When Columbine happened - we were shocked. Now, we're inured. It's been 25 years.
When Columbine happened - we were shocked. Now, we're inured. It's been 25 years.
I wanted to share an article but after read/scanned ~6 of them - I had nothing to share. They weren't any good. I wish blogs were still a thing. Blogs can be excellent on topics like these. Here's the Wikipedia page - Columbine High School massacre.
I wonder if maybe now people will finally look at the two shooters being neo-nazis and not placing blame on rock music and video games.
the two shooters being neo-nazis
I don't know if you saw the self text but I read/scanned a bunch of articles and they were weird. I didn't see any mention of Nazism or their hatred. It gave me the creeps. Instead the badly written text was focused healing, grieving, and gun control hopium.
I remember reading Dave Cullen's book on Columbine and he basically blames it all on the shooters' mental illnesses. Like it all happened because the psychopath and the extremely depressed kid (both post-humously diagnosed) were codependent in their violent fantasies or whatever. I don't recall any more than maybe a passing reference to nazi ideology in that book, pretty disappointing considering 10 years of research went into it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
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
If the trend continues as it has, the new record should be set during the 2028-2029 school year.
I wouldn’t say inured. People seem to care a great deal and feel exasperated over the ongoing situation. There’s a political impotence and lack of analysis revealed by the situation… and I think that impotence and lack of analysis is part of a vicious feedback loop that actually inspires more violence, larger kill counts, increasingly cruel targets.
The Sandy Hook shooting happened in December, 2012. By early 2013 I had entirely given up on any hopes of gun control. If a mass of murdered little kids killed by guns didn't change anything - I knew nothing would ever change. I think that's true for a lot of Americans.
"Gun control" is a bourgeois talking point. Rifles kill less than 400 people a year in the US on average, the Bloombergs and the Bidens and the Betos are only concerned about disarming the working class. Things that would actually address mass shootings (like affordable mental healthcare) are never even discussed, because those solutions actually cost the rich money.
Growing up in the US, you just hear about people getting shot and killed. That's part of the 6:00 news along with sports and weather. There's no time to emotionally engage with what happened; you get maybe 5 seconds with a distraught family member and then it's back to the studio where nobody's showing any reaction, so, from a child's perspective, why should the viewer? So the jarring thing about Columbine for me wasn't that it happened, it's that people decided to keep caring about it unlike the hundreds of other shootings that we just immediately forgot.
Eh, it's anecdotal but when I saw the image in this post my first thought was "wait, only 13? That seems low for how big a deal it was back in the day".
The mass shooting meta is has advanced significantly in the last 25 years
Remember watching a documentary about this in school. For some reason Marilyn Manson was in it.
Bowling for Columbine maybe
Yesss that rings a bell
Why Do We Get Columbine So Wrong?
Two popular bullies try to blow up a school and then shoot people when the explosions fail.
They were not geeky, picked on, trenchcoat-wearing, Marilyn Manson fans, bent on revenge, who asked people if they believed in god. Everything most people think they know about Columbine is false.
Anything informed by Dave Cullen's book is trash and they really weren't very popular.
Regarding music:
Some of Eric's references/purchases include: KMFDM, Rammstein, Ich Bin Ein Auslander by Pop Will Eat Itself, Closer by Nine Inch Nails, Guilty by Gravity Kills, Fly (the album Bombthreat: Before She Blows), Lights of Euphoria, The Electric Hellfire Club, Funker Vogt, Loreena McKennitt, Orbital, Trip Factor, Front 242, Nosferatu, Die Krupps, The Prodigy, Marilyn Manson, Enya
And some of Dylan's: Nine Inch Nails, The Chemical Brothers, White Zombie, They May Be Giants, The Smashing Pumpkins, Alice In Chains, KMFDM, Americana by The Offspring, soundtracks from The Doom Generation etc, Autechre, Rammstein, Ceiba, Prana, DJ Spoon, Atari Teenage Riot, Marilyn Manson
They did wear trenchcoats but only in their home films. https://youtu.be/4bvH5VHsddg?si=Q8gnlpUBf9BHoSU6 around the 1 hour mark you can see them hanging out in the cafeteria (one in a KMFDM shirt). There's also ~11,000 pages of investigative documents that were released.
The asking people if they believed in god is obviously bullshit, and the NYT made up a student who they attributed quotes to (Bob).
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Why couldn’t they just ban guns?
Asking as a British citizen
the gun lobby and gun manufacturers are too powerful to allow that
In other words, same reason why tobacco could not be banned.