April 18, 2009
Life (And A Lifetime) After The Massacre
Andrew Cohen Recalls The Horrors Of Columbine And What Has (And Hasn't) Changed Since
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Eric Harris, left, and Dylan Klebold, carrying a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in security cameras in Columbine High School. Before killing themselves, they took the lives of 12 other students and a teacher and wounded 23 others. (AP)
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Interactive Columbine Two students went on shooting spree at Columbine High School, killing 13 people before committing suicide.
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Interactive Guns In America State-by-state gun laws and death rates, maps of recent school and workplace shootings and facts on who's at risk.
I lived less than five miles from Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 and, within minutes of the first reports of a shooting there, was assigned by CBS News to stand vigil at a local hospital located between my house and the school.
There, I waited all afternoon, listening for the ambulances that we hoped would bring some of the wounded back from the bloodbath. I will never forget the moment when I heard about the scope of the massacre; that feeling, standing on the sidewalk in front of the emergency room entrance, will live with me forever.
Ten years later, I now have a son who attends public school in the area, and from time to time when I drop him off, or pick him up, I think of April 20, 1999 and what it must have been like for the parents of Columbine students, the living, the wounded and the dead.
And every time there is a school shooting - in America or anywhere else in the world - I think back to that grey spring afternoon when two sick teenagers in the span of just a few hours directly ruined the lives of … what, thousands of people?
I am sure that millions of other parents in America have the same sorts of thoughts and fears.
What has happened between now and then? There are still too many guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. There are still too many children and teenagers who are falling through the cracks. There is still too much evil in the world directed at our kids - and offered up by our kids. And now our children are instantly connected with one another by text and cell-phone in a way they weren’t 10 years ago [which means, as we have seen with “sexting,” yet another opportunity for them to get in big, big trouble].
The world is not getting more innocent and less cynical. Anyone want to argue otherwise?
It’s also true that there has been a renewed commitment to stop bullying in our schools and a raised sensitivity to the dangerous mix of raging hormones and easy access to weapons. Even in elementary school, where we are now, teachers are super-sensitive to schoolyard bullying. And when a four-square “gang” was organized at school (fourth grade!), the teachers came down like police screws heavily on everyone.
More sophisticated efforts by school administrators in high school follow. Dangerous school plots have been identified and broken up before their execution. In the main, our schools are safer now than they were then. Anyone want to argue otherwise?
Law enforcement officials, too, have learned great lessons from the great pain they exacerbated that day. Local officials knew one year before the Columbine shooting that Eric Harris had engaged in bomb-making activities, and yet they failed to execute a search warrant for his folks’ home. How do you reckon a similarly-situated official would react now? My best guess is that the search warrant would be executed, and pronto. Even police tactics at the scene of mass shootings/hostage situations have changed, and for the better, since the day in 1999 when so many police officers literally just stood there outside of Columbine because they didn’t quite know what to do.
What also, clearly and obviously, has changed since Columbine is our collective response to large-scale gun tragedies. It’s not that we don’t care about them anymore - the shooting in Binghamton, New York just a few weeks ago was big news for days - it’s just that many of us have more important things to focus upon in 2009 than the occasional massacre, like finding or keeping a job, paying a mortgage, or figuring out a way to re-establish that 401(k) before the kids start heading off for college.
Right or wrong, it’s no wonder the Obama administration has backed off on the gun control issue; their internal polls suggest Americans have their minds more on their purses and wallets than on social issues like gun control.
The lack of public ardor now for gun regulations - remember the contrasting cry after Columbine? - ensures that this still-important issue won’t be addressed (never mind resolved) in the immediate future. The danger in delay, of course, is that while our politicians fiddle, thousands of frightened, worried (or just plain angry and paranoid) Americans are buying up (some legally, some not so much) tens of thousands of guns.
So by the time our nation turns its mournful eyes to gun control again, there will be that many more guns to try to control … that many more potential gunmen, too.
The Supreme Court last year certainly helped tranquilize the nation about guns when it declared that the 2nd Amendment’s right to “bear arms” was an individual right guaranteed by the Constitution that may only be restricted in certain circumstances. The ruling hasn’t sent local jurisdictions scrambling to generate new restrictions; it’s caused opponents of gun control to try to overturn existing restrictions. I am quite sure that a number of those gun restrictions will be deemed unconstitutional by sympathetic federal court judges all over the country in the years to come.
Speaking of guns and Columbine, whenever I think of the raw sorrow of the shooting, I think of the grief, the madness really, of Tom Mauser, whose son, Daniel, was slaughtered that day. Mauser instantly dedicated himself to gun control efforts, passionately, obsessively pleading his case to whomever would listen. Not only have I always admired him. I also have always figured that’s how I would respond if that unspeakable horror even happened to me. What is Mauser saying these days? He’s talking about the Virginia Tech massacre - we’re honoring the two-year anniversary of that awful event, too, this week. He’s not satisfied with the pace of progress in keeping guns away from students. Do you blame him? I don’t.
