Echoes of Columbine

Two of the youngest mass shooters and the only two living school shooters who are not incarcerated... Last updated: March 25, 2018 Date:   March 24 Year: 1998 School:  Westside Middle School Location:  Jonesboro State: Arkansas Wounded:  5 Fatalities: 10 Shots Fired:  27 Time lapsed:  4 minutes Police response time:  Unknown. Approx. 4 minutes. After police arrived shooters ran.  How ended: Taken without issue. Civilians involved:  None known Perpetrators:  Mitchell Johnson (13) and Andrew Golden (11) cousins Age: 13 & 11 Family history:  The two students were cousins. It was reported that Golden came from a normal, happy American family. No home troubles were noted in family history. Johnson came from a broken family, and lived with his mother and stepfather. His mother was a prison guard and married a man she met in prison for weapons charges. Police report Johnson often disappear...

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. ...

If a part of the fantasy was the sheer violence they fed on, another factor was the hero worship. They didn't want to just go out, they wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. If they were nobodies who wanted to become somebodies, the fastest way to do so was to do something so shocking that the media could not ignore it. The media in their own way, turned them into heroes. When one reads these books, watches these movies, or listens to the music that inspired mass shooters, one strong theme runs through all of them. In each case the hero of the is the killer, students cheer them, crowds gather to spur them on, and the media worships them. While I was researching I was appalled at the sheer number of tributes there were not to the victims, but to the shooters. A quick tour of Youtube reveals that for many, these mass shooters kids were not perpetrators but victims. The media in most cases played right into it. While it was happening, and then for weeks after, the media hand f...

In every mass shooting case you will find what professionals refer to as "leakage". The perpetrators leaked plans before the attack. It was as if they boiled over, or perhaps were testing the reaction. These kids told at least one other personally, usually more than one ahead of time. In some cases dozens of students knew about the plot beforehand, they even gathered to watch that morning just to see if it would really happen. Almost a year before Columbine, local law enforcement officers were handed death threats, detailed bomb making instructions, and even details on the bomb tests. This information was all housed on a personal website run by one of the perpetrators. Law enforcement even went as far as obtaining a search warrant... but failed to execute it. After the criminal investigation began, that information disappeared for a time, only to be retrieved by a reporter. Up to that point law enforcement denied it existed at all. Many of the witnesses questioned after...

When the line between fantasy and reality blurs One of the first issues to get resurrected shortly after a new shooting is the topic of violence in the media. We can't deny that movies and video games have grown increasingly violent, it is becoming more and more difficult to locate a true family movie. Yet hundreds of thousands of people play the same games, watch the same movies, and read the same books and none of them committed such horrific acts. Mass shooters were all attracted to violent media in some form. Early on they cited Richard Bachman's short story "Rage" as an influence. "Rage" was the story of a frustrated by taking his classroom hostage, and emerging the hero among his classmates. After it copies of his book were found in the possession of several of the first school shooters, not only highlighted copies but very well worn. Bachman's creator Stephen King pulled the book from print, stating "The ------- incident was enough for ...