Читать книгу Lockdown High - Annette Fuentes - Страница 6
ОглавлениеGuns 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 an arsenal of explosives and guns. We believed his participation in the massacre was accidental or that he had been coerced. We believed that he did not intend to hurt anyone. One friend was sure that Dylan had been tricked at the last minute into using live ammunition. None of us could accept that he was capable of doing what he did.”
Down the line, the adults in the assailants’ lives failed to connect the many dots and respond to the warning signs. From their parents to the school principal and teachers to sheriff’s deputies to friends who shared their fascination with guns, no one paid needed attention until Harris and Klebold couldn’t be ignored.
Do the parents and teachers and administrators at Columbine pay attention now? Well, a decade later, the issue of bullying and intolerance among students, spotlighted by the incident, has not been programmatically addressed at Columbine High School. And just as important, the gun culture that provided Harris and Klebold easy access to firearms has been a taboo topic for most everyone—except for one parent-crusader. Tom Mauser alone seems to get it: as disturbed as Harris and Klebold were, without guns, Columbine could never have occurred.
TEENS AS TERRORISTS
The events of April 20, 1999, have been recounted in news accounts, books, even film, making many basic details familiar: eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, carried out a well-planned assault on their high school armed with a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun, a rifle, two sawed-off shotguns, knives, and dozens of homemade explosive devices in order to kill as many students as possible, and then themselves. In Harris’s home, they videotaped their arsenal of weapons, vented their anger and hatred for other students, and mocked their parents, police, and teachers. They shot and killed one teacher and twelve students, some at point-blank range, most of them in the school library, wounded twenty-four others, and then committed suicide. Dave Sanders bled to death before SWAT teams got to him three hours after he was shot. Law enforcement officers thought the shooters were still active as the explosive devices continued to go off. But the boys had killed themselves forty-seven minutes after their attack began.
With the eyes of the nation on Colorado, Governor Bill Owens declared, “Our innocence is lost today.” Owens, a Republican, had been supporting a bill before the statehouse to make it easier to carry concealed weapons. Ironically, the bill was scheduled for debate on April 20, but legislators postponed it after the school assault. Owens named the Columbine Review Commission nine months later to conduct a postmortem and offer recommendations for change. Its focus was on law enforcement’s performance, the adequacy of school safety protocols, the emergency medical response, and how well victims and families were assisted. The blue-ribbon panel, which included the Denver district attorney, Bill Ritter (later governor), delivered a hard-nosed critique of the police response and of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s lack of cooperation with the commission. For law enforcement, Columbine was a debacle, a crisis in which they appeared impotent while a school full of students and faculty waited for rescue. Deputy Neil Gardner, Columbine’s school resource officer, exchanged fire with Harris in the first moments of the attack but missed him and did not pursue the teen into the school. Gardner and five other deputies were untrained in the kind of rescue procedures required. Denver and Jefferson County SWAT teams arrived but delayed entry for hours into those areas of the school where Dave Sanders and injured students were waiting. Radios of the different police units operated on different frequencies, making communication among teams impossible. Police had no plans of the school building and were hampered by smoke-filled hallways. As the report stated: “It is fair to observe that neither law enforcement command personnel nor school administrators were well prepared to counter the violence that erupted at Columbine High School . . .” The commission’s first recommendation among a dozen cut to the chase: “Law enforcement and training should emphasize that the highest priority of law enforcement officers, after arriving at the scene of a crisis, is to stop any ongoing assault.”
Columbine was a human tragedy in a small Colorado town. But for school districts around the country it was a nightmare of what-ifs. For law enforcement it was a humiliation in which two disturbed teenagers with four guns and homemade bombs stymied the professionals. The reaction to Columbine by both sectors was dramatic and severe. Strict zero tolerance policies were ratcheted up tighter, security hardware piled on, and policing became more militaristic, viewing students as potential enemies. Law enforcement devised the “active shooter” drill, in which officers practice responding to an incident of multiple suspects who are armed and shooting, as a response to Columbine-type attacks, and it is now a popular training method offered by NASRO (the National Assoication of School Resource Officers), as well as local school police units. Lockdown drills became the new duck-and-cover drills practiced by earlier generations of Cold War–era children instructed to hide under their desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. The new threat was not foreign, though. It was the alienated boy next door, and many states decided to treat him as a terrorist. State legislatures and school districts around the country embraced laws to treat Columbine-like threats, even student essays with dark subject matter, as terroristic and potentially criminal. Better to err on the side of being overzealous, was the consensus. A New York Times article published five months after the Columbine attack described the radical change in treatment students faced:
In the months since Columbine, authorities’ rules for what is, and is not, acceptable behavior for teenagers have been drastically rewritten. Hoping to prevent another tragedy, parents, teachers, police officers, and the courts are trying to attack violence at its roots. Instead of waiting for another disturbed student to gun down his or her classmates, they have widened the radar scope for acts that could be signs of potential trouble.
