

Age also affects how the symptoms of post-traumatic stress might manifest. Younger children might experience sleep disturbances, difficulty focusing, and other troubles at school, while adolescent and young adults may also withdraw from their regular activities and relationships, and engage in more risk-seeking behaviors. Untreated symptoms, Gurwitch said, can lead to a greater risk of addiction and the development of other mental and physical health issues later in life.

Martin was a senior at the time of the Columbine shooting; she and her classmates finished their last few weeks at a nearby school. She eventually went off to college, and didn’t tell people there that she was a survivor of what was then the deadliest school shooting in American history. Still, she couldn’t escape it. Once, during class, a fire alarm went off, and she started crying. Another time, a teacher asked her to write a persuasive essay on gun violence, and when she tried to explain why that might be difficult, the teacher told her she needed to write it or fail the class. She failed, and later dropped out.

“I stopped going to classes, and I started using recreational drugs,” Martin said. “I knew I wasn’t okay on a surface level, but I refused to believe it was because of Columbine.” She went to a few sessions of therapy, and tried to move on with her life. Yet the trauma kept resurfacing. She was triggered by the 9/11 terror attacks and, years later, by the mass shooting at Virginia Tech that killed 32 people. “I was horrified, I cried, I freaked out,” she said. “I felt jealous that nobody would remember Columbine.”

Later, Martin went back to college, graduated, and became a teacher. As an adult, she co-founded a group to help support other survivors of mass shootings. Looking back at it now, she thinks, “I was so desperate for people to know my story and know I wasn’t shot, but I’m struggling. It’s a horrible thing to admit and even recognize in yourself.”

Zach Cartaya, a classmate of Martin’s who hid with her that day, experienced a similar trajectory. “I suppressed it through my college years with drugs and alcohol,” he said. After graduating from college, he started a career in financial services, and he, too, found the aftershocks of the shooting creeping up in unexpected ways. His job required regular meetings in conference rooms. At first, they were fine. Yet over time, he said, “those meetings got harder and harder for me. I hated being in them. My skin started to crawl.”

One day, during a meeting, Cartaya realized he couldn’t breathe. “I got up, jumped the table, ran out the door, got in my bed, and didn’t talk to anyone for three days,” he said. He met with his doctor, who ran a battery of tests to make sure there wasn’t some underlying medical cause. When there wasn’t, the doctor sent him to therapy. Cartaya tried different treatments, including eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) , a form of therapy that has been proven effective for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I’ve come a long way, and managed to keep a lid on it,” he said, but not until after “things got pretty dark and scary.”

The discovery that everything was not okay, that they were still struggling with what happened, came from events large and small. The survivors of the West Paducah shooting felt it when a school 30 miles away in Marshall County, Kentucky, had a shooting in 2018. Those moments of revelation could be more subtle, too. Leam didn’t receive a PTSD diagnosis until four years ago, when a doctor he was seeing for severe back pain suggested he try seeing a therapist.

Another survivor, William Tipper Thomas, who was paralyzed in a school shooting just outside Baltimore, Maryland, in 2004, said a recent small moment — snapping at his sister during a FaceTime call — helped him realize he was still dealing with trauma-related stress. His sister found it so unusual that she drove from her home in Virginia to his place in Baltimore to confront him about it, leading to him seeking treatment. Thomas had never seen a therapist. When the shooting happened, he was an honors student weeks away from graduating and fulfilling his dream of playing college football. Suddenly, he had to orient himself to using a wheelchair. The argument with his sister, he realized, came just after doing a photo shoot on the field of his college alma mater, where he was supposed to have played.

The timing ended up being significant. In May 2021, Thomas realized he’d crossed an important threshold. He was 17 when he was shot, and he’s 35 now. “I’ve spent more time in the wheelchair than I have walking,” he said. He feels that he’s had a certain level of healing, psychologically and emotionally. Being in a wheelchair, though, makes it hard to forget. “I think about it often because I’m constantly reminded of it,” he said. “It’s hard to heal from things that you’re consistently and constantly reminded of.”

