Lockdown High. Annette Fuentes
so soon after the tragedy. It would be Tom’s first time publicly talking about his son’s death and his first public speaking experience outside of work. “When I spoke that day to the crowd, I said, ‘I’m not arguing like many of you that they shouldn’t be here,” he says. “My message was why did they feel the need to cut back on any of it? If they didn’t feel any responsibility for what happened at Columbine, why should they cut the convention at all? I don’t believe they did it out of respect. They did it to save themselves because it would have been extremely embarrassing to have that gun show, that bravado and all those assault weapons, those gun clips. They knew damn well the media would have been there focusing on it.”
Unfortunately, media attention to the issue of guns in school shootings has been sporadic and shallow. Lurid descriptions of the Columbine aftermath and photos of Harris and Klebold dead in the school library, guns nearby, reflect the sensationalized coverage that drove so much news of the tragedy. Several articles did little more than mention the Colorado pro-gun laws being considered and the topic of gun availability in general. A deeper look provides a perspective on school shootings and violence that makes guns more integral to the discussion. First is the question of where the guns come from. Although Harris and Klebold got their firearms directly and indirectly through a poorly regulated marketplace, the single most common source of guns used by students in a school shooting is their home. The second-greatest source is from a relative or friend. The 1998 Jonesboro incident is a good example: two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, shot and killed four students and a teacher at their middle school with rifles they took from a grandfather’s gun cabinet. An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of all the gun-related deaths at schools between 1992 and 1999 found that 123 students used 128 guns to commit violence at school, with 48 of those guns taken from home and 30 from a friend or relative. And not all the gun violence at school is homicidal. While 85 students shot and killed others, 33 used a gun to commit suicide. Five students, including Harris and Klebold, committed homicide and then suicide.11
Suicide is virtually absent from discussions of school violence, and that couldn’t be clearer than with Columbine. Harris and Klebold were suicidal teens whose anger and depression was directed at their school, classmates, and the world—and themselves. Columbine wasn’t simply a horrendous school shooting. It was a multiple homicide-suicide, a not uncommon form of rage killing by adults. But to consider the suicides of Harris and Klebold requires granting them some humanity, acknowledging that despair drove them to end their lives before they’d even really begun. It is easier, perhaps, to think of them as evil and lacking in any humanity. And it is easier to ignore the issue of suicide, especially among young people. In Colorado in 1999, the suicide rate was 14.4 per 100,000 people, compared to a national rate of 10.6. Colorado’s suicide rate is among the highest in the country, and Jefferson County is one of four Denver-area counties with the highest number of suicide deaths. Guns are used in 52 percent of all suicides.12 Nationally, suicide is among the top three causes of death for those aged thirteen to nineteen, claiming about four lives every day—or 1,460 lives every year. For added perspective on the real scope of school deaths, consider this: nationally during the 2006–2007 school year, there were three student suicides on school grounds, compared to two student-on-student shooting fatalities and two stabbing deaths, according to the National Center for School Safety.
Temporarily chastened by the national spotlight on Columbine, the Colorado legislature tabled two gun-rights bills, but they were revived the next session. In 2000, Tom Mauser took a one-year leave from his state job to work as a full-time lobbyist for SAFE (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic) Colorado, where he fought against the pro-gun bills and for a law to close the gun-show loophole in the Brady Law. But legislators were weak-kneed and the NRA’s clout was strong, and tougher control measures foundered. So SAFE Colorado took a new tack, to put before voters in the November 2000 election a ballot initiative to close the loophole. It was an overwhelming success despite the NRA’s well-funded campaign to defeat Amendment 22, as it was known, which passed with 70 percent of the votes. “When someone says, ‘Well, if this law had been in effect, would it have prevented what happened?’ We will never know,” Mauser says. “I believe there is a chance if that law was in effect and Robyn Anderson couldn’t get the guns so easily, that she would have said, ‘No, I can’t do this.’ They [Harris and Klebold] would have gone to somebody else. Sure. But maybe that next person would have said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here. I better talk to somebody about this.”
Mauser still speaks out on gun control and lobbies for safer gun laws as president of Colorado Cease Fire. Their push now is for a CAP law—child access prevention—to hold adult gun owners responsible if children shoot others or themselves with their firearms. “I’ve seen too many cases where kids have gotten access to guns, especially in accidental shooting cases—not so much school shootings—and the parents don’t get charged,” Mauser says. “A gun under the mattress, a gun in the nightstand, and the parent says, ‘I told him to get it.’ We’re charging a child for God’s sake, and we don’t charge the parent.” Mauser’s group made suicide prevention a big focus of the bill in 2008, and hoped to find allies among groups doing such work. Instead, they waded into taboo territory. “Nobody wants to talk about suicide. In fact, it was very difficult for us in working the bill and trying to get the suicide prevention people with us,” he says. “Some of the leaders of the suicide prevention movement are people who indeed lost their children to suicide. And in a few of those cases, how do you think they committed suicide? And then when you go to those people and say, ‘We’d like your support for a bill that does this,’ they say, ‘You’re gonna punish people who lost their child?’ ” The bill actually would give prosecutors discretion in filing charges against an adult, which would only be a misdemeanor. Pretty mild. But it would also require gun shops and gun show dealers to post signs and hand out flyers stating that the law holds adults responsible for keeping guns away from children. And those simple measures are anathema to the NRA and its more extreme offshoots.
The gun lobby’s power is occasionally exposed in surprising ways and places. After two tragic incidents in fall 2006—at an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and a Bailey, Colorado, high school—a coalition of educators, school psychologists, and health professionals came together and issued a statement on school violence. In both incidents, adult male intruders took students hostage and then shot and killed students and themselves. The coalition, called the National Consortium of School Violence Prevention Researchers and Practitioners, was concerned that the hysterical overreaction to the incidents would simply continue the harsh and ineffective approaches to school safety anointed in the wake of Columbine. The statement noted that schools are safer places for children than their homes or communities, where more violence occurs. In one brief paragraph, it takes direct aim at the role of guns:
Finally, it is also important to acknowledge that access to guns plays an important role in many acts of serious violence in the United States. Although guns are never the simple cause of a violent act, the availability of lethal weapons to youth and to emotionally disturbed or antisocial adults poses a serious public health problem that cannot be overlooked. Our political leaders need to find a reasonable and constitutional way to limit the widespread availability of guns to persons who are unwilling or unable to use them in a responsible, lawful manner.
Hardly a radical manifesto, the statement was endorsed by more than a hundred leading researchers and educators, as well as two dozen national professional organizations. Among them were the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Education Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the American Psychological Association. But one organization with a natural interest in school safety—the American Federation of Teachers—declined to sign the statement because it was afraid of controversy with the pro-gun lobby. “We lost the AFT over the last paragraph on guns,” says Matthew J. Mayer, a Rutgers University professor and a founder of the coalition. “Once you raise the issue of gun control you create a dynamic where some people feel there is no discussion. It’s like taking on the NRA lobbying machine.”
COLUMBINE: HIGH SCHOOL OR FORTRESS?
The Columbine attack unleashed a national frenzy of security equipment purchases, with metal detectors a popular choice. Closed campuses to restrict student movement, pumped-up school policing, and zero tolerance