The result: Teenagers are being interrogated, suspended, reprimanded, and even arrested—not for committing actual crimes, but for what they say in class, write on tests, post on the Internet, or e-mail to a friend, as well as what they wear and even how they do their hair. Taken together, civil-liberties advocates say, these policies amount to the biggest crackdown on teen rights in recent history.
“It all seems driven by post-Columbine hysteria and misinformation about safety,” says Ann Beeson, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “Students have always been irreverent, but we shouldn’t punish them for that behavior.”3
More than a decade later, the post-Columbine hysteria has not evaporated. It’s been integrated into the lockdown philosophy of school safety and youth discipline. Students making threats of violence—real or make-believe—are subjected to swift and harsh prosecution, even if no crime has occurred. Witness seventeen-year-old Jeremie Dalin from Fox River Grove, Illinois, who was convicted in June 2008 for making a “false terrorist threat.” Dalin, a senior at Barrington High School, posted a message on a website about Japanese anime, warning of an attack on Halloween at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. There are four schools in the country with that name and Dalin didn’t specify which. The FBI traced the posting to Dalin’s house hours after a student at a school named Stevenson High in a nearby town saw it on the website and reported it. Although Dalin had second thoughts and removed the posting and the FBI ruled it a prank, the teen was arrested and prosecuted. Odder still, Dennis Oh, the teen who reported Dalin’s prank, was arrested and charged with obstructing a peace officer because he posted the phony threat on another website. Dalin faced up to fifteen years in prison.
Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, school administrators and law enforcement officials have been even more emboldened to apply the terrorist label to students with the usual behavioral problems, as well as more serious ones. Looked at another way, the lockdown approach to school security, which views students as potential terrorists and schools as likely targets requiring heavy policing and surveillance, was in many ways the paradigm for the national security crackdown that swept the country after September 2001. Columbine, a rare act of violence at one school, became the excuse for implementing costly new security systems and disciplinary codes that curtailed students’ rights to free speech, due process, and privacy. Likewise, the September 11 attacks, horrifying but rare acts of foreign terrorism on U.S. soil, have been used to justify retrenchments in civil liberties and widening surveillance by the government. In both incidents, authorities declared that “everything has changed” to justify extraordinary measures supposed to make us all safer, but which provided little evidence of that outcome. The Columbine scenario is terrifying, but the odds of it occurring in your hometown are about one in two million.4 Still, many people believe it can happen anytime, anywhere.
ARE WE ALL COLUMBINE?
Columbine provoked not only a crackdown on students but a spate of philosophizing on the causes of youth violence. President Bill Clinton, the figurative patriarch of the national family, said “perhaps we’ll never fully understand it,” and opined, “St. Paul reminds us that we all see things in life darkly . . . We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger . . . with words, not weapons.” The Littleton district attorney called for “a national soul-searching mission to stop the culture of violence,” which he blamed on “a society with too little respect for life . . . schools with too few rules . . . movies with too many murders and . . . video games that glorify too much gore and mayhem.” Experts proffered their two cents on what motivated Harris and Klebold, with psychologists blaming depression, isolation, and aggression and others dragging out the usual suspects: youth culture and its violent, nihilistic bent. News coverage segued from reporting on the particulars of Columbine, its victims, and the assailants to articles depicting an epidemic of hand-wringing among students, teachers, and parents who wondered: Could it happen here?
