25 Years After Columbine, We Fixed Nothing

Despite Many Efforts, We Never Made Progress On The Gun Violence Issue

The Columbine High School Massacre memorial in Littleton, Colorado

I was a sophomore at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, New York on April 20, 1999. I remember sitting in Geometry class in Room E205 just after lunch when our teacher, Mrs. Quinn, was called into the hallway by one of the deans. I was close enough to the door to hear what was going on and I heard the dean mention “students killed at a high school out West.”

It wasn’t until I left school that day that I found out the news the way people did back before social media; on the televisions in the window of a local electronics store. I rushed home and found my mom, who was making dinner for my grandmother’s 68th birthday, with the news on: A shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. At least 13 dead.

It was one of the few major hard news events at the time that seeped into the everyday conversation of my sheltered social circle of teenagers. We talked about it among ourselves, brought it up to teachers and morbidly related ourselves to the students who died. We had an assembly at school the next week where our Principal assured us we were safe. I can’t say it reassured me. After Columbine, my entire perspective of high school changed. The word itself has a new meaning to my generation. The section of Pinelawn Cemetery where my grandparents are buried is called “Columbine Court.” Today, I can’t go there without thinking of the school first and not the flower.

I’ve been thinking all week on whether I should write something about the 25 anniversary of what we today know simply as “Columbine.” Many times over the years I wondered if that massacre, and not 9/11, was really the defining traumatic incident of my generation. The students killed in the attacks were all my age. I think about how many years I’ve lived since that they haven’t, and how short their lives really were, something that I couldn’t really comprehend at the time. Today 16 years doesn’t seem very long. Barack Obama was elected 16 years ago. In 1999 though, 16 years was my entire lifetime.

I remember thinking at the time that this was a problem with an easy fix. We’d just ban guns, or make it hard for kids to get them. “They’ll fix this,” I thought.

Before school shootings, the main news item for which you’d see a “Special Report” breaking news interruption on regular television was a plane crash. In the latter half of the 20th Century, plane crashes were frighteningly common. There would be several commercial jetliner crashes a year in the United States with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of fatalities. The last time there was a mass casualty commercial air disaster in the United States, however, was in 2009 when Colgan Air 3407 crashed outside Buffalo, New York. Today they are almost unheard of.

School shootings on the other hand have become endemic to American life. Columbine was the beginning of decades of horror and incomprehension that eventually became frustration and hopelessness. Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde all have the same meaning as Columbine now. When plane crashes were common, those in power in both the public and private sectors dedicated themselves toward fixing the problems that led to the crashes. As a result, flying is now the safest mode of traveling.

That did not happen for gun violence. Since Columbine, every attempt to fix the problem has been met with opposition, especially from the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun lobbyists. Pro-gun advocates have dug in on the argument that no amount of gun control would stop mass shootings, despite dozens of other countries’ experiences being evidence to the contrary, and anything that might help would violate the Second Amendment anyway. Even when gun control advocates do win, the victories are often pyrrhic.

In the wake of a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado – just a few miles from Columbine – and less than a year after Sandy Hook, Colorado’s Democratic legislature enacted background checks for gun purchases and capacity limits for ammunition. Later, three Democratic State Senators faced recall elections over the bills, despite the bills polling favorably among the public in the state and in the senators’ districts. Two of the Senators were recalled anyway, despite strong support for the measures, and a third resigned rather than face a recall. Dumbstruck political observers wondered how voters who supported gun control could recall elected officials who enacted it. The only theory anyone could come up with was the voters lied to pollsters when they said they supported the laws.

Nineteen years after Columbine, another school shooting woke up a different generation. The 2018 mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people felt like a turning point.

After Parkland, Columbine survivors, now adults, publicly said they believed their failure in achieving change was in putting their faith in their parents and leaders to solve the problem. Feeling betrayed by their elders and those in power after Columbine, the survivors of the 1999 shooting advised Parkland students to do the work themselves. They did. Parkland survivors, like David Hogg, Emma Gonzales and Cameron Kasky became vocal advocates for gun control and lobbied for legislation nationwide and in Washington.

But their attempts failed too, and perhaps even backfired. While Hogg was in Washington lobbying Congress on gun control in 2019, he was famously harassed and heckled by a then-unknown conspiracy theorist from Georgia. A video of the encounter went viral online. A year later, that heckler, Marjorie Taylor Greene, won election to Congress where she now holds tremendous influence in the Republican majority. Hogg and the other Parkland activists meanwhile have faded into the background since and gun control is hardly even discussed as a salient issue anymore.

At the risk of sounding cynical, the lesson of Columbine 25 years later feels like this: Sometimes there are problems that just aren't fixable because the public doesn't care enough to force the hand of those in power to fix them, even if they say they support a solution. Very often the public humors us by saying they want something (gun control, better healthcare, workers rights) but they really don't care if it happens or not, and vote on issues more important to them personally and reject opportunities for advancement on the other issues.

The public, not just politicians and lobbyists, has had agency on the issue of gun violence since Columbine, the same way they had agency in airline safety. When the public demanded safer air travel, they ensured elected officials, aircraft manufactures and airlines heard them. They spoke with their votes and with their money. When it came to gun control however, they did the opposite. The public dithered and temporized. We lectured each other about not “politicizing tragedy” and used that to buy ourselves time for the moment to pass and for us not to have do anything divisive and hard.

Some of it I believe has to do with the fact that many who personally support left-of-center ideas like gun control feel more culturally aligned with conservatives, so are likely to feel more inclined to give them some grace in their positions, even if they oppose them. Another reason is Americans have become so conflict adverse in their own communities that many moderate and left-of-center folks who exist in largely conservative circles do not care enough about issues like gun violence to risk direct conflict with their conservative friends and family.

Whatever the reason, the public’s inability and unwillingness to turn their suggested support of issues like gun control into actual action is the real reason why we haven’t fixed what led to Columbine and the dozens of other mass shootings since, and lobbyists like the NRA and corrupt politicians are only emboldened by that.