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.

Source: Read Full Article