Columbine High School’s principal, Frank DeAngelis, would tell them unhesitatingly yes. “If you had asked me April 15 of ’99, ‘Could a Columbine shooting occur?’ I would say, there’s no way, not in this community,” DeAngelis says during an interview in his office in May 2008. “I can’t tell you the number of people who e-mailed me, or called me, or that I run into who said, ‘Your school is just like our school, your community is just like our community.’ And for anyone to state it could never happen is an inaccurate statement.” DeAngelis is compact, a Joe Pesci lookalike who has spent three decades at Columbine High, more than a dozen as principal. “If you look at school shootings, there is not a profile. They have occurred in rural communities, they’ve occurred in a suburban area, upper-middle-class, middle-class communities. They’ve occurred throughout. To say they only occur in inner cities, or they only occur in large high schools—there’s not one set profile.” DeAngelis calls what happened during his tenure a “wake-up call” to communities around the nation, even the world, and says he still doesn’t understand why Harris and Klebold did what they did. “That’s what is scary. That’s why people are afraid. If you could pinpoint it, then there’s a chance you could stop school shootings from occurring,” he says. “If you could state the reason—it was video games or it was the music. But you can’t! There are millions and millions of kids who played the game Doom, which Harris and Klebold played. Or millions of kids who listened to Marilyn Manson. Why did Klebold and Harris go off and these other kids didn’t?”
DeAngelis has a vested interest in claiming that what happened in his school could happen anywhere, and that Harris and Klebold behaved like millions of other teens. After all, he was a defendant in lawsuits that held him partly responsible for what occurred; his defense has been that he was clueless about two students in his charge or of the pecking order in his school. But facts indicate that a Columbine does not and will not happen just anywhere. There is less mystery and more clear information about where such incidents occur and who the likely perpetrators are than is generally acknowledged. Columbine-style violence has specific race, sex, and class characteristics, which are usually ignored or glossed over. The majority of school-shooting incidents with multiple victims have been committed by white, male teenagers and they have occurred in rural or suburban settings.5 There has never been a Columbine in a public city school. Yes, gun violence occurs in public city schools, but the school shootings that have grabbed headlines, what the sociologist Mike Males calls “rage killings,” have common characteristics: “All involved males, none poor, nearly all white, nearly all wielding guns (or more rarely, bombs), nearly all motivated by generalized rage.” These middle-class or affluent boys are motivated by rejection by girlfriends or school suspensions, Males found, and are not drug or alcohol users. They usually spend months or years planning their assaults and often amass arsenals of weapons.6 One reason that Columbine was spread across headlines and TV newscasts was that it shocked a nation that believed communities like the Denver suburb were supposed to be safe from extreme violence. Those sentiments were on display in news articles that quoted stunned Columbine residents saying, “This can’t be happening at our school,” and “I just can’t believe it is happening at my school.” Implicit is the idea that it would be believable and even expected for a shooting incident to occur at some schools. Which schools is made explicit in one New York Times article published two days after the incident, quoting one student’s mother: “As for safety, Mrs. Staley said she had never worried about violence at the school. ‘It’s a big deal when someone throws eggs at your house on Halloween,’ she said. Metal detectors? No one even thought about installing them at Columbine, she said. They were for urban schools.”7
If Columbine was a big story because it wasn’t supposed to happen in an affluent, white, suburban school, violence in urban schools with Latino or black victims and perpetrators isn’t news at all. In his analysis of school killings and news coverage of them, Males found that race and class played a role in what rated attention. Less than two months after Columbine, two Latina teenagers were shot to death outside their Southern California high school, rating a brief article inside the paper. Similarly, when a thirteen-year-old Latino boy shot and killed a thirteen-year-old Latina girl in a New Mexico middle school, it made no headlines. Yet a March 2001 shooting of two teens by another student—all three white—at a high school in Santee, California, was a national story. If high death tolls determined newsworthiness, several ignored school shootings had as many or more victims as well-publicized incidents in Springfield, Oregon, and Pearl, Mississippi, among others, Males noted. Why, then, did the media, as well as politicians, treat the white, suburban student shootings as more alarming than those involving minority students at urban schools? “To ask the question is to answer it: in the crass logic of reporters and editors, things like that are ‘supposed to happen’ to darker skinned youth,” Males argues.8
The alarms sounded over teen terrorists at school reached far beyond suburban Denver to Washington, D.C., where elected officials had to respond to their fretting constituents. What Harris and Klebold had done was seen as a threat to national security, demanding an investigation worthy of a terrorist attack. In June 1999, the U.S. Secret Service teamed up with the Department of Education to study “targeted violence in schools.” The Safe School Initiative, as it was called, examined thirty-seven previous incidents of violence at schools between 1974 and 2000 to understand the behavior and planning of students involved. The goal was to identify risk factors and threats in order to prevent future Columbine-type events. The Secret Service applied the same framework it had developed for an earlier study of assassination attempts against public officials.9 After three years, the joint task force issued a report, which offered few surprises and little solace to those in the Columbine community like DeAngelis who believe that the attack was unforeseeable. Among the key findings were:
• Incidents of targeted violence at school are rarely sudden, impulsive acts.
• Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s idea and/or plan to attack.
• Most attackers engaged in some behavior, prior to the incident, that caused concern or indicated a need for help.
• Most attackers were known to have difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Many had considered or attempted suicide.
• Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack.
• Most attackers had access to and had used weapons prior to the attack.
The report, while culling these commonalities, asserted that there was no one useful profile of a school shooter, making prevention a highly individualized challenge for school districts. In a follow-up report, the Safe School Initiative provided a detailed guide to threat assessment that, surprisingly, called it just “one component” in a wider strategy to reduce school violence. The best prevention strategies, the guide asserts, “create cultures and climates of safety, respect, and emotional support within educational institutions . . . environments [that] emphasize “ ‘emotional intelligence,’ as well as educational or intellectual pursuits.” But a public panicked about crazed student terrorists would not be mollified by recommendations to bolster “emotional support” and “emotional intelligence” at school. No, if anything students had been coddled too much, for too long. Bring on the metal detectors and zero tolerance rules.
JOHNNY GOT HIS GUNS
The tidy single-family homes that dot the streets in the area surrounding Columbine High School are like so many pixels forming a familiar picture of American suburbia, with shiny new minivans in driveways and tow-headed toddlers in strollers. Like folks in communities around the country, residents in this corner of Jefferson County enjoy the popular cultural tradition known as garage sales. Driving to an interview with Principal Frank DeAngelis one morning, I saw hand-drawn flyers advertising garage sales taped to utility poles, beckoning me to a closer intimacy with Columbine residents. What better way to explore a community than to mingle with neighbors perusing one another’s household clutter? Spotting a bold black arrow at an upcoming corner, I took a right turn, passing an entry sign: COLUMBINE WEST, A COVENANT PROTECTED COMMUNITY. A few more flyers led me to a cul-de-sac where the sale was under way, with kitchen utensils and pillows, excess clothing and kids’ toys displayed on the driveway. The home owner chatted with another woman inside the open garage as I rummaged around. Here was something odd, I thought, as I reached for what looked like a wide, tan leather belt. It was an old ammo belt and its small loops were holding about four spent shell casings and what appeared to be half a dozen three-inch copper-tipped rifle rounds. Having shopped at hundreds of garage sales over the years, this certainly was a first. I held it up to the owner, showing surprise about finding live ammunition plopped next to her old kitchen curtains. Nonchalantly she said, “Oh, I guess I should take those out.” She didn’t, and I departed. Welcome to Colorado, where gun culture is a vibrant element of its identity as part of the Wild West.
In the days, weeks, months, and years since April 20, 1999, the Columbine attack has been dissected and researched from just about every possible angle—except for one. It is the elephant in the room, the topic that at most gets minor mention and even less serious scrutiny. Simply put, without easy access to guns, Harris and Klebold never could have killed so many people. School shootings cannot happen without guns. Period. In fall 1998, Harris and Klebold were only seventeen years old, so they brought a friend, Robyn Anderson, eighteen, to the Tanner Gun Show, Denver’s largest and oldest gun mart, where she purchased two shotguns and a 9mm carbine rifle from the dealers Ronald Hartmann and James Royce Washington with her friends’ money. She broke no law in handing over the guns to Harris and Klebold, because it wasn’t technically a sale. Anderson, who was sued by victims and their families and settled by paying $300,000 for her role, reportedly said she was comfortable going to the Tanner show because she knew the transaction would not be documented. At that time, Colorado law permitted gun dealers who were not federally licensed to sell long arms to anyone eighteen and older without conducting the background check required by federal law. The boys also bought a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun from Mark Manes, an acquaintance of Phillip Duran, who worked with Harris and Klebold at a pizzeria. That handgun also originated at the Tanner show. Manes’s sale to the boys, however, was illegal, and he was convicted on felony charges of selling a handgun to a minor and sentenced to six years in prison. Duran, who steered the boys to Manes, was convicted of related charges and sentenced to four