Long after Jenkins Smith was released from the hospital, and after her informal therapy group disbanded, reporters continued to reach out to her, eager to track her story of recovery. At times the interest could be overwhelming, but she also found some value in it: Here were adults who were genuinely interested in her experiences and thoughts, providing an open forum for her to discuss what happened. “I started using reporters as counselors,” she said. “It was therapeutic to me, and I really didn’t have that realization that that’s what I was doing with it until later on in life.”

Though I couldn’t exactly relate to her experience, I instinctively understood it. I’ve never found it necessary to seek treatment for what happened on the day of my school’s shooting, but it looms large in my memories. It was my first and most powerful experience with collective trauma. What has helped me process my feelings as an adult has been writing about it, again and again and again . But perhaps nothing was as helpful as talking with these adult survivors.

There was so much overlap in our experiences. To know that others felt like they weren’t impacted directly enough to need help — even some students who had been shot — was both surprising and reassuring. We were all looking back at the ways we tried, as kids, to comprehend the incomprehensible. We were all considering what life was like back then, what’s different now, and what’s stayed the same.

The survivors I spoke with come from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. They grew up in suburbs, rural areas, and cities. Their experiences with guns were mixed. Some, like me , grew up in homes and communities where lots of people owned guns, regardless of their politics. Others had never touched one before. Many, but not all, grew up to favor stricter gun control; a handful of them owned guns themselves. (Leam owns an assault rifle, the kind of weapon he was shot with, but he said he wouldn’t mind if the government banned them.) Dare decided that she doesn’t want guns in her house; Jenkins Smith, despite her initial discomfort, has allowed them because hunting is a part of the culture where she lives, and she wants her children to experience it.

They also had different feelings about how we should discuss the perpetrators of the shootings. Martin asked me not to name the shooters in my article; the media coverage of Columbine focused intensely on the psychology of the shooters, which inspired copycats . Fannie Black, who survived a shooting in 1997 when she was a teen at Bethel High School in Alaska, felt differently. It’s always bothered her that no one ever talked about her school’s shooter when discussing what happened. “No one ever talked about bullying,” she said. She knew the shooter, watched him get bullied, watched him unsuccessfully try to seek help. “This could have been prevented,” she said.

As a teen, Jenkins Smith forgave the boy who shot her. He then proceeded to mail and call her from prison, until her dad called the authorities and told them to make it stop. As an adult, she went to meet with him in prison. She wanted to see what he remembered, and if he was remorseful, though she was almost nine months pregnant at the time and wasn’t sure it was a great idea. He couldn’t remember much, she said, but he did apologize for what he’d done. “I felt like I got what I needed,” she said. “There was no reason for me to talk with him again.”

Many adult survivors have entered the life phase where they are having children. Some have decided not to. “Around the time that it would have made sense for me to have kids,” Cartaya said, “I was realizing I didn’t want to bring children into a world where this stuff was still happening.” Others, though, are now raising kids, some with fellow survivors, in the towns where they grew up. Dare and her husband both attended Santana High School, but they weren’t a couple at the time of the shooting. They didn’t talk much about what happened until it was time for their son to enter high school, and Dare’s husband told her he didn’t want his son to attend their high school, because it would mean too many trips back to a place that was still difficult to visit. “I had no idea it bothered him,” she said. “We had never talked about our experiences of that day.”

Nichole Burcal and her husband are high school sweethearts; they were both in the cafeteria of Thurston High School when their classmate opened fire. Even though they were together, they too had different experiences: Burcal was shot; her husband wasn’t. As one of the injured, she says she received offers of free counseling and scholarships. But he didn’t, she said, “even though we were [both] in the middle of it.” Later, their oldest son attended Thurston High. When it came time to sign him up for cross-country in the school’s cafeteria, she found that she couldn’t do it. “I still can’t go in the cafeteria,” she said, “even 20 years later.”

The impacts of trauma can last a lifetime, but psychologists are much better equipped to deal with young trauma survivors today than they were 20 years ago. “The field of child trauma has grown exponentially over the years, and that’s a good thing because we know more treatments are readily available now for children,” Gurwitch said. Cognitive processing therapy , in which a patient learns to reframe unhelpful thoughts about a traumatic event, and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy have been shown to help children and adolescents recover from traumatic experiences. Parent-child interaction therapy has also proven helpful for young children.

