Given that there have been 74 school shootings since Newtown, including one in Seattle where Columbine was reported by local news outlets to serve as partial inspiration (and this isn’t including the recent attack by the duo in Los Vegas), it’s worth asking ourselves again – in addition to what sort of gun laws we could possibly pass, and, also, I say ‘again’ because we were here in November – what place Columbine occupies in our narrative landscape and in our narrative imagination and what could possibly be done to fix that?
The attention paid to Columbine was on par with Rodney King and the LA Riots, which has ended up translating itself into – as a study by Ralph Larkin of John Jay College notes – this:
“Columbine was ‘referenced’ when perpetrators identified the shootings as an inspiration; referred to Columbine before, during, or after the attack as a target to be exceeded; or described their own shooting as an homage to Columbine. References were found to the Columbine shootings in the shootings at Fort Gibson, Oklahoma; East Greenwich, New York; and Virginia Tech. In the weeks priors to the shooting in Santee, California, the shooter claimed that he was going to ‘pull a Columbine’ on his school (McCarthy, 2001.) The shooter in Hillsborough, North Carolina, sent an e-mail confession to the principle of Columbine High School prior to his rampage (Rocha, 2007.) In his manifesto, the Virginia Tech shooter praised the Columbine killers as martyrs to the cause of the downtrodden (Kleinfield, 2007.)”
And that’s not an exhaustive study. It doesn’t even take into account all the failed attempts, of which – on the linked list, at least – Columbine is cited six times.
How do you take a narrative like that away from that many different psychopaths all at once? How do you convince them that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold didn’t care about them then, don’t care about them now, and will never care about them in the future? Write them an open letter saying as much? Show a greater variety of sports games on a greater variety of TV’s, as there is at least one study out there documenting the relationship between sports and crime? Do a “Four Lions” version of “Bowling for Columbine?” (After all: we partially met Hitler with Chaplin, Roderick Spode, Ernst Lubitsch, Werner Finck, and Dr. Seuss, too, didn’t we? Didn’t Hemingway once write a hilarious column about Mussolini trying to come across as intimidating and learned to the world press – only to spot that the book that Mussolini was holding was a dictionary, and that it was upside down?) Find more ways to economically integrate nearby schools with each other so that there are more structural reasons to maintain and want a safe environment?
The question isn’t only, “When will this stop?” or “Why won’t this stop?” or “What sort of laws can we pass and when?” but “How do we change this portion of the story?” too.