and a half years. Manes and Duran were also sued by victims’ families and settled for $720,000 and $250,000 respectively. Victims sued the dealers Hartmann and Washington and the gun show’s owner, J. D. Tanner, but they avoided liability. In Colorado as in many states, gun-rights sentiment is strong and gun-control supporters are marginally less reviled than sex predators. Weeks after Columbine, it was business as usual as J. D. Tanner held his gun show—although he did cancel one scheduled for the weekend after the attack. Tanner’s thirty-year-old show, held monthly at Denver’s Merchandise Mart, faced no public protests or disruptions. Tanner told a reporter he couldn’t explain Columbine. “Guns are not to blame, and the ready availability of them is not to blame,” he said. “It’s in the minds of the children . . . I’m not a psychologist.” His dealers, however, were reportedly upset that state legislators were entertaining gun-control measures as a consequence of the school tragedy.10
Principal Frank DeAngelis might reasonably be expected to have strong feelings about gun control. But he doesn’t. “Robyn Anderson, she was eighteen and she actually went down to a gun show and purchased the guns,” DeAngelis says. “And so those laws were in place, so you question some of those laws. If there would have been tougher laws—she wouldn’t get the guns. But some of these others they purchased were purchased illegally from someone else in the community, and that’s where there’s a question of guns laws. If Klebold and Harris wanted to get guns—and I truly believe this—whether you talk about Washington, D.C., and things, if kids want guns they’re gonna get guns. It’s not the law-abiding citizens. Criminals are gonna get the guns.” The flaw in this reasoning is that Harris and Klebold were not “criminals,” even if they’d burglarized a van. They were emotionally disturbed teenagers, not gun-toting drug dealers, and there is a vast difference. It may be true that in our gun-infested culture, criminals will always get guns. It’s also true that gun-control laws make it more difficult for everyone to get guns. The Brady Law requires federally licensed gun dealers to document purchases by conducting background checks on buyers, a significant hurdle for anyone—not just criminals—who does not want to leave a legal paper trail. The law’s loophole permits dealers who are not federally licensed to forgo the process. For Tom Mauser, gun-control laws are speed bumps on the way to dangerous gun use. “In terms of, could they have gotten [guns] somewhere else? The fact is they didn’t,” he says. “It’s the law of odds. How many obstacles are you going to put there? We had a very easy way for someone to buy guns without any records. And that’s what they used. That’s the point. They could so easily get them at the gun show.” For Principal DeAngelis, a neutral stance on guns might be part of surviving what could have been a career-ending disaster.
“I think that Frank says, ‘Well, there’s different points of view,’ because he has to. Anybody who’s in a public position has to be so concerned about how they address the gun issue because the gun lobby is so powerful in this country, and they punish people who step out of line,” says Mauser. “So, if Frank DeAngelis suddenly became a gun-control advocate, I think his job would be at risk. Seriously. How dare you? This isn’t about guns, and you shouldn’t be going there.” We met for breakfast at La Peep, a diner-style restaurant not far from the high school, which was crammed with Saturday morning patrons. Mauser is a Pittsburgh native who made his way to Colorado long ago, married Linda, and raised Daniel and his younger sister. A year after Daniel’s death, they adopted a baby girl from China. Tom works for the state Department of Transportation, where he developed a stand-up persona for all the public presentations he does related to his job. Sort of a wry, Bob Neuhart–style humor with a quirky slide show. “It’s all about timing,” he explains. “You say something about how important safety is, and then click on a picture of a highway worker in a full suit of armor, with the cones next to him and holding a ‘slow’ sign. Things like that.” After Daniel’s death, Tom found a new public persona, speaking out about guns, and he wasn’t kidding around anymore. He’d supported gun control before Columbine, and that year for the first time he’d become active. He wrote letters to his state legislator opposing pro-gun measures, like the concealed weapons bill, in the statehouse. Then came what he calls “an omen.” Shortly before the attack, Daniel was doing research on gun laws for his debate team and talked to Tom about the loophole in the Brady Law—the very one that Harris and Klebold exploited to obtain guns from the gun show. For a grieving father, Daniel’s senseless death was a call to arms for full-throttle activism on gun control.
