School Shootings

All my love to teachers.

Content Warning: This post discusses school shootings, bullying, suicide, death threats, and other difficult and potentially triggering topics.

Parts of this article are written in second person, as an invitation to an experience that I hope is not familiar to you. I have done this with intent, but also feel it is important to acknowledge that this is a writing style that can be particularly triggering. I avoid being graphic as much as possible, but as this is an evocative and emotive piece, you may find that there are emotional triggers even where there are not explicit ones.

If you are not in a good place to read that kind of content right now, please consider choosing a different article, and I invite you to come back and read this later, if and when you choose when you are more prepared for the content.

Thank you, and I wish you all the best, and I hope your days get better from here.

I had a lot of great teachers growing up. And, admittedly, I had some not-so-good ones. But, I’ll give them all credit for one thing. They were all trying their best. And, especially when it came to going to school at Columbine High School, a lot of the teachers there had had a particularly rough go of things.

A lot of them carried heavy trauma.

Trauma they lived with every day, and still came back to school, back to teach, and back to try and prevent a shooting like the one at Columbine from ever happening again.

A lot of my teachers were survivors of that day.

It wasn’t just the school that was changed by the shooting, it was the people in the school, in the community.

While I attended Columbine High School, a memorial for the lives lost in the shooting was built a short distance away from the school, in the public park that shares a border with school grounds. It was within walking distance, and it was a beautiful and solemn place. A place that feels quiet, even when there’s noise all around.

I’m not writing this because I want to make light of the growth or changes that happened in the years after the shooting. I know that I went to a very different Columbine than the one where the tragedy occurred. A Columbine with a new library, and better security, and teachers more on the alert for possible signs of trouble.

A school where students like me knew and respected the school psychologist, and where we watched for signs that our peers were struggling so we could try and help.

But I also went to a school that was made darker by the living memory of the shooting that still echoed through its halls every April. A school that still allowed students like me to be bullied, hurt and threatened in its halls.

A school where I twice reported that a threat had been made against my life by another student and was twice ignored.

There is, or perhaps was, a myth around Columbine. An idea that it was a school that had learned the error of its ways and reformed its culture. An idea that Columbine was now a safe haven from issues of bullying, bias, and cruelty. That the community around Columbine, especially the families of the students, was harmonious and that while people might have their differences, they were always part of a cohesive whole at the end of the day.

And I’m sure, for many of the students who were at Columbine before, during, and after my time there, those things may have been true.

But they weren’t true for all the students at Columbine. Having heard stories from teachers, classmates, and others who attended school there before I did, I suspect that the myth of Columbine was true for a much smaller percentage of the students there than anyone, including myself, would want to believe.

My personal experience there was shaped by the lies behind the myth of Columbine and by both the hidden nature of the bullying there, and the denial that it happened at all.

There were a lot of problems with the myths surrounding Columbine. As a student there it was seemingly inevitable that you would eventually learn about the Columbiners — people who were fans of the school’s shooters.

The knowledge that people admire what happened at Columbine, especially as a student, is disturbing and frightening. At least at first.

Eventually, you come to realize that the Columbiners are a bit like the cult followings that crop up around other serial killers and you move on, feeling just a little bit safer again. But not as safe as you felt before you realized there were people who admired the ones that hurt your school and your community in such a profound way.

And then you start hearing, inevitably, that the shooters were the victims of bullying. That they were Goth and that the reason the school bans trench coats is because the two shooters wore them the day of the shooting.

And if you happen to be a student who wears black or appreciates Goth fashion, and especially if you are a student other students know is bullied, like I was, you become an object of fascination and fear. It gets harder and harder, each year, to pretend that things are normal or that this is a normal school. Students ask you, as they asked me and many of my friends, if you’re going to be the next Columbine shooter.

When an acquaintance of yours kills himself, you overhear students in the halls saying it’s better him than us.

And even if you didn’t really like him, didn’t like spending time with him before he died, you become filled with rage and pain knowing that they think the same things about you. That they fear you without ever bothering to know you, as they never bothered to know him.

