Irish Examiner view: US students have witnessed 404 school shootings since Columbine

370,000 young Americans experienced school shootings in the quarter century since the Columbine High School massacre

Grief-stricken students praying in Littleton, Colorado on Wednesday, April 21, 1999, after the mass shooting at Columbine High School. Picture: Patrick Davison/Rocky Mountain News/AP

How many people have been shot on school premises in the US since the massacre in Columbine, Colorado, 25 years ago this weekend? According to the Washington Post, there have been 404 school shootings and 370,000 students have experienced gun violence since April 20, 1999. On that day, then US president Bill Clinton and Nato had just initiated a bombing campaign on Yugoslavia because of the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo.

Incredibly, the US government does not track school shootings, so the Post figure is drawn from news articles, open-source databases, law-enforcement reports, and calls to schools and police departments. For this reason, a variety of figures might be headlined in the retrospectives of that terrible day.

One data journalist on Substack, the online platform, concludes that there have been 2,032 school shootings since Columbine. He cites a definition that documents when a gun is fired, brandished (pointed at a person with intent), or a bullet hits school property, regardless of the number of victims, time, day, or reason. Other analysis, based on the number of people injured or killed, produces a different benchmark. That figure is 1,143. Despite a significant increase in security and classroom lockdowns, these measures, he concludes, have not prevented such attacks.

While there have been shootings in US schools for more than a century, and the numbers have hugely accelerated in the past seven years, Columbine has established a menacing place in our collective psyches.

The very name has become a synonym for this form of mass murder.

Dave Cullen, one of the first reporters on the scene when Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 students and one teacher, and injured 21 others, says he had no idea he was writing an ‘origin’ story. Harris wrote online of his ambition to create something “like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam”, and various apocalyptic video games “all mixed together”. He and Klebold carried propane bombs into the buildings with them. These failed to explode.

Columbine became a template for the mass shootings that have followed — Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas — and it has been consistently magnified through social media, which recasts the perpetrators, who took their own lives, as sinister torch bearers for malcontents and true-crime groupies. And for the mentally ill. Plenty of evidence in the writings of Harris and Klebold, even in school essays, pointed towards disturbed minds with a predilection for violence. Yet it was largely ignored. They were easily able to acquire pump-action shotguns and semi-automatic weapons, despite being underage.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, said that Columbine provided a threshold model in “a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to, and in combination with, those who came before”.

Columbine has been classified as a terrorist attack and we must wonder why it is that more and more young people are drawn to such activities. It was a 16-year-old who attempted to murder a priest of the Assyrian Orthodox Church on livestream in a suburb of Sydney, Australia. 

In the UK last year, a record 42 under-18s were arrested for terror crimes, including sharing propaganda and encouraging attacks. Perpetrators had been radicalised online and included followers of jihadism and of neo-Nazism. The youngest was 13.

Whatever it is that encourages lonely, hate-filled youngsters, overwhelmingly male, to find solace, identity, and meaning online, it is the poisonous legacy of Columbine.

Canaries offer a warning

The Canary Islands are hugely popular destinations for the Irish, with several hundred thousand of us making for destinations such as Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Tenerife each year. More than 6,000 homes there are owned by Irish people.

But for Canarians, there is a limit to the benefits brought by growth. And it has been reached. Life is becoming unaffordable for residents and resources are overstretched.

Organisers of a concerted protest at the weekend are urging the introduction of a cap on visitor numbers — under the heading “the Canaries have a limit” — in a campaign supported by eco-activist groups. Last year, there were 13.9m visitors bringing in more than €17bn, about one-third of the local gross domestic product. But Spain says 34% of local people in the Canaries face poverty or social exclusion.

The Irish are popular visitors, and tourists generally get a warm welcome. However, the current model does not have long-term sustainability. Residents want a moratorium on future developments. We should respect their views.

Game-changer

This week we celebrate the release, 35 years ago, of Nintendo’s GameBoy portable console, a gateway to a world of pleasure where the most violent shoot-em-up was Space Invaders with its hypnotic alien music. One of its bundled games was Tetris with its indelible earworm theme. It was also the device which introduced Pokémon to the world.

The original GameBoy, a robust grey brick, was a black- and-white 8-bit device with four buttons — A, B, Select, and Start — and a direction pad. You could only play against an opponent by connecting a lead.

Almost half of its users were young women. It had incredible battery life.

Its success is a lesson for marketeers. The company’s developers had low expectations, but its initial production run of 300,000 units sold out within a fortnight. One hundred and twenty million sales later, it is the fourth best-selling console in history. A mint condition original is worth thousands on the retro market.

The GameBoy, with its simple and intuitive controls, was a machine which could be enjoyed across the generations. Times have changed, and, not necessarily for the better.