Today is the anniversery of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings. I knew it wouldn't take long for me to find something relating to the incident in the news today, and here it is Police: MySpace foils school shooting. Sometimes I wonder whether all the media coverage of school shootings causes more to happen. I also wonder how parents are not aware that their teenager is building bombs and sawing off shot guns in the basement or garage. As this day passes, let us pray for the 13 students and teachers whose lives were taken from them on this day seven years ago.
I remember 4/20/1999 very well. I was in 10th grade at a school with over 2,000 students. In the days and weeks that followed rumers about copy cat shootings were ran like wildfire around school. Talks of hit lists, specific days to skip school and where in the school it would happen were common. A couple weeks after Columbine, I was in the library during 4th hour researching for a class, when the lights go out. As you can imagine, chaos errupted. We were in the library and the lights went out at almost the exact same time of day as the Columbine incident. Turns out that there was an accident on the street by our school and a car hit an electric pole which caused the school to lose power. Luckly there were no incidents of violence in our school that year or any of the following two years that I was a student there.
That was a very strange and maddening situation. The two perps were in one kid's family's garage sawing off the barrel of a gun and the parents don't think to find out what's going on? Then, on the day of the shootings, the heavily armed police SWAT team shows up at the school, but refuses to go inside because they believe the two killers were still roaming the halls (actually, they were already dead). A dozen trained officers with body armor and sub-machine guns are afraid of two punks who would probably have wet their pants at the mere sight of someone who could actually fight back? Meanwhile, wounded teachers and students are bleeding to death, waiting for the help that doesn't arrive!
ReplyDeleteEven after all this time, I wonder how many schools are any more secure than the day before Columbine?
While working in grade schools, I was always amazed at how open and accessible the rooms were. Once I had a person slam my classroom door closed as I was in the room working late after school was out for the day. Needless to say, that was the last time I stayed late! I was frightened.
ReplyDeleteI remember we started doing intruder drills in high school. That was scary hearing about Columbine.
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