“What really primed me was the fact that those laws were being promoted,” he says. “On the day of Columbine, the governor of Colorado came to the school and I confronted him. I said, ‘Hey, Governor, here you were promoting these gun laws.’ He said, ‘This isn’t the appropriate time for this.’ He didn’t know I was a victim at that point. But in particular, I was watching a little of the news coverage of Columbine afterwards. I was hearing some of the things that were said, and it was just flabbergasting. ‘If teachers had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened.’” Then, ten days later, Tom’s friend Margie called to say the National Rifle Association was coming to Denver for its national convention. The gun lobby shortened its convention to a one-day event for board business and a few other festivities, eliminating the massive gun show that was the popular draw. But a lot of people, including Denver’s mayor, thought it shouldn’t happen in light of Columbine. Did Tom want to go and speak? Linda was supportive but concerned because it was so soon after the tragedy. It would be Tom’s first time publicly talking about his son’s death and his first public speaking experience outside of work. “When I spoke that day to the crowd, I said, ‘I’m not arguing like many of you that they shouldn’t be here,” he says. “My message was why did they feel the need to cut back on any of it? If they didn’t feel any responsibility for what happened at Columbine, why should they cut the convention at all? I don’t believe they did it out of respect. They did it to save themselves because it would have been extremely embarrassing to have that gun show, that bravado and all those assault weapons, those gun clips. They knew damn well the media would have been there focusing on it.”
Unfortunately, media attention to the issue of guns in school shootings has been sporadic and shallow. Lurid descriptions of the Columbine aftermath and photos of Harris and Klebold dead in the school library, guns nearby, reflect the sensationalized coverage that drove so much news of the tragedy. Several articles did little more than mention the Colorado pro-gun laws being considered and the topic of gun availability in general. A deeper look provides a perspective on school shootings and violence that makes guns more integral to the discussion. First is the question of where the guns come from. Although Harris and Klebold got their firearms directly and indirectly through a poorly regulated marketplace, the single most common source of guns used by students in a school shooting is their home. The second-greatest source is from a relative or friend. The 1998 Jonesboro incident is a good example: two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, shot and killed four students and a teacher at their middle school with rifles they took from a grandfather’s gun cabinet. An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of all the gun-related deaths at schools between 1992 and 1999 found that 123 students used 128 guns to commit violence at school, with 48 of those guns taken from home and 30 from a friend or relative. And not all the gun violence at school is homicidal. While 85 students shot and killed others, 33 used a gun to commit suicide. Five students, including Harris and Klebold, committed homicide and then suicide.11
Suicide is virtually absent from discussions of school violence, and that couldn’t be clearer than with Columbine. Harris and Klebold were suicidal teens whose anger and depression was directed at their school, classmates, and the world—and themselves. Columbine wasn’t simply a horrendous school shooting. It was a multiple homicide-suicide, a not uncommon form of rage killing by adults. But to consider the suicides of Harris and Klebold requires granting them some humanity, acknowledging that despair drove them to end their lives before they’d even really begun. It is easier, perhaps, to think of them as evil and lacking in any humanity. And it is easier to ignore the issue of suicide, especially among young people. In Colorado in 1999, the suicide rate was 14.4 per 100,000 people, compared to a national rate of 10.6. Colorado’s suicide rate is among the highest in the country, and Jefferson County is one of four Denver-area counties with the highest number of suicide deaths. Guns are used in 52 percent of all suicides.12 Nationally, suicide is among the top three causes of death for those aged thirteen to nineteen, claiming about four lives every day—or 1,460 lives every year. For added perspective on the real scope of school deaths, consider this: nationally during the 2006–2007 school year, there were three student suicides on school grounds, compared to two student-on-student shooting fatalities and two stabbing deaths, according to the National Center for School Safety.
Temporarily chastened by the national spotlight on Columbine, the Colorado legislature tabled two gun-rights bills, but they were revived the next session. In 2000, Tom Mauser took a one-year leave from his state job to work as a full-time lobbyist for SAFE (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic) Colorado, where he fought against the pro-gun bills and for a law to close the gun-show loophole in the Brady Law. But legislators were weak-kneed and the NRA’s clout was strong, and tougher control measures foundered. So SAFE Colorado took a new tack, to put before voters in the November 2000 election a ballot initiative to close the loophole. It was an overwhelming success despite the NRA’s well-funded campaign to defeat Amendment 22, as it was known, which passed with 70 percent of the votes. “When someone says, ‘Well, if this law had been in effect, would it have prevented what happened?’ We will never know,” Mauser says. “I believe there is a chance if that law was in effect and Robyn Anderson 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.”
