Another Shooting, Like the Last One, Like the Next One

It’s not cynicism. It’s practical realism.

The worst part about witnessing a tragic aberrant historical event is when you realize there’s nothing aberrant about it at all.

I was 23 years old and working 4 p.m.-midnight shifts at The Sporting News in April 1999 when I came in on a Tuesday and found everyone in the newsroom standing up and staring at the televisions. The news had just broken that there had been a shooting at a high school in suburban Denver. The screens were showing students sprinting through the parking lot and a kid trying to climb out of a window. It was shocking to see, or even to think about, the idea of someone walking into a high school, a high school, and randomly shooting at teenagers. It didn’t really compute, the way something you’ve never seen before doesn’t compute — a skyscraper collapsing, the space shuttle exploding, Times Square abandoned of human beings. You stare at it to try to make sense of it. But what you’re really doing is adjusting to a new reality. You now live in a world where this can happen. Which means you live in a world where it can happen again. And will.

At the time the Columbine shooting happened — and here is your reminder that the definitive account was written by my friend Dave Cullen in Columbine, still one of the best nonfiction books I’ve ever read (and which I interviewed Cullen about for New York back when it came out in 2009) — it was the fifth-deadliest mass shooting in American history. It is now the 17th. The killers themselves, as Cullen chronicled on the 25th anniversary of the shooting this past April, got exactly what they wanted: Not just fame, but influence. Cullen writes how there are entire online communities dedicated to them today, often full of disaffected, isolated teenagers who have convinced themselves the Columbine shooters were somehow the only people who could have understood them. The Tennessee Star reported last week that Audrey Hale, who killed six people, including three nine-year-olds, at The Covenant School in Nashville last year, explicitly wanted to “make Eric and Dylan proud.”