Twenty-five years ago today, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 classmates and a teacher, injured 21 other people and ended their rampage with a double suicide. The killings dominated news coverage for weeks, first as a horrified reaction to the massacre and then as every faction with a moral panic to foster sought to prove that their chosen demon was responsible for the massacre. Even after the nightly news broadcasts continued, the killings left a deep imprint on popular culture, inspiring songs, films and more. They remain infamous to this day.
Why is Columbine still so important? The simplest answer would be that it was such a terrible crime that people found it difficult to forget it. This is certainly true, but it does not fully answer the question, since several terrible crimes have occurred since then that do not have the same place in our public memory that Littleton does. I suspect that more Americans remember the names of the Columbine killers than the name of the man behind the 2017 Las Vegas Strip massacre, even though the latter occurred much more recently, killed five times as many people, and led directly to a negative result. ban on actions, the constitutionality of which the Supreme Court is currently evaluating.
Another possible answer would be that Columbine was there First crime by its nature, but that’s not really the case. There were several high-profile mass killings in the decade before Columbine, including the 1991 Luby shooting, a particularly deadly but now rarely mentioned assault that killed 23 people and injured 20 others. Even before Littleton, there was no shortage of mass shootings schools: People may have a hard time believing it, but more students died in school shootings in 1993 than in the bloody Columbine year of 1999. It’s just that those earlier killings were relatively small incidents, with one or two victims each, rather than the large number of deaths in Colorado.
That was, and in fact still is, the most common form of school homicide. “The vast majority of fatal school shootings involve a single victim and a single assailant… nothing like Columbine,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and one of the country’s leading authorities on mass killings . In the early 1990s, public discussion about school violence often centered on gangs, but this also did not reflect typical campus shootings. “Some were gang-related,” Fox explains, “but most were just a student killing a classmate or teacher.”
Nor was Columbine the first massacre to be both a mass shooting and a school shooting. In 1989, to take one particularly gruesome example, a gunman killed five children and injured 32 others on the playground of Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. Yet, while this certainly attracted national coverage at the time, it did not gain the level of attention that Columbine did, nor did it remain as long in our cultural memory.
Fox has thought about why this might be. “Stockton wasn’t covered by live video,” he says. “CNN was the only cable news channel and didn’t have that many subscribers. No video to show, the broadcast networks weren’t about to preempt soaps with nothing to show.” With Columbine, by contrast, “a crew was nearby.”
Today, of course, virtually everyone is part of a television crew. And scrolling through our news feed isn’t just interrupted when word of a mass shooting gets out: it’s interrupted when there’s a shooting. gossip of a mass shooting, even if the story turns out to be false. We have become hyperaware of violence at a distance, and the possibility of violence at a distance, and the external possibility that violence will not be so distant tomorrow. Columbine did not cause this change, but perhaps she foreshadowed it.
Here’s another possible answer: While those video images circulated through the media, Columbine changed the way the public saw imagine such crimes. If three decades ago the popular stereotype of school violence involved gangs, the popular stereotype of the mass murderer was that of the disgruntled postal worker. (Hence the expression “going postal,” which is still used today although I doubt many younger Americans have any idea where it came from.) There is a 1994 episode of The X-Files, “Blood,” in which a mysterious force – apparently a mixture of chemicals and shields – forces people to commit mass murder; the character in the center appears in the first scene working in a post office, and eventually took a rifle to the top of the university’s clock tower (a visual reference to the 1966 tower shooting at the University of Austin). Watching it feels like taking an hour-long tour of the American anxieties of three decades ago. It is surprising, then, that none of the murders involve children in danger or occur in a K-12 school.
So perhaps Columbine created a new archetype, a new model, not just for ordinary people frightened by spectacular crimes, but for alienated imitators plotting their own attacks. In 2015, Mark Follman and Becca Andrews of Mother Jones counted at least 74 assassination plots directly inspired by Columbine, 21 of which were actually carried out; a 2019 follow-up brought the total to more than 100.
To be clear: Those impersonators may have committed crimes without Columbine. The Colorado massacre gave them a script to satisfy their violent impulses, but that doesn’t mean it triggered their impulses in the first place. Nor did everyone follow that script very closely: a surprisingly large number of those killers and would-be killers planned to use knives or explosives rather than guns. And Columbine wasn’t necessarily the only crime that affected them. In their 2021 book The Violence Projectfor example, criminologists Jillian Peterson and James Densley interview an author who has studied three other school shootings besides Columbine.
But all these people saw something in the massacre that attracted them. “The conspirators in at least 10 cases cited the Columbine killers as heroes, idols, martyrs or God,” Mother Jones reported. In 14 cases, the conspirators intended to act on the anniversary of Columbine; three “made pilgrimages to Columbine while planning attacks.”
On the 20th anniversary of the Littleton assaults, as Mother Jones was updating the count of Columbine impersonators, Peterson and Densley noted The conversation that he examined 46 school shootings since 1999, six of them mass, and found that in 20 cases the attackers saw Columbine as a model. These include the killers behind the two most infamous incidents of school violence of that period, the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre and the 2018 Parkland killings. (Scholars have also found evidence of influence abroad: in 2019, a couple of mass murderers in Brazil were reportedly inspired by the Columbine carnage.)
Peterson and Densley don’t always agree with Fox – they’re prone to using phrases like “epidemic of mass shootings,” a frame Fox wisely rejects – but their conclusions in The conversation are consistent with his comments on cable and live video:
Before Columbine, there was no script for how school shooters should behave, dress and speak. Columbine created “common knowledge,” the foundation of coordination in the absence of a standardized manual. Timing was everything. The massacre was one of the first to occur after the advent of 24-hour cable news and during the “year of the network.” This was the dawn of the digital age of perfect memory, where words and actions live online forever. Columbine became the pilot for future episodes of fame-seeking violence.
Five years after he wrote that passage, the reactions to a public mass shooting also seem scripted, to an almost fractal level: from anti-gun activists mocking the phrase “thoughts and prayers” to 4chan trolls blaming the killings of the comedian. Sam Hyde. Some years they see more crimes like this and other years they see less. But in both of us we have transformed these murders into something that did not exist before: a public ritual with roles assigned to everyone. This too is a legacy of Colombina.