Global Voice
Saturday, April 20 marked 25 years since two students fatally shot 12 classmates, a teacher, and wounded more than 20 others at Columbine High School in Littleton. Although it wasn’t the first, the 1999 tragedy has become a blueprint for other shooters over the last quarter-century, ushering in a new era of school gun violence that has only gotten worse.
The Columbine massacre was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, until it was surpassed by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, and later the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until the Parkland high school shooting in February 2018.
So far in 2024, there have been more than 50 incidents of gunfire and nearly 20 deaths on school grounds nationwide, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, the largest gun violence prevention group in the U.S., which formed after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.
Since 2013, there have been over 1,200 such shootings, killing more than 400 people. Nineteen have been in Colorado, leaving eight dead.
The impact of gun violence lingers “not only within a community but also within families, within the mental health of … survivors and [their] support systems,” Kiki Leyba, a teacher at Columbine High School who survived the shooting, said this week during a news briefing in Washington, D.C.
Despite more shootings and a lack of federal legislation banning assault-style weapons, survivors say hope can still be found.They see it in Colorado’s efforts to tighten firearm regulations and the Biden administration’s new rule expanding background checks for gun purchases.
The perpetrators, twelfth-grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve students and one teacher. Ten of the twelve students killed were in the school library, where Harris and Klebold subsequently commited suicide.
Harris and Klebold, who planned for at least a year and hoped to have a large number of victims, intended for the attack to primarily be a bombing and only secondarily a shooting. But when several homemade bombs they planted in the school failed to detonate, the pair launched a shooting attack.
At 11:19 a.m., 17-year-old Rachel Scott and her friend Richard Castaldo were having lunch and sitting on the grass next to the west entrance of the school. Klebold threw a pipe bomb towards the parking lot; the bomb only partially detonated, causing it to give off smoke. Castaldo thought it was no more than a crude senior prank.
The two allegedly returned to where Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo lay on the ground injured. Scott was killed instantly when she was hit four times with rounds fired from Harris’s carbine and Castaldo was shot eight times in the chest, arm, and abdomen by both Harris and Klebold.
