April 19, 1999 (Sometime after 6:00 pm): The story begins the evening before. Still unknown to police, Columbine High School faculty, students and parents, somehow on this evening shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold snuck into the school and planted over 25 homemade pipe bombs throughout the school. All of them set to detonate April 20, 1999 at around 1:00 pm. Ideally the shooters had planned to blow up the school altogether, hoping to kill all of the students. One would wonder where the parents of 18 year old Eric Harris were when he and Klebold were building pipe bombs in the basement of his suburban home. Due to the absence of the parents, it is obvious that the parents of the shooters were not only distant from their children’s activities, but also distant from their children emotionally. Just as there are signs of an anorexic girl or a suicidal teen, there are signs of an angry teen. The parents of Harris and Klebold either neglected to acknowledge or didn’t see the signs that their own children displayed. Being a part of the “Trench Coat Mafia,” not attending school dances, listening to violent music, watching violent movies and going to internet sites with instructions to make pipe bombs were signs that the shooters showed way before the tragedy occurred. Not to mention the actual pimp bombs constructed in the basement. In an Online NewsHour interview, Dr. Joan Kinlan talks about a “spiritual emptiness that is present in these kids, too, have come from homes in which there’s violence, especially domestic violence” (Online NewsHour 1). This may or may not have been the case, with the shooters dead their life at home may never really been known. But the unwillingness of the parents to pay attention to their children’s lives or the way that the parents treated their children is what caused and influenced the tragedy at Columbine.
April 20, 1999 (7:50 a.m.): My best friend, Brooke Allison, freshman class president, frantically walks up the open spiraling staircase located in the cafeteria. At the top of the stairs and the main entrance to the school, she notices one of her acquaintances Eric Harris. He is dressed in his usual attire, a knee length black trench coat as symbol of his peer group often known as the “Trench Coat Mafia,” dark blue jeans, and a black shirt. They swiftly pass each other giving the usual glance and short smile and Brooke ushers of to her first class. What Brooke did not know was that on that same day, that same acquaintance would change the rest of her life. As much as I don’t like to admit it, some of the blame can be placed on the other students that attended Columbine High School. Life in high school can be rough for a student who does not represent the ideal prom queen, captain of the football team image. Neither Harris nor Klebold fit this image and in turn they were made fun of and teased. It was the teasing that fueled their hate and discontent for fellow students. In a post Columbine forum, one high school student defended the shooters by arguing that “For example, a certain football [player] (at a nearby high school) committed two felonies and will still be [allowed] to play football in the fall. What is going on? The [staff] think no sports would eliminate some of the cliques. The jocks [need] to realize that they are not the sh**, and they have no right to [push people] around. Some might say they had it coming to them.” (Tochterman 3-4) This was probably the same attitude that Harris and Klebold felt when they walked into Columbine High School and fired their weapons. As many high school students can preach, what your peers think of you matters and the superficial prejudices that the “jocks” had about the shooters is what drove them to violence.
April 20, 1999 (9:05 a.m.): Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold approach the back entrance of Columbine High School while firing their semi automatic weapons. Brooke and her friends hear the chaos as they are eating their lunch. As soon as the first shots fired, kids in the lunch room turned to look outside the wall of windows that showed a frightful scene and their worst nightmare, these two shooters in a fit of rage. They shooting didn’t silence and Eric and Dylan continued to walk into the school.
April 20, 1999 (9:10 a.m.): They finally walk into the cafeteria. Frantically with the sound of tables dropping on their sides as shields from the array of bullets being sprayed across the lunch room, Brooke and her friends sit crying looking only at the bottom of a lunch table hoping to find a way out of the school before they are killed. Meanwhile, the look of terror, fear and disbelief fills the face of every student in that cafeteria when all of the fire alarms begin to go off.
April 20, 1999: (9:15 a.m.): With tears in her eyes, down her face, and a lack of breath in her lungs, Brooke is finally able to run out a side entrance to the cafeteria along with all of the others in the cafeteria looking for a retreat from the shooting.
