Down the line, the adults in the assailants’ lives failed to connect the many dots and respond to the warning signs. From their parents to the school principal and teachers to sheriff’s deputies to friends who shared their fascination with guns, no one paid needed attention until Harris and Klebold couldn’t be ignored.
Do the parents and teachers and administrators at Columbine pay attention now? Well, a decade later, the issue of bullying and intolerance among students, spotlighted by the incident, has not been programmatically addressed at Columbine High School. And just as important, the gun culture that provided Harris and Klebold easy access to firearms has been a taboo topic for most everyone—except for one parent-crusader. Tom Mauser alone seems to get it: as disturbed as Harris and Klebold were, without guns, Columbine could never have occurred.
TEENS AS TERRORISTS
The events of April 20, 1999, have been recounted in news accounts, books, even film, making many basic details familiar: eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, carried out a well-planned assault on their high school armed with a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun, a rifle, two sawed-off shotguns, knives, and dozens of homemade explosive devices in order to kill as many students as possible, and then themselves. In Harris’s home, they videotaped their arsenal of weapons, vented their anger and hatred for other students, and mocked their parents, police, and teachers. They shot and killed one teacher and twelve students, some at point-blank range, most of them in the school library, wounded twenty-four others, and then committed suicide. Dave Sanders bled to death before SWAT teams got to him three hours after he was shot. Law enforcement officers thought the shooters were still active as the explosive devices continued to go off. But the boys had killed themselves forty-seven minutes after their attack began.
With the eyes of the nation on Colorado, Governor Bill Owens declared, “Our innocence is lost today.” Owens, a Republican, had been supporting a bill before the statehouse to make it easier to carry concealed weapons. Ironically, the bill was scheduled for debate on April 20, but legislators postponed it after the school assault. Owens named the Columbine Review Commission nine months later to conduct a postmortem and offer recommendations for change. Its focus was on law enforcement’s performance, the adequacy of school safety protocols, the emergency medical response, and how well victims and families were assisted. The blue-ribbon panel, which included the Denver district attorney, Bill Ritter (later governor), delivered a hard-nosed critique of the police response and of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s lack of cooperation with the commission. For law enforcement, Columbine was a debacle, a crisis in which they appeared impotent while a school full of students and faculty waited for rescue. Deputy Neil Gardner, Columbine’s school resource officer, exchanged fire with Harris in the first moments of the attack but missed him and did not pursue the teen into the school. Gardner and five other deputies were untrained in the kind of rescue procedures required. Denver and Jefferson County SWAT teams arrived but delayed entry for hours into those areas of the school where Dave Sanders and injured students were waiting. Radios of the different police units operated on different frequencies, making communication among teams impossible. Police had no plans of the school building and were hampered by smoke-filled hallways. As the report stated: “It is fair to observe that neither law enforcement command personnel nor school administrators were well prepared to counter the violence that erupted at Columbine High School . . .” The commission’s first recommendation among a dozen cut to the chase: “Law enforcement and training should emphasize that the highest priority of law enforcement officers, after arriving at the scene of a crisis, is to stop any ongoing assault.”
Columbine was a human tragedy in a small Colorado town. But for school districts around the country it was a nightmare of what-ifs. For law enforcement it was a humiliation in which two disturbed teenagers with four guns and homemade bombs stymied the professionals. The reaction to Columbine by both sectors was dramatic and severe. Strict zero tolerance policies were ratcheted up tighter, security hardware piled on, and policing became more militaristic, viewing students as potential enemies. Law enforcement devised the “active shooter” drill, in which officers practice responding to an incident of multiple suspects who are armed and shooting, as a response to Columbine-type attacks, and it is now a popular training method offered by NASRO (the National Assoication of School Resource Officers), as well as local school police units. Lockdown drills became the new duck-and-cover drills practiced by earlier generations of Cold War–era children instructed to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. The new threat was not foreign, though. It was the alienated boy next door, and many states decided to treat him as a terrorist. State legislatures and school districts around the country embraced laws to treat Columbine-like threats, even student essays with dark subject matter, as terroristic and potentially criminal. Better to err on the side of being overzealous, was the consensus. A New York Times article published five months after the Columbine attack described the radical change in treatment students faced:
In the months since Columbine, authorities’ rules for what is, and is not, acceptable behavior for teenagers have been drastically rewritten. Hoping to prevent another tragedy, parents, teachers, police officers, and the courts are trying to attack violence at its roots. Instead of waiting for another disturbed student to gun down his or her classmates, they have widened the radar scope for acts that could be signs of potential trouble.
The result: Teenagers are being interrogated, suspended, reprimanded, and even arrested—not for committing actual crimes, but for what they say in class, write on tests, post on the Internet, or e-mail to a friend, as well as what they wear and even how they do their hair. Taken together, civil-liberties advocates say, these policies amount to the biggest crackdown on teen rights in recent history.
“It all seems driven by post-Columbine hysteria and misinformation about safety,” says Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Students have always been irreverent, but we shouldn’t punish them for that behavior.”3
More than a decade later, the post-Columbine hysteria has not evaporated. It’s been integrated into the lockdown philosophy of school safety and youth discipline. Students making threats of violence—real or make-believe—are subjected to swift and harsh prosecution, even if no crime has occurred. Witness seventeen-year-old Jeremie Dalin from Fox River Grove, Illinois, who was convicted in June 2008 for making a “false terrorist threat.” Dalin, a senior at Barrington High School, posted a message on a website about Japanese anime, warning of an attack on Halloween at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. There are four schools in the country with that name and Dalin didn’t specify which. The FBI traced the posting to Dalin’s house hours after a student at a school named Stevenson High in a nearby town saw it on the website and reported it. Although Dalin had second thoughts and removed the posting and the FBI ruled it a prank, the teen was arrested and prosecuted. Odder still, Dennis Oh, the teen who reported Dalin’s prank, was arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer because he posted the phony threat on another website. Dalin faced up to fifteen years in prison.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, school administrators and law enforcement officials have been even more emboldened to apply the terrorist label to students with the usual behavioral problems, as well as more serious ones. Looked at another way, the lockdown approach to school security, which views students as potential terrorists and schools as likely targets requiring heavy policing and surveillance, was in many ways the paradigm for the national security crackdown that swept the country after September 2001. Columbine, a rare act of violence at one school, became the excuse for implementing costly new security systems and disciplinary codes that curtailed students’ rights to free speech, due process, and privacy. Likewise, the September 11 attacks, horrifying but rare acts of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil, have been used to justify retrenchments in civil liberties and widening surveillance by the government. In both incidents, authorities declared that “everything has changed” to justify extraordinary measures supposed to make us all safer, but which provided little evidence of that outcome. The Columbine scenario is terrifying, but the odds of it occurring in your