Mauser still speaks out on gun control and lobbies for safer gun laws as president of Colorado Cease Fire. Their push now is for a CAP law—child access prevention—to hold adult gun owners responsible if children shoot others or themselves with their firearms. “I’ve seen too many cases where kids have gotten access to guns, especially in accidental shooting cases—not so much school shootings—and the parents don’t get charged,” Mauser says. “A gun under the mattress, a gun in the nightstand, and the parent says, ‘I told him to get it.’ We’re charging a child for God’s sake, and we don’t charge the parent.” Mauser’s group made suicide prevention a big focus of the bill in 2008, and hoped to find allies among groups doing such work. Instead, they waded into taboo territory. “Nobody wants to talk about suicide. In fact, it was very difficult for us in working the bill and trying to get the suicide prevention people with us,” he says. “Some of the leaders of the suicide prevention movement are people who indeed lost their children to suicide. And in a few of those cases, how do you think they committed suicide? And then when you go to those people and say, ‘We’d like your support for a bill that does this,’ they say, ‘You’re gonna punish people who lost their child?’ ” The bill actually would give prosecutors discretion in filing charges against an adult, which would only be a misdemeanor. Pretty mild. But it would also require gun shops and gun show dealers to post signs and hand out flyers stating that the law holds adults responsible for keeping guns away from children. And those simple measures are anathema to the NRA and its more extreme offshoots.
The gun lobby’s power is occasionally exposed in surprising ways and places. After two tragic incidents in fall 2006—at an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and a Bailey, Colorado, high school—a coalition of educators, school psychologists, and health professionals came together and issued a statement on school violence. In both incidents, adult male intruders took students hostage and then shot and killed students and themselves. The coalition, called the National Consortium of School Violence Prevention Researchers and Practitioners, was concerned that the hysterical overreaction to the incidents would simply continue the harsh and ineffective approaches to school safety anointed in the wake of Columbine. The statement noted that schools are safer places for children than their homes or communities, where more violence occurs. In one brief paragraph, it takes direct aim at the role of guns:
Finally, it is also important to acknowledge that access to guns plays an important role in many acts of serious violence in the United States. Although guns are never the simple cause of a violent act, the availability of lethal weapons to youth and to emotionally disturbed or antisocial adults poses a serious public health problem that cannot be overlooked. Our political leaders need to find a reasonable and constitutional way to limit the widespread availability of guns to persons who are unwilling or unable to use them in a responsible, lawful manner.
Hardly a radical manifesto, the statement was endorsed by more than a hundred leading researchers and educators, as well as two dozen national professional organizations. Among them were the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the American Psychological Association. But one organization with a natural interest in school safety—the American Federation of Teachers—declined to sign the statement because it was afraid of controversy with the pro-gun lobby. “We lost the AFT over the last paragraph on guns,” says Matthew J. Mayer, a Rutgers University professor and a founder of the coalition. “Once you raise the issue of gun control you create a dynamic where some people feel there is no discussion. It’s like taking on the NRA lobbying machine.”
COLUMBINE: HIGH SCHOOL OR FORTRESS?
The Columbine attack unleashed a national frenzy of security equipment purchases, with metal detectors a popular choice. Closed campuses to restrict student movement, pumped-up school policing, and zero tolerance policies that criminalized a range of typical teen behaviors were also part of the equation. Educators were suddenly discussing bullying and programs to address its negative influence on the learning environment. Given that the Columbine tragedy was the impetus behind these changes, I was curious about how that infamous symbol of school violence had responded to concerns about security and a climate that fostered bullying of less popular students. Most people think the place must be a fortress with state-of-the-art antibullying programs and conflict resolution training. And they’d be wrong. Columbine High School has no metal detectors. Zero. There are a few more surveillance cameras, but there had been some in place before April 20, 1999. School resource officers? Still one SRO, same as before. Three new positions were added—campus supervisors, unarmed middle-aged men who walk around the campus. All but two entry doors are locked now, but the campus is not closed and students come and go freely during lunchtime and breaks.
