The school, meanwhile, failed to recognise the danger, even though Harris spilled much of his venom on his publicly accessible website, and even though Klebold wrote an essay two months before the attack about a man gunning down innocents and enjoying it.
Klebold's teacher was deeply concerned, but the authorities ultimately bought his explanation that it was "just a story". On the day of the attacks, the Swat teams were so hesitant to swoop in mid-killing that they ended up compounding the disaster, allowing a PE teacher to bleed to death when early intervention would almost certainly have saved his life.
The sheriff's department was dysfunctional from start to finish, preferring to cover up what it had known about the killers and doing nothing to contradict the nerds-targeting-jocks story.
The bulk of the withheld investigation documents were finally released in , the result of years of lawsuits, but not all: a deposition of the parents of the two killers, taken over several days in , remains under seal until In some ways, Columbine is unlike other school shootings because of its sheer scale.
In other ways, though, it is both a reference point and even an inspiration to successive killers - in Germany, Finland and Britain as well as the US. Seung Hui Cho, the disturbed gunman who killed more than 30 students at Virginia Tech in , called Harris and Klebold "martyrs".
We can perhaps be grateful that the Columbine killers saw themselves in media-age terms as performers, who chronicled their thoughts and actions in great detail. As a result, we now know a whole lot more about how to recognise potential school shooters, and how to limit the damage once the shooting starts. The Swat teams at Virginia Tech did not hesitate for an instant, almost certainly saving the lives of a dozen or more people.
At scores of high schools around the US, meanwhile, teachers and mental health professionals have taken death threats or the discovery of weapons with the utmost seriousness.
The piece of the puzzle that remains most troubling is the role of the media. Harris and Klebold were playing to the cameras and there is evidence that many of their successors were motivated at least in part by the promise of instant mass-media notoriety. The influence of the media on real-life acts of violence is hotly debated and far from proven, but here is one statistic.
Just about every recorded instance of mass murder given saturation coverage on US television is followed by another mass murder, somewhere around the country, within two weeks. Most of these smaller scale copycat killings don't make headlines, but are picked up by Park Dietz, a criminal profiler who has been offering violence prevention advice to the US TV networks for years.
They feel willing to die. When they watch the coverage of a school shooting, it only takes one or two of them to say, 'That guy is just like me, that's the solution to my problem, that's what I'll do tomorrow. The truth about Columbine. Ten years ago, two teenagers walked into a Colorado school and massacred 13 people.
The killings sparked wall-to-wall media coverage around the world - much of which has since turned out to be nonsense. Andrew Gumbel, who reported on the aftermath, explains what really happened that day - and why. Medics tend to the wounded in the wake of the massacre.
For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation.
Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. At approximately a. The pair then moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library. By approximately a. Shortly after 12 p. Investigators later learned Harris and Klebold had arrived in separate cars at Columbine around on the morning of the massacre.
The two then walked into the school cafeteria, where they placed two duffel bags each containing a pound propane bomb set to explode at a. The teens then went back outside to their cars to wait for the bombs to go off. When the bombs failed to detonate, Harris and Klebold began their shooting spree. In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims.
It initially was reported that one student, Cassie Bernall, was asked by one of the gunmen if she believed in God. Her parents later wrote a book titled She Said Yes , honoring their daughter. However, it later was determined the question was not posed to Bernall but to another student who already had been wounded by a gunshot. Subsequent investigations determined Harris and Klebold chose their victims randomly, and the two teens originally had intended to bomb their school, potentially killing hundreds of people.
There was speculation that Harris and Klebold committed the killings because they were members of a group of social outcasts called the Trenchcoat Mafia that was fascinated by Goth culture. It also was speculated that Harris and Klebold had carried out the shootings as retaliation for being bullied. According to Marceno, the two students are well known to authorities, deputies having visited their homes nearly 80 times combined.
Both boys met the criteria for evaluations at a mental health facility and were assessed before being detained. Mass shootings are generally defined as incidents in which at least four people are shot or killed, not including the person with the gun.
According to data from Gun Violence Archives , mass shootings have been increasing across the US since
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