Something else has changed, too: The adult survivors with school-age children have had to process the reality of their children going through active shooter drills. (Research suggests that the drills increase stress and anxiety in students, with little evidence that they’re effective.)

Holm remembered the day his daughter came home from kindergarten and told him and his wife about a drill where they had to turn off the lights and be quiet so the bad guys couldn’t find them. It was the kind of moment, he said, in which “you step outside of yourself and you take a look at your entire life leading up to that moment. It reprioritizes everything. ... This thing that happened to me is now affecting my daughter.”

The following year, when students in Marshall County had a shooting at their school, Holm and other West Paducah survivors met with the students affected, to offer them help. He also wrote an op-ed for his local paper , and started speaking out at rallies for greater gun control. “I was silent for 20 years, and it never went away,” he said, “and these kids kept getting injured and it’s frustrating.” Doing nothing was no longer an option.

Holm wasn’t the only one who took action. After the Aurora, Colorado, shooting in 2012, Martin and another classmate decided to start a group, the Rebels Project , named after the Columbine school mascot, to lend support to and connect with other mass shooting survivors. “When we started, all we knew is that we wanted to help in ways we didn’t have access to in 1999,” Martin said. Since then, the group has met with victims to offer their help and hosts an annual meetup for survivors.

Keene focuses on helping another way. He is a social worker who does therapy with kids, including in his old school district. “Hollan is so outspoken and eloquent, he speaks at rallies, and he’s so good at that,” Keene said of his old high school friend. “The way I deal with it is I pour it into these individuals who are sitting across from me at work.”

There’s been one undeniable difference in the media landscape since the first generation of survivors grew up — young people are more able to make their voices heard about the issue. When Parkland, Florida, students seized on media attention after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to call for greater gun control, “I was extremely proud of them,” said Thomas, who now works as an engineer and started his own foundation aimed at violence prevention for young people in Baltimore.

A few years ago, Leam took his oldest son with him to an event commemorating the 29th anniversary of the Cleveland Elementary shooting. Getting diagnosed and treated for PTSD has helped Leam cope with the loud noises that used to trigger him, and with the pain of seeing his trauma repeated in countless other schools. Before treatment, “I could be driving and break down in tears, just thinking about what these kids are going through over and over again,” he said.

Still, he hasn’t talked to many of his fellow Cleveland survivors about what happened — even at the anniversary event. “I wish we did more back then to talk about it, and the repercussions from it,” Leam said. “Because I think it could have changed my life.”

Marin Cogan is a senior correspondent at Vox.

Will Staehle is an award-winning designer based in Seattle. He was named one of Print magazine’s New Visual Artists and an ADC Young Gun. He has had a solo exhibit at the Type Directors Club.

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Newspaper Article Analysis

A Community ‘Surrounded by love’: With poems and prayers, Denver residents give support after Columbine High shooting:

The article, from The Christian Science Monitor published on April 23, 1999, serves to illustrate the community response following the Columbine High School shooting. It further sheds light on the strength and resilience present within the community. The article begins by highlighting a note someone wrote, reading “‘You have been shattered by their hate. But you are surrounded by our love.”’ This emphasizes the strong sense of community felt by those in Littleton following the disaster. The article states how thousands of Coloradans are gathered on a lawn adjacent to Columbine High School, all sharing “the compelling need to be present here, to help in any way they can”. Further, residents from suburbs on the opposite side of the Denver area came to show their support, showing how the strong sense of community extends beyond Littleton and into neighboring communities. 

Further, the article emphasizes the impact of personal connections within the community response. This is seen through Columbine High School Alumni Sarah Tomicih, whose younger brother was a student at the school at the time of the shooting. Tomicih drove home from her school immediately after hearing the news, and though her brother was safe, she wanted to stay home to be able to help in any way she could. Tomicih emphasized that she wanted to be able to be there and ‘“just listen to anyone who needs to talk about this.”’ This personal connection reflects the strong presence of empathy and solidarity within the community. 