April 20, 1999: (9:16 a.m.): Shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walk up that same open spiraling staircase with a slight grin on their faces. They reload their semi automatic weapons and make their way to the library. A library which has windows open to the cafeteria, as the students in the library have just watched the destruction below and can hear the gun shots, then knowing that their destruction will be next. Police and fire trucks begin to arrive, but An image of a destructive shooter on a rampage grinning with delight as he kills, it almost sounds like a movie scene. It probably is a movie that came out recently for all influential teenage minds to see and learn about. In Online NewsHour, Gerald Tirozzi stated the argument perfectly that this event at Columbine High School “speaks volumes to the image that many of our youngsters [see]- most of our youngsters are bombarded with images of violence in our society, television, movies, more recently even the Internet.” (Online NewsHour 2) It was all of these things, society, television, movies, and the Internet that planted the seed of a violent plan in the minds of Harris and Klebold. Continually feeding their brains with ways to take away the lives of fellow classmates who they deemed worthy of death, our society indirectly gave these kids the handgun to carry out the plan. It is our growing attitude of hate in society that influenced the tragedy at Columbine High School.
April 20, 1999: (9:20 a.m.): They enter the library setting off bullets in every direction. Terrified students hide under tables and behind book shelves hoping not to be hit. One student finds their way into the rafters of the library. This student won’t be found by police alive until 5:00 p.m.
April 20, 1999: (9:25 a.m.): Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold leave the library and make a short round of the school, spraying bullets into random classrooms. But they soon end up, back in the cafeteria.
April 20, 1999: (9:35 a.m.): A half an hour after the shooting first began, police have filled the building and Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turn the gun on themselves. They lay dead on the hard tile floor surrounded in blood after having killed 11 innocent students and 1 beloved teacher. Within two hours, the police have found all of the pipe bombs and they were all immediately disabled.
February 25, 2003: (All day long): Brooke is still haunted by the images of her acquaintance shooting up the cafeteria as she ducks behind a lunch room table, fearing for her life. The tragedy will never leave Brooke’s heart, nor will it for any student in the building that day.
I believe that it was the violent video games they played that fueled their plan, it was the neglect and inobservance of their parents, as they made the pipe bombs in the basement of their homes, that allowed the plan, and it was the teasing from some of their fellow students that first inspired the plan and the act of killing that occurred that day. However, to many of the people in the community of Littleton, Colorado, the killings are rested solely upon the shoulders of the shooters. They choose to take those influences and put them into action. From the moment that the shootings took place three arguments became the community’s concerns. I agree and it is true that an important argument shows that regardless of how many outside influences society produced, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold chose to walk into that school and kill students. But still we as a society and community do not know exactly what the shooters were thinking when the tragedy happened. Another concern of the community is the safety of their children at school and how that effects their education. Now that kids felt less safe at school, other consequences related to shootings. In an experimental study, researchers found that “students who feel more at risk are also less likely to share their ideas with others and are less likely to vie the classroom as a secure or tolerant space where ideas and views an be freely expressed” (Stretesky/Hogan 3). Now that students are fearful and it is affecting their school work, students also have the fear of “Will it happen again?” The community also became concerned with the influence that Harris and Klebold would have on other young children. In at Time article, the writer says “a tiny number of disaffected kids stockpiles guns and homemade bombs to mimic Columbine’s Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (or at least threaten to)” (Time 1). Even this simple threat of acting as Harris and Klebold did is enough for community parents and students to blame the shooters for causing so much unneeded pain and anguish.
Overall it is the simple act of going into the school and actually carrying out their plan, which leaves the community to believe that the shooters are completely to blame. But in the end, it is not a simple situation. It was not society that put the gun in the hands of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but it was the movies, the internet, the video games, parents, and peers that contributed to the whole tragedy at Columbine High School.