If you, like me, later need to report that a student has threatened you — that you are now afraid to walk in these halls because of the words and actions of those around you, and the administration you go to for help does nothing, you’ll begin to wonder if the administration doesn’t secretly fear you as well. If the adults in the building wouldn’t rather get rid of you, despite your high grades, your participation in extra-curriculars, or any of the other proofs you can give that might, in some small way, prove your worth.

You get quieter. Afraid to talk to even your most trusted teachers about what’s going on. Afraid to tell them, by your Junior year, when someone threatens your life for a second time, why you hide in their classrooms during lunch instead of eating in the Commons with everyone else. And they, perhaps out of respect for your silence, don’t ask.

If you went to Columbine at the same time I did, you’ll remember the list. The big list that went up every April on the split staircase leading from the Commons, auditorium, and language hall up to the main school. You know the one. The list of names.

The names of the schools that suffered shootings since Columbine.

April was a hard month for the kids who wore black. And the kids who liked anime. And the kids who didn’t quite fit in everywhere else.

It was a month of suspicion. Silences where there was just sound. Gritted teeth where there should have been laughter.

A month of counting how many new names there were, compared with last year. A month of counting how many elementary schools were added, where there used to be just one.

The numbers tik up. Up. UP.

At least, that’s how I remember Aprils at Columbine.

If you went to Columbine when I did, you’ll remember that it was the month of recitations. The month that teachers came to school a little more haggard, the bags under their eyes more prominent. When one or two of them might admit to having nightmares and not sleeping.

They’d tell you their stories, one by one. Where they were when the shooting began, what happened, and how they tried to help. The helplessness of getting students out of the school and knowing they couldn’t possibly have saved all of them.

The helplessness of being a student, suddenly shepherded out of classes, afraid for friends and family.

After listening to the stories, you’ll hear the students around you promise, yet again, that We Are Columbine and we are a family. That we protect and respect one another.

If you’re anything like me, after the first year, you’ll start to wonder if the other students included you when they said that.

When I went to Columbine there was very little left that could have told you, at first glance, that this was a site of tragedy. The halls were clean and bright. The school’s silver and blue colors look innocent and pure. And if the lockers were dented or scuffed in a few places, well, what high school’s lockers don’t look like that.

Of the tragedy itself, nothing was left. The library was remodeled, the school cleaned and prepared for returning students long before I ever enrolled there. There were hints, a Rebel mascot carrying a badly-matched cane because they removed his rifle, a day off from school in the middle of April with no holiday attached, a principal who spent so much of his adult life walking Columbine’s halls because he couldn’t bear to abandon the children who studied there.

But nothing of the tragedy itself was left. Just the scars.

The scars were enough.

You see, when we talk about school shootings, we don’t often talk about the scars. Oh, we talk about how the parents’ lives are changed forever, how the students who lived through the shooting are changed forever. The potential of the lives lost. We talk about the foundations and charities and lawsuits that spring up in the wake of school shootings.

What we don’t talk about is that you don’t have to experience a school shooting to be scarred by it. We don’t talk about how students like me live with the memory of shootings they never went through. Or how students all across this country live with the reality that their schools may be sites of tragedy, too. The parents that live in fear that their school is at risk.

We don’t talk about how violence, and the harm it causes, is passed down as a community legacy. Of how it creates pain, inspires fear, and makes us other and objectify each other.

We talk about how Columbine healed, not how the healing left scar tissue.

School shootings are tragic. I’m writing this in response to the latest school shooting here in the United States, and my heart goes out to everyone who has already been affected by that shooting and everyone who will be affected by it.

By the time you read this, it’s possible, even likely, that there will have been another school shooting in the United States.

After years and years of hoping that we’ll finally step up and do something to stop this violence and the harm it causes, of hoping that the latest shooting will truly be the last, it’s hard now to hope that things will get better.

But maybe realizing the full scope of the pain caused by shootings, and how it lingers and echoes long after the rest of the world has moved on, maybe that will help us change this. Somehow.