The tyranny of Columbine 25 years ago, America handed evil a gun

The 25 years since the Columbine massacre have given us many occasions — other massacres, alas — to invoke it. But this repetition has had the strange effect of dimming and narrowing our sense of what “Columbine” was in its details. From reading up on the tragedy in recent weeks, I learned that my own sense of Columbine had dimmed and narrowed very much over those 25 years. For me, “Columbine” had become a sort of placeholder, a vague signifier for the few things it has in common with all the new massacres that bring it to speech, rather than the name of something that, when it happened, was catastrophically unique. I’m not alone. People I’ve told the things I’m relearning have likewise received these old facts as fresh revelations. The details of Columbine are sad and shocking, in other words, but we’ve forgotten them anyway. They are worth remembering.

Columbine was not unprecedented. I knew that. Armed people had shot up American schools before, and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine killers, may have been inspired by some of these killings. But their truer inspirations were not shooters at all. They were larger events of mass mayhem and death. In an online journal Harris sketched his ambition to create something “like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam”, and various apocalyptic video games “all mixed together”. Accordingly, he and Klebold conducted a careful study of their school’s cafeteria, to learn when it would be most densely packed with students (11:17am, they determined). They built several large propane bombs, timed them to explode at this peak moment, and, on the morning of their attack, carried them into the cafeteria, using the lunch-hour busyness as cover for their unusual lugging and dropping of heavy duffle bags in a lunch room.

Leave a Comment