How We Talk About Columbine Matters As Much Today As It Did Then

By De Elizabeth


It would not be an exaggeration to mention that, even 20 years later, we’re still ordering going by means of the effects trailing in the wake of Columbine. On April 20, 1999, two perpetrators targeted Columbine High School and killed Cassie Bernall, Steve Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matt Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez, and Coach Dave Sanders. The event soon became a catalyst for several changes — including the ways in which several young people no longer viewed their schools as safe.


“[The Columbine shooting] felt so personalized in a horrifying way,” Dan, a 31-year-old North Carolina resident who attended a public high school in New York and was 11 years old at the time of the attack, told MTV News. “It hit residence … especially [given] the age we were at the time.”


That impact also struck Debbie, who lives in Brooklyn and was 13 at the time of the attack. “Our school district had just finished creating a gigantic new campus that looked exactly like Columbine from the top,” she told MTV News; the attack occurred months before she entered her freshman year. “I cannot imagine what kids feel like today.”


While the attack on Columbine felt like an outlier to several people at the time, mass gun violence has become devastatingly normalized in our current culture; 2018 was reportedly the worst year for U.S. School shootings on record, and millions more young folks are forced to grow up in communities where gun violence is an everyday reality. Each person from college students to preschoolers participate in active shooter drills in their classrooms, despite proven evidence that these drills can have negative effects on students’ mental health. In the 2015-2016 school year, over 90 percent of public schools ran lockdown drills, and several students graduating today have been preparing to survive a school shooting for most of their academic lives.


For several people looking back two decades later, the Columbine shooting was a forced reckoning with the grave reality of school shootings; other young people today know of the impact it left on society. Although a huge piece of what we remember is undoubtedly because of the way the media portrayed the events of the shooting; particularly, the seemingly obsessive fixation on the perpetrators themselves. As the frequency, and our understanding of mass instances of gun violence has grown, so has our knowledge of how to correctly talk about them.


Much of the first reporting that emerged from Columbine’s campus included footage of the tragedy in process, a sort of documentation that would later be mirrored in the footage other school shooting survivors would broadcast on social media from their classrooms. Nevertheless it wasn’t just the footage of Columbine’s campus that several people remember; it’s the perpetrators themselves, from their names to specific specifics of their appearances, which a few TV news stations broadcasted while in their coverage, and also copious detail about alleged and perceived motives. In following years, outlets have moved give attention to the victims and survivors as a substitute, and activists are continually calling on the media not to publish the identities of other school shooting perpetrators.


That shift is one that activists are still pushing for today. “This should be our time to resemble and remember the lives that were taken from us,” Coach Sanders’s daughter Coni Sanders, a member of the Everytown Survivor Network, said in a statement following school lockdowns in the Denver area on Wednesday, April 17.


Tom Teves is convinced that if people had responded to Columbine differently, his son could be alive today. Teves and his partner Caren lost their son Alex in 2012 as a gunman killed 12 people and injured dozens more at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. In response to their grief, the Teves family member founded No Notoriety, an agency that urges media outlets not to publish the names and pictures of the perpetrators of mass violence categorize in attempt to prevent future incidents.


“Our objective is to eliminate gratuitous use of the names and likenesses of rampage mass killers and shift the focus to the victims, the heroes, and the survivors,” Teves told MTV News. “There is only one thing that connects all these killers: their quest for notoriety, their quest to be known.” (Ed. Note: MTV News published the names of the perpetrators in its reporting dating back to 1999.)


“We knew so much about [the perpetrators], maybe more so than some of the victims,” Valerie, a 33-year-old from Chicago told MTV News. “They became group kind of a stereotype for what a school shooter would look like… I remember having a conversation with my companions at lunch where we spoke who in our school could be most likely to bring a gun, or how we would escape if it happened.”


Because so much focus was really interested in the perpetrators, students, and parents across the nation were led to feel as if they were given a checklist for what to “watch out” for. Dan told MTV News that Columbine adjusted his perspective on his classmates, particularly those that were seen as social outcasts. “You just begin looking at people differently,” he said.


Three Columbine High School students look at the 13 crosses memorializing those killed at the Columbine shooting.


obviously, not all “social outcasts” are potential perpetrators, and therein lies the trouble with assigning such surface-level qualifiers to a deeply horrific act. It turned out that much of the lore surrounding the perpetrators wasn’t even rooted in reality. However even inadvertently mythologizing the perpetrators carried weight — and consequences.


“After Columbine, I remember having this lump in my throat, like all of the things I loved were ‘bad’ or ‘crazy,’” Debbie mentioned, explaining that a few of her interests, like punk rock and Magic: The Gathering, inadvertently labeled her as something she wasn’t. “I was bullied a lot,” she added. “These things were a way for me to channel my anger and rage.”