As for my son, he finally this past week asked me about Columbine and what happened there that awful day. I told him as much as I could while still reassuring him that his schools were safe.
In my head, I know that’s true. In my heart, I’m not so sure.
Note: The original version of this column incorrectly identified a gun control advocate as Brian Rohrbaugh instead of Tom Mauser. The writer apologies for the error; it has been corrected.
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Posted by staycalm
And the way to stop speeders is to have everyone speed, old ladies, teenage girls on their phones...and arm everybody at the same time, yeah, that I'll fix things!
As Benjamin Franklin said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It seems that you could use a little common sense, Willcaine or at least look at the facts.
Posted by bondsman_dotmac
Getting back to the 2nd ammendmant, what did this country look like at that time? Chances are the state that you live in did not exsist in 1791. How did James Madison vote on the Assault Weapons ban? Oh, wait, there were no such weapons of mass murder in the 14 states and two territories (all east of the Mississippi.) Need to defend yourself in 1791? The American Revolution had ended 8-years earlier and America would be in another war with Britain in 11 years, both fought by milita armies. Through in the need purge several indian uprisings and their you have it.
Posted by bondsman_dotmac at 2:24 PM : Apr 18, 2009
Back in the 70s on "All in the Family" Archie Bunker maintained that passengers on airliners should be armed so that they could shoot it out with the hijackers. Of course, no one would be that dumb in real life. Or would they?
Mark Manes, a twenty-two-year-old former Columbine High School student, acquired a Tec-DC9 at a Denver-area gun show and then conveyed it to one of the two Columbine killers. Robyn Anderson, an eighteen-year-old friend of Dylan Klebold's, admitted to buying a Hi-Point semiautomatic carbine and two 1969 Savage shotguns for Klebold at the Tanner Gun Show, outside Denver.
The NRA tells you and the gun nuts parrot that you need (many) guns to protect yourself from the wackos. My question is how did the wackos get guns in the first place? Could it be that this country has become so awash in cheap guns that they are readily available to any wacko. Who allowed that to happen? It was not by accident.
These criminals that you refer to that massacre our kids in their classrooms and our friends at work, are they hardened criminals or just wacked out losers that get pushed to the edge, open up the home arsenal and start blasting the first people they see? Your answer, Our thoughts and prayers - and do nothing.
America's nightmare will never end as long as ALL nutcases have easy access to guns in this country . And as much as they all want to deny it anyone that obstructs common-sense gun laws, that work in all other industrialized nations, is enabling these tragic events to happen. If you are in the NRA or support the NRA you have blood on your hands.
Posted by bondsman_dotmac at 3:01 PM : Apr 18, 2009
I'm using a lot of common sense, and I've been looking at the facts for about 50 years now. The Texas Legislature is considering a bill to allow college students to carry guns and campus and to let people carry guns into bars. College students with guns! Gun craziness has gotten steadily worse during my lifetime.
Posted by willcaine
What the rest of the world had to say after the Virginia Tech massacre:
Europe
?The Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins
"In a country where ?the right to bear arms' is written into the Constitution and where there are an estimated 192 million firearms, the problem isn't simply one of a particular interest group. After the tragedy, voices rose up to deplore the fact that professors and students are not authorized to arm themselves, since one of them could have neutralized the killer. With that kind of reasoning, America is not close to overcoming its violence."
"Why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?"
?Mangus Linklater, The Times of London columnist
"There's only one real "freedom" in America, the freedom to kill one another? if guns weren't so readily available in the "land of the free," this tragedy might never have happened."
Australia
"Eleven years ago we took action to limit the availability of guns, and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country."
?Australian Prime Minister John Howard, expressing sympathy for the victims' families and referring to the 1996 shooting spree by a man with a semi-automatic rifle who killed 35 people in Port Arthur, on the island of Tasmania. Australia banned most types of semi-automatic weapons after the incident.
Deaths of our soldiers in Iraq: 4,272 (4/09)
Coalition military fatalities in Afghanistan: 1,133
U.S. soldiers wounded, maimed, disabled in the Iraq War: 24,912
U.S. citizens killed by guns in the last four years: 121,000
Posted by bondsman_dotmac at 3:01 PM : Apr 18, 2009
I'm using a lot of common sense, and I've been looking at the facts for about 50 years now. The Texas Legislature is considering a bill to allow college students to carry guns and campus and to let people carry guns into bars. College students with guns! Gun craziness has gotten steadily worse during my lifetime.
As Benjamin Franklin said, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It seems that you could use a little common sense, Willcaine or at least look at the facts.
- by bondsman_dotmac April 18, 2009 5:24 PM EDT
- It was sad that those that could carry a gun were prevented since it was a gun free zone they could have saved many lives but many think that gun control and gun free zones are the answer. Well if you want to have more targets then may be you are right.
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