Columbine Tragedy Claims Another Victim

The article ‘Columbine Tragedy Claims Another Victim’ from the Washington Post serves to illustrate the lasting effects of Columbine not only on the survivor’s themselves, but additionally the survivor’s family members, shedding light on the impact the events have had on individuals mental health. The article focuses on Carla Hochhalter, the mother of survivor Anne Marie Hochhlater, who was severely injured in the shooting. Carla Hochhalter committed suicide six months following the shooting, and was “declared dead at the same hospital where her daughter was saved by the heroic work of emergency room doctors.” 

According to friend Connie Michalik regarding Hochhlater’s suicide, “First you’re devastated, then you’re angry, and then you move on to deal with it. She never really left the devastation stage. She was just stuck there.” This illustrates the indirect impacts of Columbine. As Hochhlater’s daughter Anne Marie was severely injured in the shooting and was paralyzed in both her legs, it took an immense toll on Hochhalter, with her constantly worrying about Anne Marie. Michalik further stated “She was just so worried about Anne Marie. How she was going to get around school, how she was going to be able to go to college, how she would be able to drive. She was just so focused on Anne Marie.” 

Hochhlater’s anxiety regarding Anne Marie is representative of the harshly distorted realities many survivors and their families had to face, suggesting how the most difficult aspect of disasters is not the survival of the events, but living and coping with the aftermath of it. Hochhlater’s suicide is just one example of the importance of recognizing and prioritizing mental health awareness and treatment in this disaster. The article does not explicitly mention anything regarding mental health or mental illness, though in an interview done several years later, Anne Marie stated her mother had been struggling with depression prior to Columbine, and that the shooting was not the sole cause of her suicide. The article’s lack of explicit discussion of mental illness serves to illustrate the underlying stigma surrounding mental health, further exhibiting the need for awareness and education surrounding mental health and illness.

Cause & Effect of Columbine Shooting

This essay about the Columbine High School shooting analyzes the complex causes and significant effects of this tragic event. It explores how the combination of individual issues like social isolation and broader societal factors such as easy access to firearms and insufficient mental health resources contributed to the incident. The aftermath led to national debates and substantial changes in policies concerning school safety, mental health support, and gun control laws. Schools implemented measures like zero-tolerance policies and emergency response planning, while mental health awareness and gun control discussions gained prominence. The essay also touches on how Columbine has influenced American culture and continues to serve as a reference point for discussions about violence in schools and the responsibilities of communities. The piece underscores the importance of addressing both immediate and underlying factors to prevent future tragedies.

How it works

On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, became the site of one of the most infamous school shootings in American history. This tragic event not only altered the lives of those directly involved but also had far-reaching effects on society’s approach to school safety, mental health, and gun control laws. The causes of the Columbine shooting are multifaceted, involving complex interactions between individual psychology, societal influences, and systemic failures, while the aftermath has provoked significant changes in public policy and cultural attitudes.

The shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were two seniors at Columbine High School who had planned the attack for over a year. Their motivations have been the subject of extensive analysis and debate, with factors such as social isolation, bullying, and a fascination with violence being cited as possible influences. However, it is the intersection of these personal issues with broader societal and systemic failings that paints a fuller picture of the tragedy’s causes. The easy accessibility of firearms, the lack of mental health resources for young people, and the media’s role in sensationalizing violence all contributed to creating an environment where such a tragedy could occur.

The immediate aftermath of the shooting was marked by grief and shock, but it quickly spurred a national conversation about school safety and gun control. In response, schools across the United States implemented new policies such as zero-tolerance approaches to bullying and violence, the introduction of school resource officers, and the development of emergency response plans. These measures reflect a shift towards a more proactive stance on preventing violence in schools, although their effectiveness remains a subject of debate.

Moreover, the Columbine shooting had a profound effect on the national discourse surrounding mental health, particularly in relation to young people. It highlighted the need for better mental health services and support systems within schools and communities, leading to increased advocacy for mental health awareness and the destigmatization of seeking help. The tragedy also contributed to the intensification of the gun control debate in the United States, with calls for stricter background checks, safe storage laws, and measures to prevent the sale of firearms to individuals at risk of committing acts of violence.