Perhaps people’s fascination with the perpetrators had the ideal of intentions; perhaps it was a way to better understand a tragedy and help a grieving country heal. Some reporters might not directly have known the perfect way to mask the story because it wasn't one they'd often or ever encountered before; it is partly due to the repeated horrors of gun violence that we right now know how to talk — and how not to talk about these events. Those not directly affected by the shooting might have been drawn to the perpetrators as a knee-jerk reaction, and without the framework and information that we have right now, there was far less knowledge of how such fixation would prove to be damaging later on.


However even with the benefit of the doubt, the reality is that sensationalizing the perpetrators of the Columbine shooting has had deadly ramifications, and the nation is still feeling the aftershocks today.


Research has shown that there really is a contagion effect with regard to publicizing the perpetrators of mass shootings; one study concluded that there really is “significant evidence” proving that mass killings regarding firearms are incited “by similar events in the immediate past.” And according to an investigation conducted by ABC News, there have been dozens of attacks, alleged plots, and threats made against schools that can be connected to the attack at Columbine.


From Teves’s perspective, the media got everything totally wrong with regards to the Columbine attack. “In the name of that investigation, [the media] delved into every little tiny detail of [the perpetrators’s] lives, however in doing so, [they] also used their names over and over and over and over and over again,” Teves mentioned. It’s exactly what not to do any time reporting on mass shootings, or once sharing statistics on social media — even as soon as done in good faith. “A man who is known by no one is currently known by each person, with his face splashed across every screen, his name across everyone’s lips,” he added. “Every person on the planet all in the course of one day… Every one of those [killers] are telling you: This is what I want.”


This lesson came far also late for journalist Dave Cullen, as he explained in his books Columbine and Parkland: Birth of a Movement. Both works detail the ways in which dangerous ideas surrounding the Columbine perpetrators permeated and perpetuated narratives, ultimately creating lore that would switch shape after awhile, and inadvertently incite both fear and further violence in years to come.


“What I failed to grasp that day I arrived in Columbine was how we were botching the story — and the staggering ramifications of mislaid good intentions,” Cullen wrote in Parkland: Birth of  Movement, published in February 2019. “I had no idea that I might be playing a role, and bear some responsibility for the children still dying around us two decades later.”


Los Angeles students join in a nationwide walkout against gun violence 19 years right following the shooting at Columbine High School.


While the fixation on the perpetrators of Columbine definitely warrants criticism, it should be noted that gun violence can be prevented through a host of important legislature, as pointed out by Everytown For Gun Safety. Red flag laws let family member members and law enforcement officials to prevent at-risk individuals from buying a gun, and activists are continually pushing for stronger background checks at the point of firearm sales. And given that hundreds of thousands of students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine, it’s in back of clear that the U.S. Government has significant work to do.


Yet, the way we spoken about Columbine at the time — and the way we continue to talk about mass shootings today — matters. Teves and No Notoriety recommend that people as an alternative concentrate on the victims and survivors to “send the message their lives are more crucial than the killer’s actions.”


Kaylee Tyner, a current senior at Columbine High School, has a similar objective. The 17-year-old is the founder of #MyLastShot, an assignment that empowers young people to determine if they want their image to be publicized in the case they are killed by gun violence. She and a few of her classmates were inspired in part by the ways in which Parkland students signal-boosted their fear on social media while in the February 2018 shooting.


“I remember coming across videos on Twitter from indoor within school because the shooting was happening,” the 17-year-old explained. “I remember seeing so several comments like, ‘Oh, this is so horrible. How could you post this?’ And I was like, ‘That's real life. That wasn't a movie. That's what those kids actually went through.’”


By shifting the eye from the perpetrators of gun violence to the reality of the victims’ experiences, Kaylee hopes to trim light on the huge threat that firearms bring to people’s lives. “Because of the mass quantity of people who perish by gun violence every year, a lot of people just become another number in the news,” she explained. (2018, as an example, held the highest gun-related deaths in the U.S. On record in 50 years, with 40,000 people being killed by firearms.) “By putting a face to the violence, people can see: ‘That would be my mom, that would be my dad, my sister, my brother, my best friend.’ And I think that makes people feel a sense of urgency to address this provide and learn that gun violence doesn't discriminate, and also it might can occur to anyone.”


The legacy of her hometown also had a substantial influence on Kaylee’s efforts. “The community has healed… Nevertheless it never goes away,” she mentioned of the attack. “Growing up and knowing survivors … has had a large vast impact on my life. I wasn't even place on Earth as soon as Columbine happened, yet I've grown up still feeling all of the effects of the aftermath.”


And that aftermath has been felt by several, particularly the young people who saw Columbine as a horrific manifestation of what could happen anywhere — even at their own school. “I had nightmares about it,” Valerie, who was in eighth grade at the time of the shooting, mentioned. “I was convinced our school could be next.”