On the Friday afternoon I visited Columbine High, school was over and clusters of students lingered outside the main entrance and inside the lobby. I walked through the unlocked front doors, which displayed a sign stating that the school was “protected by V-Soft,” a computer software program that scans visitor IDs to detect registered sex offenders. Another sign instructs all visitors to stop at the main office. There was no adult presence at the entrance, and no one questioned me as I walked in. The office was bustling with students, teachers, and staff preparing for the next day’s fifth annual Community Day, an event created to “give back to the community” that had rallied to help the school post–April 20, 1999. Over several e-mails and phone calls with his secretary, Principal DeAngelis had agreed to grant me a one-hour interview after school hours to discuss safety and security at Columbine, a large, two-story, multiwing campus with about 1,700 students. Businesslike but cordial, he ushered me into his office and talked about April 20 and school security as if he’d done it a hundred times before. He has. What did he do to create a sense of safety in the building after the tragedy? “I think we have surveillance camera systems second to none that we can access via our Blackberries,” he explains. “Campus supervisors can be anywhere in the building and can have access to what’s happening throughout the school. We have keyless entries. We have two entrances into the building that are open during the day. The one you just walked in and the one downstairs, and we have staff members monitoring them. All the other doors, when we’re locked down, are keyless entries. So if a key was to be lost—if this card was to be lost [holding a card on a lanyard around his neck]—it’s all tied into a computer system, so we can deactivate it. I’m the only that has twenty-four/seven access, along with our custodial person. Every period of the day we have adult supervision. So there are teachers during their planning periods that either monitor the doors downstairs or walk the halls upstairs.”
Jefferson County School District, of which Columbine is part, created threat-assessment teams that in each school began to identify students who posed potential risks. DeAngelis says he has used the process several times successfully, starting with his school social worker and moving up to the district level if action is warranted. Columbine devised an emergency response plan, and each semester it practices evacuations and lockdowns, he says, “and we talk to teachers about assignments, and are there red flags.” People always ask him why there are no metal detectors, DeAngelis says, and he poses his own question. “Would metal detectors have stopped Klebold and Harris? They would not. When they came on campus, we had a Jefferson [County] police officer who was armed. He exchanged gunfire. They drove into the parking lot. They’re not gonna stop at the metal detector and go through. They came in blasting,” he says. “A lot of times metal detectors are false security, and the presence of that security system, or the metal detector—is it really gonna stop another school shooting? Not necessarily. And then you look at the practicality of it. A month after the shooting at Columbine, President Clinton came to Dakota Ridge High School to address us, and all because of security reasons, all the people had to go through metal detectors. And it was an hour. Do we do that every day with students and make them go through metal detectors? It’s still a place to educate students, and do students, and do parents, want a fortress?”
The Columbine community considered that question, and so did the Columbine Review Commission. It rejected the high-tech fortress approach to making Colorado schools safer, noting the limitations of metal detectors and other hardware: “Although security devices can effectively deter certain forms of school crimes, including theft, graffiti and gang violence, they have not yet proven to be cost effective in preventing major school violence like that experienced by Columbine High School. Therefore, the Commission does not recommend the universal installation of metal detectors, video surveillance cameras and other security equipment as a means of forestalling violence generally; for the present, such devices can serve only to offer transient solutions to specific problems at individual schools.”13
The commission also offered prescriptions for addressing conditions in a school that could foster a Columbine-type incident. One called for changing what it termed the “code of silence” in student culture to encourage reporting potential threats from classmates. Another recommendation homed in on bullying, which the commission stated was either a huge problem at Columbine or not very significant, based on contradictory testimony it heard from parents, students, and Principal DeAngelis. Acknowledging that bullying was a “risk factor” for school violence, the commission urged every Colorado school to adopt proven antibullying programs. Under Principal DeAngelis, the student-informer model found traction while bullying prevention hasn’t. At Columbine, students are educated that it’s “safe to tell” on one another, DeAngelis says, and to that end he has an anonymous tip box. “I can’t tell you the number of tips I get in my office about ‘You may want to check so-and-so, he may have drugs,’ or ‘You may want to check so-and-so, who may have a weapon.’ That’s what the key is,” he says. “It’s very difficult for these kids to narc or rat on someone but at least give them the skills to put an anonymous tip in my tip box.” DeAngelis had no statistics on the number of tips that were substantiated, but Columbine High’s state profile indicates a school most administrators would consider trouble-free. For the 2005–2006 school year, fifteen drug-related incidents, eleven alcohol incidents, and one dangerous weapon (unspecified) were reported. No assaults or fights were reported, but there were ninety-eight other violations of the code of conduct, and a total of five expulsions—this from a population of 1,677 teenagers.14
