25 Years Post-Columbine: What’s Changed?
Article by Rhea Gupta
On December 14th, 2012, a young 20-year-old man named Adam Lanza took his mother’s rifle and fatally shot twenty-six innocent citizens at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He killed twenty students and six adults, making Sandy Hook the deadliest school shooting that has ever occurred in the US. On May 24th, 2022, an 18 year-old man named Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two adults in Robb Elementary School. He killed a total of 21 victims, making the Texas Uvalde shooting the second deadliest school shooting in America. The difference between these two mass shootings is five victims and ten years.
Yet, they were not the first to grip the nation. On April 20, 1999, two teenagers went on a horrific shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 13 people and injuring dozens more before taking their own lives. The shooting was one of the first to receive widespread national media coverage, and it exposed how easy it was for underage individuals to obtain powerful firearms. Nearly 25 years later, the legacy of Columbine still haunts America. It was a devastating wake-up call about the potential for mass violence, especially at the hands of teenagers, and marked the beginning of an era of active shooter drills, lockdowns, and heightened security in high schools all across America.
The Columbine shooting also carries a different legacy. The images of teenage gunmen clad in trenchcoats, their idea of going out in a twisted blaze of glory, and the details of their meticulous planning were all carefully documented by the media. This intense focus and awareness campaign, while intended to prevent future tragedies, may have inspired other mentally ill individuals looking for their 15 minutes of fame. The Columbine coverage turned Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into anti-heroes, students that fought against the status quo and used violence as an outlet for their societal rage. The first copycat shooting – one where the killer was inspired and motivated by Columbine – was the W. R. Myers High School shooting. The angry student, dressed in a blue trench coat, injured one classmate and killed another. The shooting came only eight days after Columbine, and many other copycats emerged soon after.
These legacies and reverberations encompass what’s known as the “Columbine effect.” But although the tragedy galvanized the citizens of America and inspired the anti-gun violence movement we know today, that momentum for reform never materialized into concrete federal laws. Year after year, mass shooting after mass shooting, the demands for change remained unmet by Congress. We must break this vicious pattern. It’s time to finally embrace comprehensive gun legislation measures that show that we have learned from these tragedies.
According to Everytown Research and Policy, states that have “thoughtfully strengthened their laws over the years consistently saw lower death rates, with a 36 percent reduction in gun deaths since 1990” (Suplina). Conversely, states that enact policies enabling increased gun ownership have experienced a 19 percent increase in gun deaths since 1990. The party divide has largely prevented Congress from passing comprehensive gun legislation even though there are clear statistics that show that states with stricter gun control legislation have experienced fewer mass shootings.
We need legislation that requires secure storage of weapons, implements background checks on every sale and transfer, and bans high capacity magazines. These reforms must go beyond the federal level – they should extend to local towns and city ordinances and involve community-based violence prevention programs. We need to continue to fund gun violence research programs and use that data to guide our future legislation. Many gun deaths are accidental and can easily be prevented. We need to educate families and gun owners about gun safety and make mental health records a mandatory part of background checks when purchasing a gun.
There is also a clear link between right-to-carry laws and an increase in gun deaths. A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that “the average rate of assaults with firearms increased an average of 9.5 percent relative to forecasted trends in the first 10 years after 34 states relaxed restrictions on civilians carrying concealed firearms in public.” We need to pass legislation that requires permits and a good or proper cause to carry a concealed firearm.
In the ten-year span between Sandy Hook and Uvalde, the gun legislation that the United States has passed has been almost nothing. And more than two decades after Columbine, our nation’s paralysis on gun reform persists. The memories of the victims from these massacres deserve more than just a recurring wake-up call. They deserve substantive policies that address the root of the gun violence epidemic. It is not “too soon” to talk about gun reforms, as the gun lobbyists repeat after every mass shooting. And it is not “politicizing the tragedy” if you are working on solutions to prevent them. The time to grieve has passed – now we must honor the lives lost in Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Uvalde by finally taking powerful, palpable action to stop the gun violence epidemic.