Echoes of Columbine

If you came to Echoes of Columbine in search of a way to 100% positively identify a school shooter before the fact, you've come to the wrong place. Any group or person who clams they have any single identifier is just plain wrong. Currently, the only way to find them is to wait for them to hurt someone and then try to intervene as quickly as possible. That method is costing America dearly. Everyone has their pet cause of course. Many have blamed bullying, while just as many say it is easy access to guns. Others blame it on mental health issues. Violence in movies, music, and video games are favorite targets as well. Some say it is the media fascination with blood and anti-heroes. The copycat effect. Lack of parenting and failure to disciple. Weak school structures. Overcrowded classrooms. A godless society. Latchkey kids. Nobody seems to agree where the blame should go, and all of this finger pointing is wasting valuable time. They not only keep happening, but have increas...

The Cult of Columbine now dictates that the crimes be more shocking and the body counts be higher with each attempt. Including explosives. Ways to carry more ammo. Ways to prevent people from escaping. Though they usually worked alone, sometimes in pairs, they all worked towards a singular goal. Destruction of our society from within. They wanted to make us hurt, this much is true but more than they they wanted that hurt to be known, and impossible to forget. Mass shooters are all copy cats now, carbon copies of carbon copies. The goal of mass shootings isn't just to kill people. Mass shooters are often suicidal as well as homicidal. They have usually already decided to end their own lives through suicide by cop. If death was their eventual goal, why did they feel the need to create such a spectacle around it? Part of that power they are looking for comes from the media attention. The attention previous crimes have gathered is usually part of their overall plan. If they jus...

There is only one single ingredient that every mass shooting has had in common, the gun. This is also the one topic guaranteed to bring out the highest emotions. Mass shootings are not uniquely American, but 31% of the worlds mass shootings take place in America, while accounting for only 5% of the worlds population. America is a gun culture, there is no debating that fact. 320 million Americans own around 350 million guns. The United States can now arm nearly every man, woman and child from shore to shore and still have guns left over. With numbers like that it might seem that every American owns a gun, but only about 40% of the population owns guns. while 3% of the country owns one half of all of the guns. By far the most common guns used in massacres are those that can do the most damage in the least amount of time. Semi-automatic handguns are the chosen weapon in over 70% of mass shootings. Semi-automatic rifles are a second choice, followed by shotguns and then revolvers. ...

The United States has very complicated privacy laws. Often those in authority are not allowed to share information with one another. The court might not be allowed to notify the school of a problem with a student, nor can the school notify law enforcement about a problem if it is outside of the scope of the law. The teachers and staff aren't always allowed to talk among themselves about a student or compare notes to see if the other teachers have seen similar behavior. Even if a principal is aware of a problem, he can't always warn the other teachers. Studies have been done where teachers have been fed information about a particular students performance ahead of time. In some cases they were told that students performed well above average on tests, when they were actually poor performers. On the other hand a child that was presented to a teacher as a "problem child" could be in every other case a model student, but this specific teacher saw them exactly as they we...

It wasn't until I began this project that I realized many of these shootings were committed in small towns or suburbs. They often describe the places school shootings happen as close-knit communities in news reports, but what does that phrase really mean? Violence at school has long been considered an city problem. Small town America always felt somehow immune from these problems but in the 1990's all of that changed. I looked around at my own small town and it was just unthinkable that such a tragic event could happen here, that a child could slip under the radar when we all seem to know what our neighbor had for breakfast last Sunday. It turns out that many sociologists believe that is actually a big part of the problem. In a small town people are more concerned with maintaining the status quo. We may see or hear of danger signs but we are less likely to act on it. Too many personal connections can be both a blessing and a curse. We not only know the child, but we k...