On a warm April day a quarter of a century ago, Dave Cullen was just about to eat lunch (cheap gourmet frozen beef stroganoff) when the media first reported that there had been a shooting at a school in Littleton, Colorado. was.
Jaclyn Schildkraut was homesick, she says, while watching the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” during her freshman year of college, when the news showed aerial footage of a SWAT team and students The students were so frightened that they ran from Columbine High School with their hands up. Head.
Robert Thompson appeared on the late-night news program “Nightline,” interviewed survivors and their parents, and told the story of then-17-year-old Patrick Ireland falling bloody from a school library window into his arms. I kept watching videos that didn't exist. Number of first responders.
The Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999, in which 12 students and a teacher were killed, was not the first school shooting in the United States, nor will it be the last. But media experts told USA TODAY that thanks to the 24-hour news cycle and the advent of the internet, the story quickly became one of the most infamous. The shooting, which felt like it happened in real time, shocked Colorado communities and the nation, and shattered faith that children could safely attend school.
“It was baked into us,” said Karen, a journalist and author of “Columbine.” “At the time, I didn't say this was the beginning of the era of mass shootings, but I knew we were getting into something new and scary.”
The trauma of Columbine still haunts this country 25 years later, including for students who did not live to witness it. The massacre served as a blueprint for dozens of copycats, led to major changes in school safety, and prompted survivors to call for better gun control and offer support to the next generation of Americans affected by gun violence. , creating an enduring legacy of activity.
“There's no healing. It's an open wound,” Karen said.
News of mass shootings can cause stress
Thompson, director professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, said at the time that the Columbine massacre was not the nation's deadliest school shooting. But the shooting occurred after the establishment of CNN, FOX and MSNBC for the first time in 24/7 television news coverage, which Thompson described as “powerful and deeply upsetting.”
According to a 1999 study by the Pew Research Center, the Columbine incident was the cause of more news stories than any other news story of that year or decade, other than the 1992 verdict in the Rodney King assault case and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. It was attracting attention.
Shocking footage was broadcast and TV anchors interviewed students who called in from inside the building, adding to the sense that the disaster was still unfolding, Karen wrote in “Columbine.” . The shooting ended shortly after noon, but it would be several hours before police, the press and the public learned the gunman was dead, said Cullen, who covered the massacre at Salon. That may have given the tragedy the power to be remembered by the entire nation, he said.
“We lived through it live,” he said.
Another factor was the media focus on the shooter, said James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Minnesota Metropolitan State University. The gunman intentionally left behind a body of evidence that would later be celebrated in “the darkest corners of the internet,” he said. .
“It was a mass shooting to spread the virus before anyone even understood what it meant to spread the virus,” Dency said.
Decades of research on mass tragedies since then shows that the more time people spend watching this type of news, the more they report higher levels of acute stress, said E. Alison Holman, a professor in the School of Nursing. It turns out that the chances are high. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Irvine. This is especially true if the images are graphic, says Holman.
In a study of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Professor Holman found that being exposed to media coverage of the event for more than six hours a day was associated with more acute stress symptoms than actually being at the scene of the bombing. I discovered that. She said her symptoms can include intrusive thoughts, hyperarousal, shallow breathing and increased heart rate. Holman said the effects could last for years.
Columbine Day can be difficult for survivors
Tom Moser, whose son Daniel was killed at Columbine, believes it was a trauma that people still don't understand. Moser said the anniversary of the mass shooting can be an especially tough time. He helped plan a vigil for the victims on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol on Friday evening, but said it was a day that survivors “want to pass quickly.”
“It's more than just the dead and injured,” Moser said. “The trauma can be very severe for some people.”
In the years since the shooting, Mauser has been fighting for stricter gun laws as a member of Colorado Ceasefire. When speaking publicly, he wears the shoes his son was wearing on the day of the massacre.
After Columbine, many survivors of mass shootings followed in Moser's footsteps, including survivors of the 2018 attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Activism can lead to burnout, but a study on climate change anxiety published in Current Psychology and a study on sexual assault trauma published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology found that This suggests that participating in activism may benefit participants' mental health.