The legacy of Columbine extends beyond policy changes and has deeply influenced American culture. It has inspired a myriad of books, films, and discussions that seek to understand the complexities of school shootings and their impact on society. The tragedy has become a pivotal reference point in conversations about youth alienation, violence in media, and the responsibilities of educational institutions and communities in fostering safe environments.

In conclusion, the Columbine shooting remains a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of societal and systemic failures to address the root causes of violence among youth. It underscores the importance of comprehensive strategies that include gun control, mental health support, and the cultivation of inclusive, supportive communities as essential components in preventing future tragedies. The ongoing discussion and policy reforms initiated in the wake of Columbine reflect its lasting impact on American society, serving as a call to action to address the complex interplay of factors that can lead to such catastrophic events.

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Dark online groups idolize the Columbine school shooters

Twenty-five years after the shooting, Columbine 'fan clubs' remain prevalent online

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April 20 marked the 25th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, where a pair of gunmen killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives. The attack remains one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, and while Columbine led to a reckoning over gun culture in America, it also birthed a darker element, one that exists to this day: online fan clubs that idolize the Columbine shooters. 

In the months after the shooting, online message boards began creeping up lauding the actions of the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. There were a variety of reasons for this. Some idolized the pair as lone wolfs, while others on the far-right lauded their supposed adoration for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (though many of these alleged motives have since been debunked ).

And in the quarter-century since the shooting, this subculture around Columbine has only been increasing, and many copycat fan clubs have also emerged surrounding other school shootings and mass casualty events . But how prevalent are these fan clubs, and why are they still flourishing?  

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What do these fan clubs believe?

Columbine has created an "obsessive online interest among a generation that wasn't even alive at the time of the attack," said USA Today . Much of this is due to the advent of social media over the last few decades, as well as the internet allowing easier access to information about the shooters. 

After Columbine, it was discovered that Harris and Klebold left evidence of their plans, including journals and videos. This resulted in a subculture that "latched onto those details of their online life and the investigative reports that followed," USA Today said, and that subculture has never gone away. Modern social media has given these fan club members a new platform to spread their beliefs, and "TikTok profiles with the shooters' names and photos are festooned with hearts and ribbons and fans of the shooters declare their love and admiration in the comments." 

The fact that so much of the shooters' lives were on display following the attack "helped make the Columbine shooters into icons of rebellion," said The Guardian . Teens that didn't believe the narrative that Harris and Klebold were cold-blooded killers "now had lots of highly charged, intimate material to stoke their fascination, and they used it to build a counter-narrative" that depicted the pair as "martyred revolutionaries who dared to rebel against the repressive, jock-centric culture of their school." Social media played an integral role in this evolution. Fans first began uploading tributes of the shooters on YouTube, then moved to Tumblr when YouTube started cracking down, before making their way to modern platforms like X and TikTok.  

Not all of these fans are the same, and Columbine followers can generally "be separated into four types," according to experts at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology . This includes researchers who search for and share information, fangirls who have a crush on the perpetrators, fans who empathize with the shooters but do not necessarily condone their actions, and copycats . 

What are the consequences of these clubs?

Speaking of copycats, that is exactly what occurs with many of the Columbine fans. There have been "54 mass shootings that have killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 500," and "every gunman left evidence that they were inspired or influenced by the murderers at Columbine," said The Atlantic . This is largely due to the "legend" that was propagated around the shooters online. 

The Virginia Tech shooter "wrote in a school assignment that he wanted to 'repeat Columbine' and that he idolized its 'martyrs,'" said the Atlantic. The Northern Illinois University shooter was "explicitly inspired by both Virginia Tech and Columbine," and the Sandy Hook shooter was inspired by all three. But most fans were "just curious teenagers interested in the criminal mind or in analyzing Columbine," and "many still are."

And like Columbine, these shooters often receive fans of their own. Following the Parkland school shooting in Florida in 2018, online users began fawning over the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and "created hundreds of blogs, private servers, and chat rooms where kids can get together and talk about their latest obsession," said New York Magazine . Cruz killed 17 people, but according to one fan, he was "just a person that the system failed."

