Columbine revives questions, lessons

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Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo. People across the country marked the solemn date in different ways and survivors remembered the peers they lost on April 20, 1999.

Academics and journalists still struggled to draw clear conclusions about the killers’ motivations and psyches and about what could have gone differently.

At Virginia Tech, the community remembered both the Columbine tragedy and the massacre that occurred on their own campus just two years ago on April 16, 2007.

I was a sophomore at Stevenson High School in Livonia, Mich., when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold perpetrated their attack on Columbine High School with improvised explosives, shotguns and semi-automatic handguns.

Harris and Klebold pulled into the school’s parking lot at 11:10 a.m., and by 12:08 p.m., they had killed 12 students, one teacher and themselves.

I don’t recall today whether my teachers told us of the incident while still at school, or if I learned of it only after arriving home later that afternoon.

The next day, I remember much clearer.

There was a strange feeling in the halls of my school as everyone — teachers, staff and students — grappled with what had happened and the many implications of this tragedy. In addition to the expected swirl of rumors and gossip about the killers’ motivations, students wondered about their own safety: If this could happen in a small town in Colorado that none of us had heard of before, couldn’t it happen here, too?

We all knew students who fit the early descriptions of Harris and Klebold — angst-ridden outsiders who spent a lot of time playing violent video games. Could they, too, have fantasies of such violence? Would there be “copycat” incidents?

I disagreed sharply with a teacher who was fairly convinced that the killers’ supposed love of metal music and violent video games played a major role in the tragedy.

Violent media have been a part of both popular and niche culture for generations, and it seemed too convenient and without proper consideration to make them the primary scapegoats for this tragedy.

Unable to censor the media that children are exposed to, many schools took steps — some logical and overdue; others bizarre and poorly chosen — to control the environments within their walls, including installing security guards, police officers, metal detectors and other new security policies.

Unfortunately, while some of these steps have been successful, the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and himself, reminds us that answers to the biggest questions still evade us.

No number of school policies or restrictions on access to violent video games or metal music will stop a mentally unstable person who is determined to inflict widespread harm from perpetrating some type of attack.

The much greater questions that stand before us unanswered are deeper and more difficult: What makes people like Harris, Klebold and Cho want to commit such acts?

What role do society and the media have in informing or supporting these motivations?

What, if anything, can be done to identify and rehabilitate these individuals before they make their attacks?

Ten years after Columbine, we still have more questions than answers, and the news media likely will not be the forum in which we arrive at any of these answers.

Instead, they are coming from the survivors, who have taken this tragic chapter in their lives and tried to turn it into positive actions by continuing the important conversations and spreading awareness and understanding.

Hopefully, it won’t take 10 more years before we learn the real lessons of these tragedies that could help us avoid more loss.

Ryan Dinkgrave is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at dinkgrave@gmail.com.

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