Missy Mendo, a 14-year-old freshman at Columbine in 1999, said ongoing mental health services “were not a thing.” The county offered six weeks of free mental health care, which Mendo said she took advantage of. But it wasn't until years later, when she became a mother, that she returned to therapy.
Mendo is the community outreach director for The Rebels Project, an organization founded by a group of Columbine survivors after the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The organization provides peer support to survivors of mass casualty events.
Although it's not a replacement for traditional counseling, Schildkraut, author of “Columbine, 20 Years Later, and Beyond: Lessons from the Tragedy,” says connecting with a “survivor network” is an important part of recovery. He said that research has shown that it can be a part of the body.
Every year around this time, Mendo tries to make plans to forget the memories. But she knows she can't escape the calendar: “Her brain could turn into mashed potatoes,” she said with a laugh.
Copycat school shootings after Columbine
Columbine also spawned more insidious imitators. Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University, said in a study of 46 K-12 school shootings, nearly half of the shooters, including those at Parkland Elementary School and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. It turns out that he was influenced by Columbine. Co-author of the study. A 2019 Mother Jones investigation documented the “Columbine effect” in 74 plots and attacks across 30 states.
“At these events, the shooter's search history included looking for Columbine, discussing Columbine in online chat rooms, and learning about the shooter,” the Violence Prevention Project said. said Densley, co-founder of. . “There are also examples of gunmen wearing black trench coats, because that's part of the performance of violence that Columbine produced.”
Although mass shootings are rare, 75% of 15- to 21-year-olds say mass shootings are a significant source of stress, according to a 2018 study by the American Psychological Association Harris Poll.
Columbine itself continues to be a target, said John MacDonald, former director of school safety for Colorado's Jefferson County Schools. MacDonald said security at Columbine costs more than twice as much as other high schools in the district.
“Columbine was unique because when I started, tour buses were still showing up trying to drop people off for tours of the building. It was insane,” he said. “But we were also threatened because we were fascinated. Fascination and obsession with tragedy and murderers.”
MacDonald said the threat never waned during his 14 years on the job, ultimately culminating around the 20th anniversary of the massacre. In April 2019, a teenager who Florida authorities said was “obsessed” with mass shootings flew to Colorado and purchased a shotgun in Littleton, sparking a school closure. The boy was later found dead from what appeared to be self-inflicted injuries.
“It was an incredibly scary time,” McDonald said.
Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminology professor who studies mass shootings, said media attention to the Columbine shooter may have contributed to this “contagion effect.” Mr Theves is now asking the media not to publish the names and photos of mass murderers.
But Lankford cautioned that media attention is not the only factor driving imitation.
“It's not just that learning about Columbine makes you want to kill people,” Lankford said. “It's more complicated than that. These people have other issues in their lives, and they have other issues in terms of their mental health.”
Target practice can cause anxiety
McDonald said she sometimes feels “incredibly hopeful” about the advances in school safety since Columbine. He also gets frustrated when he sees schools not taking simple precautions like locking doors. He doesn't want to have the same conversations 25 years from now.
“We'd better try to be great because the school shooters are studying. They're studying the past. They're studying tactics. They're studying. They're studying strategy. They're studying training,” McDonald said. “They're preparing for us. We'd better prepare for them.”
Protecting and vigilance in schools is critical, but it comes at a cost, he says. More than a year ago, McDonald decided he needed a change and left Colorado.
“All I can say is that after so many years of doing that job, I was completely exhausted,” said McDonald, currently chief operating officer of the Missouri Center for Educational Safety and the School Safety Leadership Council. said. “I felt like this was how I was going to live 24 hours a day. And it was exhausting, emotionally, and physically taxing.”
School security is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry, but it can also be a burden to other companies. A study by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and Georgia Tech's Social Dynamics and Well-Being Lab links active shooter drills to increased depression, stress, and anxiety among students, parents, and teachers. It is suggested that.
Author Cullen said new security measures at schools after Columbine, similar to changes in airport security after 9/11, could serve as a reminder of the tragedy for some people.
“Overnight, America changed our fears and our behavior because of this,” Cullen said. “Not only are there no other such shoots going on, but there are very few events.”
Contributed by: Reuters
