April is the Cruelest Month

I have reached the age where I sometimes have difficulty remembering what I did the day before yesterday. However, shootings over this past weekend at Hampton University and the University of Georgia have vividly brought me back to me the events of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, with precision.

I will never be able to erase the memories of visiting Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, the day after the horrific mass shooting. The things that stick in my mind are the faces of the students and parents trying to make sense of the tragedy; the sight of all those crosses placed on a hill outside the school; and the school parking lot turned into a makeshift monument with flowers, cards, signs and teddy bears from across the nation. Another image that haunts me is the media circus that surrounded the school. An added insult was a few super-righteous religious zealots who seized upon Columbine to make a faux case for religious martyrdom.

Journalist Dave Cullen has just released a comprehensive account of the massacre. The book is simply titled, Columbine. You can read a review of the book by Gary Kris from the Washington Post.

Cullen claims to expose several myths about the Columbine tragedy, but one piece of reporting that was true was the ease with which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were able to acquire the guns used in the shootings. Harris and Klebold had young friends of theirs purchase these weapons at Denver-area gun shows from private sellers—cash and carry, no questions asked. One of these friends, Robyn Anderson, later said, "It was too easy. I wish it would have been more difficult. I wouldn't have helped them buy the guns if I had faced a criminal background check."

Colorado closed the Gun Show Loophole by referendum one year after the shootings, and for that we can credit the courageous work of many of the students and parents of the victims at Columbine. They banded together to take positive action to stem the easy availability of guns in our society and we should learn from their example. Now that federal legislation to close the loophole has been introduced in Congress by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), we have an opportunity to prevent thousands of criminals and other dangerous individuals from buying guns with no oversight whatsoever.

We should seize it, and ensure that we will have something positive to reflect upon as a country when the twentieth anniversary of Columbine is observed ten years from now.


April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain...
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

School Daze

News this past weekend of a school shooting in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, served to remind me of a couple of misconceptions about the nature of gun violence in our nation’s school systems.

As I travel around the country, I often hear people say that our nation’s schools are inherently dangerous because of gun violence. The truth is that our schools are far safer than the world outside. The most recent data from the Department of Justice (DOJ) shows that youth are over 50 times more likely to be murdered—and over 150 times more likely to commit suicide—when they are away from school than at school. Another DOJ study found that 93% of violent crimes that victimize college students occur off campus.

Secondly, I hear the belief expressed that school gun violence is confined to schools in large inner cities. The sheer lunacy of this line of argument always makes me think of the Columbine High School shooting, which took place in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. Two white students from this suburban school killed 15 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves.

This past year there have been major school shootings in Blacksburg, Virginia; Opelousas, Louisiana; Willoughby, Ohio; Phoenix , Arizona; Boca Raton, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; Mobile, Alabama; and DeKalb, Illinois. A more complete listing of school shootings by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence illustrates the fact that the problem is not confined to major urban areas.

Despite that fact that our schools are some of the safest places in the country, we must continue to endeavor to keep them that way and improve existing security procedures. We must also be wary of a hard push by the gun lobby to put concealed handguns in our children’s classrooms. This disturbing development threatens to put our kids at greater risk and take the focus off the real problem—the incredibly easy access that children and the mentally unbalanced have to guns in our society.