Guns are not to blame, and the ready availability of them is not to blame . . . It’s in the minds of the children . . . I’m not a psychologist.
—J. D. Tanner, owner of the Denver gun show where Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris obtained their guns, two weeks after the Columbine incident
When someone says, “Well, if this law had been in effect, would it have prevented what happened? We will never know. I believe there is a chance if that law was in effect and Robyn Anderson [who bought guns for Harris and Klebold] couldn’t get the guns so easily, that she would have said, “No, I can’t do this.” They [Harris and Klebold] would have gone to somebody else. Sure. But maybe that next person would have said, “Whoa, what’s going on here. I better talk to somebody about this.”
—Tom Mauser, a gun control activist whose son, Daniel, was killed in Columbine High School, on a state law to require background checks for sales at gun shows.
The Columbine Memorial is carved into a knoll in Clement Park, a vast tract of emerald lawns, sports fields, and playgrounds on Pierce Street, abutting Columbine High School. Past the baseball field and picnic areas, the memorial is hidden from view until you are right at its entrance. A few discreet signs around the park direct visitors to the red rock and granite environmental design, with its inner “ring of remembrance” and outer “ring of healing.” The inner ring offers individual biographies of the twelve students and one teacher killed that day, spelled out on the top surface of a granite wall. On the ground, a looped ribbon and the words “Never Forgotten,” the motto of those touched by the tragedy, are worked into a stone paving design. Etched onto dark tablets on the red wall of the outer ring are quotes from unnamed students, teachers, and community members, as well as one from Bill Clinton, who was president when the assault occurred. One unattributed quote asks rhetorically, yet provocatively, “It brought the nation to its knees but now that we’ve gotten back up how have things changed; what have we learned?” I visited Columbine High School and the surrounding community in May 2008, nine years after the iconic incident of school violence. Had anything changed, and were lessons learned by students, teachers, parents, and administrators? Despite the motto’s sentiments, many would prefer to forget the events of April 20, 1999, and the dubious notoriety it conferred on their hometown. “There’s an element in the community that is ashamed of what happened,” says Tom Mauser, whose son, Daniel, was fifteen when he was killed. “They want Columbine to be this place of healing, but it’s this place that had this terrible tragedy.”
Although Columbine High’s postal address is Littleton, the area is actually an unincorporated part of Jefferson County and the suburban sprawl that radiates out from Denver twelve miles to the north. It is an area of upper-middle-class affluence and homogeneity, with a population that is about 90 percent white. Christian evangelical churches are abundant and the politics are decidedly Republican. Former farmlands have been gobbled up by cookie-cutter strip malls and McMansion developments with names like the Hamlet at Columbine and Columbine Knolls. Many declare at their entrances, “A covenant protected community,” referring to the standards for residents’ property maintenance—even what colors houses may be painted—in the name of maintaining homogeneity and property values for all. The snow-frosted Rocky Mountains rise up rugged and wild in the near distance, an incongruous backdrop to the manicured landscapes below them. Conformity, not notoriety, is what people who live in the Columbine Valley expect. When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed their terrible assault, they not only destroyed lives, they put their community on the map, held it up for public dissection and disapproval, and breached a tacit covenant on conventionality that residents take as an article of faith.
It would be difficult to overstate the impact the Columbine attack has had on popular attitudes about youth violence and school safety, and on policing and security policies in public schools. It wasn’t the first public school shooting with multiple victims. There was a string of them from 1997 to 1998, including the incidents in Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas. But the toll at Columbine High—fifteen dead, including the two attackers, and twenty-four wounded—was the highest, and the teens’ weaponry was unprecedented. Columbine, as the incident is now known, is the yardstick by which all school shootings will be measured. Ironically, the tragedy occurred as rates of school violence in general and shootings in particular were declining. However, statistical realities were easily swamped by widespread public fears of school and youth violence. Polls taken after the well-publicized 1998 elementary school shooting in Jonesboro, for example, found that 71 percent of respondents expected a school shooting in their community; a poll conducted two days after Columbine found 80 percent expected more school shootings. Reporting on school shootings and Columbine in particular played no small role in bringing school violence into communities and homes around the country with coverage that created an echo chamber for simmering public panic about schools. For the news media, Columbine was a terrible tragedy but a great story. It garnered the most public interest of any story that year, with one survey finding that 68 percent of Americans followed it closely.1 Top newspaper and broadcast executives named Columbine the year’s second most important story, right after President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.2
Healing hasn’t come for all in Columbine. Some still puzzle about why the two boys became killers, and the need to assign responsibility persists. There is no redemption for Harris and Klebold, even in this strongly religious community. They are reviled. Their parents still live there and are no better than pariahs, having paid out $1.6 million to settle thirty-seven wrongful death and injury lawsuits brought by the families of victims. Depositions given in those suits by Wayne and Katherine Harris and Thom and Susan Klebold were sealed by the court. But a legal tug-of-war to open them up to parents of victims and researchers who believe they will answer lingering questions continued into the next decade. Lawsuits filed by victims’ families that blamed Principal Frank DeAngelis, teachers, and the Jefferson County sheriff and deputies for not preventing the tragedy were all dismissed; as public employees, school officials and sheriffs were judged legally immune from such charges. A lawsuit filed by the family of Dave Sanders, the teacher who was killed, against the distributors of violent video games, including Doom, blamed them for Harris and Klebold’s rampage. That suit was dismissed.
Harris and Klebold were widely known to be disturbed. Their downward spiral took more than a year and was marked by a burglary arrest, involvement in the juvenile justice system, flagrant gun and explosives purchases, and their use in company with friends. Harris’s web threats against another student caused his parents to go to the Jefferson County sheriff. Columbine High School’s disciplinary dean, Peter Horvath, knew about their arrests and school discipline problems, and declared that Harris “was on the edge of losing control” before April 20. Teachers in the boys’ psychology and creative writing classes read their essays about their guns, anger, hatred, and intent to kill or injure Columbine students and others. A video production teacher viewed a project the boys filmed, enacting revenge shootings on other Columbine students with fake guns; another video the teacher saw showed Harris and Klebold shooting real guns. Apparently, none of these educators shared information or concerns with school administrators, leaving Principal DeAngelis strangely detached from the goings-on in his building. Wayne Harris reportedly found and confiscated a loaded pipe bomb in Eric’s room but allowed him to keep other explosives-related supplies. Susan and Thom Klebold maintained silence for ten years until Susan wrote an essay for O magazine’s October 13, 2009, issue, publicly offering the first explanation for their inaction, and it amounted to ignorance: “We didn’t know that he and Eric had assembled