Columbine Survivors Seek Good From Tragedy

(CBS)  It was 10 years ago Monday the nation was stunned by the worst high school massacre in United States History.

Two teenagers killed a teacher and a dozen fellow students in Colorado's Columbine High School, and wounded two dozen others, before committing suicide.

But survivors have gone on with their lives.

Patrick Ireland was the student seen in a famous video being pulled from a window in the midst of Columbine's chaos.

His fight to overcome the unthinkable still stands out.

"My entire instincts," he now tells CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann, "were for survival. Just get out."

The Columbine killers left Ireland in the library, shot twice in the head.

Partially paralyzed, delirious, he willed himself toward the window.

"My entire crawl was filled with adrenaline and fear -- the fact that they might come back in, and kill me."

He had to learn to walk and talk again.

But graduated valedictorian of his Columbine class.

Then, Ireland got married, and is now a financial planner.

"I'm not going to allow that event to define who I am as a person," he vowed to Strassmann.

Craig Scott was also in the school library that day, and his sister, Rachel, was the first student killed.

On The Early Show Monday, Scott told co-anchor Harry Smith he's "taken what's happened, and taken the story of myself and my sister into schools with a program that my family started, called Rachel's Challenge. And we've seen an immense amount of good come from that program, and so it is a day I think about constantly since it happened.

"It's changed my life and changed who I am. It's made me a deeper, stronger person, and I've been able to focus on something that was positive since the shooting happened - my sister's story. My sister, you know, the Columbine shooting happened, and it was a very angry, hateful thing that the two shooters did, and I feel like an antidote to anger and hatred is kindness and compassion."

"The embodiment of your sister," Smith remarked.

"And actually," Scott continued, "seen some school shootings stop from happening since then. So, that's one of my life's work; (it's) what I do."

Lauren Beyer-Bohn, who was a 15-year-old freshman that day, told Smith her "biggest mission has been taking this tragedy and turning it into a triumph, as far as taking something that was so terrible and horrible and turning it around into something positive. And I know Craig feels the same way, as far as seeing how the stories of the survivors and the stories of the people that lost their lives can really make us appreciate each and every day that we have.

"It's empowering to say that I have survived a situation, and have been able to take our stories and messages across the nation, and bring hope to a lot of people."

[weedapeapl]

Over the years, I've learned to think like a liberal.

All you have to do is shut off the logical side of your brain and pretend to be really really stupid.

Then you start believing that we can control the behavior of criminals by just making more laws for them to break. And then not enforce the laws we just made. And then use the continued existence of crime as a reason to make even more laws that the criminals will ignore and the government won't enforce.

It's like "suspension of disbelief" while you're watching a corny movie that has things like people just appearing in a room without opening any doors or windows to get there.

Being a liberal involves just accepting things that don''t make sense, and for some reason it doesn't bother you at all.

[weedapeapl]

If only murder had been illegal none of this would have happened!!!
Posted by jonesjep at 2:08 PM : Apr 20, 2009

Stop confusing the liberals with facts.

[weedapeapl]

ISSUE EVERY SINGLE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT A PISTOL AND A RIFLE
Posted by thomaso188 at 9:34 AM : Apr 20, 2009

Should that be before or after they get their free condoms?

[tbbaot]

Seeking good? The only thing good is the perps are dead

[jonesjep]

It needs to be pointed out that this happened directly in the middle of the "Assault Weapons Ban". If only murder had been illegal none of this would have happened!!!

[mwhc1]

this kind of story will always be news... why? just watch morning TV talk shows.... enough said.

[Segodnya]

For the first year after Columbine, news coverage was omnipresent. And every year we observe the anniversary of Columbine, despite the fact that a search on Google for "Columbine copycat" shows that there are not a few young people who think that Harris & Klebold were heroes and have tried, sometimes successfully, to react the massacre. Isn't it about time that we cut back on coverage? Surely this is contributing to a greater or lesser degree to additional shootings, and it might be possible to argue that news organizations are partly responsible for them as a result.

[brianp55]

"Columbine Survivors Seek Good From Tragedy"

I suppose this is the natural response. Unfortunately, the truth is that there is no "good".