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 Justin Klawans has worked as a staff writer at The Week since 2022. He began his career covering local news before joining Newsweek as a breaking news reporter, where he wrote about politics, national and global affairs, business, crime, sports, film, television and other Hollywood news. Justin has also freelanced for outlets including Collider and United Press International.  

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25th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre proves that the gun lobby won

I arrived in Littleton, Colo., on April 22, 1999, two days after two young men , one 18 and one 17, walked into Columbine High School and opened fire, killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding more than 20 others.

The massacre was a gut punch that took the air out of … everyone. The entire nation. Mass shootings actually had that effect on us back then. Not anymore. Not 25 years later.

Much of the public grieving in the days after the attack seemed to happen in a place called Clement Park, not far from the high school.

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There were bouquets of flowers everywhere. The saplings that lined West Bowles Avenue were covered with ribbons. They drooped under the weight of teddy bears and mementoes left by visitors.

Dozens of helium balloons were attached to trees, bobbing and nodding in the wind.

In 1999, gun law changes seemed certain

There was so much pain. So much anger. So much determination. You just knew things would change. That common sense would finally enter into our conversation about firearms.

You felt it even more a few weeks later, when the National Rifle Association decided that it would hold is planned convention in nearby Denver.

Thousands of protesters showed up.

The actor and then-NRA president Charlton Heston was defiant, even mocking. He told a cheering audience, “Each horrible act can’t become an ax for opportunists to cleave the very Bill of Rights that binds us.”

It was desperate, tone-deaf bravado on Heston’s part. But … it worked.

Columbine isn't in top 10 shootings anymore

There were many, many calls for changes after the Columbine massacre. And change happened.

Things got worse.

Philip Cook, professor emeritus of public policy at Duke University, recently put it this way, “One thing that has changed is the availability of AR-15-style rifles with large capacity magazines.

“The vast increase in availability of such weapons was facilitated by the sunset of the federal ban on assault weapons in 2004, followed by the congressional act that immunized the firearms industry from lawsuits in 2005 and the Supreme Court’s Heller decision in 2008. The surge in sales of such weapons parallels their increasing use in mass shootings nationwide.”

There have been more than 4,800 firearms deaths so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, and we are only in April.

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The Columbine attack isn’t even among the top 10 of mass shootings in America anymore. It has fallen to number 16.

And since the killing in Colorado back in 1999, there have been 404 school shootings .

Arizona police manage gun threats daily

An Arizona Republic investigation has highlighted how police here respond to thousands of calls to schools involving guns and gun threats. According to The Republic’s reporting, officers dealt with an average of two gun threat incidents a day in 2022.

Such issues don’t seem to bother those who control the Legislature, however, where the work they do is to make access to weapons even easier .

Those working to get common sense gun laws passed have gotten better organized. And their efforts to improve safety have yielded results in places outside of Congress.

Good work is being done by Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and others.

Admit it: The gun lobby won

But the fact is, the gun lobby won.

Not just in the proliferation of weapons or the lack of firearms legislation or even the horrendous number of deaths since Columbine.

The worst part is that we no longer see mass shootings as something we can prevent, or even deter. It’s as if we think of them now as not being human caused, but as acts of nature, like floods or tornadoes or wildfires.

After the NRA convention ended in 1999, I drove back to Littleton. In the weeks since the killings the balloons that had been attached to the trees had deflated and hung like withered fruit, as if mourning had lost its freshness.

And in the 25 years since, it has.

Reach Montini at  [email protected] .

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 25th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre proves that the gun lobby won

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Mount Horeb shooting: ‘People in every community need to be mindful of the warning signs’

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In November 1998, two months after joining the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, my first big story was reporting on a school shooting plot at the high school in Burlington, a city of 10,000 residents 40 miles southwest of Milwaukee.

A tip to police led to arrests, stopping students who had planned to kill certain classmates and staff.

It all seemed a bit surreal.

Five months later, I was sent to cover the landmark school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, a city of 40,000 residents in Colorado. Two students killed 13 people — including a 16-year-old John Tomlin, who had spent most of his childhood in Wisconsin — then themselves.

