Coumbine Shooting - 10th Anniversary
 

It's hard for me to believe that it was ten years ago; I have to believe that I'm not the only one. CNN has an interesting article: Debunking the Myths of Columbine.

"After a decade of research, including hundreds of interviews and relentless requests for evidence and documents, Kass also released a book this month called "Columbine: A True Crime Story." It provides comprehensive profiles of the killers and their motives."

I plan to read the book.

I heard about the book this morning on NPR; I wouldn't mind reading it when it gets to the library.

I remember it like it was yesterday since it also happened to be my last week of classes in HS. It was a good time to be done with high school.

That was the start of my last month of high school as well. Everyone was so nice to each other but we still couldn't help being wary of the "weird" ones. That is also when school lockdowns were introduced and that dreaded police siren over the loudspeaker thing. I think if I ever heard that while I was there, I'd crap my pants.

It seems so long ago but then it's surprising it's been 10 years.

I was in my Psychology class at Bowie State. My teacher started singing a gospel song. It was cool though, he had a beautiful voice. I just remember being freaked out at how they could have snuck guns into a school.

I was teaching by then, and I can remember being kind of surprised by how threatened my kids felt by it. I know that seems kind of stupid, but having grown up with smaller scale school shootings and news stories about them, I didn't find the Columbine story that scary in a personal, immediate sense*; it differed for me from previous events only in scale. I found the story terribly sad and the images that we saw later really haunting and affecting, but it didn't make me afraid to be at school or any more frightened of oddball kids.

My students, on the other hand, saw the whole thing through the "what if it happened here" lens. I can remember one kid had thought it through so vividly that he knew where the class could hide if something happened during our class period. Another kid, who was kind of a computer gamer kind of geeky guy and who had previously worn a trench coat, had his mom take away his coat and destroy it. There was a lot of sort of mean-spirited speculation about who would be the shooters if it happened at our school.

Since then, I've been frustrated at how many dumb things school want to do in the name of school safety, often based more on the myths of the crime than on the reality. But I do think some of the school safety plans make us generally safer, even if they really wouldn't do a lot to protect us from the kind of weapons the Columbine killers had.

*I find violent sociopaths really frightening obviously, but I don't spend much time thinking about how that's going to play out for me at work that day unless we're doing a safety drill.

Glad to hear someone else recognizes security theater for what it is.

I'd like to believe we could stop the Chos and the Harrises and the Klebolds, for we'd truly be doing society a good turn, but the jokes we've played to "feel" safe (rather than "be" safe) don't have me optimistic.

When it first happened, I was totally shocked. Now, it's the copy cat school shootings/potential school shootings that I'm concerned about.

I was home sick from HS and watched most of it from the couch with my mom. It's a date some other tragic events have happened on, which I was home for too. Working at a school in a not so great neighborhood I think about safety on school campuses a lot.

I cannot believe it has been ten years, it seemed like it happened just yesterday.