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 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
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".
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.