I wrote that, while covering John’s funeral, less than a year after the birth of my daughter, I shed tears on the job for the first time in 15 years as a reporter.

On Wednesday, authorities said police shot and killed a student armed with a weapon outside of the middle school in Mount Horeb, 20 miles southwest of Madison. Affectionately known as “the troll capital of the world,” the village has about 8,000 residents.

News reports identified the student as Damian Haglund, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at the school. The Department of Justice said Saturday the student pointed a Ruger .177 caliber pellet rifle at officers and ignored orders to drop the weapon before police shot him. 

What is clear about school shootings in the U.S. is that, despite feelings of, “I never thought it could happen here,” the worst incidents frequently occur in smaller towns.

Worst school shootings often in smaller towns

Since 1988, the overwhelming majority of U.S. mass school shootings — defined as at least four people shot and at least two killed — have occurred in rural or suburban locations, typically by white male teenagers, said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox.

“The copycat effect is strongest when there is similarity with the role model,” he said.

According to his data, since 2014, there have been mass school shootings in larger cities such as Nashville, St. Louis and Santa Clarita, California. But six occurred in smaller communities: Uvalde, Texas (15,000); Oxford Township, Michigan (22,000); Santa Fe, Texas (13,000); Parkland, Florida (37,000); Benton, Kentucky (5,000); and Marysville, Washington (72,000).

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Eight of the 10 deadliest U.S. school shootings since 1966 happened in communities with a population of less than 50,000, according to researcher David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.

“What 60 years of these incidents shows is that students of all ages, all different demographics, all different backgrounds, all different levels of academic performance, have committed these attacks,” Riedman said. “So, people in every community need to be mindful of the warning signs.”

He said those include people threatening to hurt themselves or others, or sharing plans or manifestos on social media.

Since Columbine, according to Riedman’s data, 59 school shootings have occurred where four or more people were wounded. 

There have also been 272 “near-misses” — incidents without injuries or deaths, or a shooting with victims killed or injured that had the potential to be much worse.

The Mount Horeb near-miss had similarities to a deadly school shooting in January at Perry High School in Iowa. Perry, 40 miles northwest of Des Moines, also has a population of 8,000. In that incident, a 17-year-old student killed one student and wounded six others. Also wounded was the school principal, who died 10 days later.

It’s worth noting that mass killings occur in private homes much more often than in schools or other public settings, according to Fox.

How Mount Horeb has reacted

Mount Horeb School Board member Adam Mertz , a 25-year resident of the village, heard about the incident in his community in a phone call from his daughter, Siobhan, a junior at the high school, which is across the street from the middle school. 

The schools were locked down into the evening partly over concerns about whether there was an ongoing threat, he said.

“You are shocked, saddened, but not surprised — which is a sad reaction,” Mertz said. “But we spent what we had always hoped was an inordinate amount of time as a board discussing safety measures.” 

Those included putting in place secured entrances, shatterproof glass, a school resource officer, equipment upgrades to enhance police communication inside schools and mental health programs for students.

“I think that there is an enormous sense of relief” in the community, Mertz said. “There is enormous pride in the work that our teachers and administrators and police did (Wednesday), and I’ve heard nothing but glowing reaction about how the students handled this whole situation. Everyone did everything they were supposed to do in a situation like this, and that helped prevent us from becoming one of those names.”

There are also thoughts about the student who was killed.

“Because there weren’t additional casualties, I think that a lot of people are placing their focus on the young man who was so distraught that he felt like this was his best option, even after being confronted by police,” Mertz said. 

“I know that that’s tearing apart a lot of people who have just worked tirelessly to elevate mental health as something to care about. To feel like you weren’t able to reach this kid when he clearly needed someone to talk to, I know that that’s weighing on people.”

Editor’s note (May 6, 2024): This story was updated with more information about the shooting.

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Tom Kertscher joined as a Wisconsin Watch fact checker in January 2023 and contributes to our collaboration with the The Gigafact Project to fight misinformation online. Kertscher is a former longtime newspaper reporter, including at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who has worked as a self-employed journalist since 2019. His gigs include contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and sports freelancer for The Associated Press.

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