Columbine High School massacre: The April 20, 1999, school shooting and attempted bombing at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States, is widely known as the Columbine High School tragedy. Twelve students and one instructor were killed by the murderers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who were in the twelfth grade. Harris and Klebold later committed suicide in the school library, where ten of the twelve students who were killed were present. There were twenty-one more gunshot wounds, and there was shooting with the police as well. Three more persons were hurt while attempting to flee. Before Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 and the Uvalde school shooting followed, the Columbine tragedy was the deadliest mass shooting at a K–12 school in American history.
until the Parkland high school incident in February 2018, in May 2022, and the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in American history. As a result of Columbine, which is widely regarded as one of the most horrific mass shootings in American history, the term “Columbine” has come to refer to all contemporary school shootings. In the history of the US state of Colorado, Columbine continues to stand as the deadliest school shooting as well as the deadliest mass shooting.
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Columbine High School massacre
Columbine High School shootings: On April 20, 1999, a massacre took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The incident claimed the lives of fifteen people, including the two teenagers who carried out the attack. In American history, it was one of the bloodiest school shootings. Dylan Klebold, age 17, and Eric Harris, age 18, were the shooters. They carried semiautomatic rifles, handguns, and many explosives when they broke into Jefferson County’s Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. They murdered twelve more students, a teacher, and twenty-one others in less than twenty minutes. After Harris and Klebold committed suicide, the violence stopped. Afterwards, investigators discovered two propane tank bombs in the cafeteria; if they had exploded, the number of casualties would have been
Columbine High School massacre Details
Location
Columbine, Colorado, U.S.
Date
April 20, 1999; 25 years ago 11:19 a.m. – 12:08 p.m. (MDT)
Target
Students and staff at Columbine High School, first responders
Attack type
School shooting, mass shooting, mass murder, murder–suicide, arson, attempted bombing, shootout
Weapons
Intratec TEC-9 Mini
Hi-Point 995 Carbine
Savage 67H pump-action shotgun
Stevens 311D double barreled sawed-off shotgun
99 explosives
4 knives
Deaths
15 (including both perpetrators)
Injured
24 (21 by gunfire)
Perpetrators
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
Motive
Unknown
Convicted
Mark Manes and Philip Duran (weapons suppliers)
Convictions
Manes and Duran:
Supplying a handgun to a minor, possession of an illegally sawed-off shotgun
Sentence
Manes:
6 years in prison Duran: 4+1⁄2 years in prison
Litigation
Multiple lawsuits against the perpetrators’ families and suppliers of the weapons
Perpetrators
Born in Wichita, Kansas, on April 9, 1981, Eric David Harris passed away on April 20, 1999. Because Harris’s father was a transport pilot in the US Air Force, the Harris family moved around a lot. His mother took care of the home. After his father’s military retirement in July 1993, the family relocated from Plattsburgh, New York, to Littleton, Colorado.
For their first three years in the Littleton area, the Harris family rented a place. Harris met Klebold while he was a student at Ken Caryl Middle School during this period. The Harris family bought a home south of CHS in 1996. The University of Colorado Boulder was the college of Harris’s elder brother.
Background
Eric Harris, then 15 years old, made a personal website on America Online (AOL) in 1996. Originally, Harris made levels (sometimes called WADs) for the first-person shooter computer games Quake, Doom, and Doom II. Harris started a diary on the website, sharing information about his covert departures from the house to commit mischief and vandalism, including setting off fireworks alongside Klebold and other people. “Rebel Missions” were these, and “mission logs” were the main focus of Harris’s blog. Early in 1997, the blog entries started to reveal the first hints of Harris’s rage at society. By year’s end, the location included explosives manufacturing instructions.
Before August 1997, when Harris concluded a blog entry describing his violent fantasies with the words, “All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially a few people,” the site received little traffic and no notice. similar to Brooks Brown.” Brown was one of his classmates.On August 7, 1997, Brown’s parents contacted the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office after viewing the website. A draft affidavit drafted by an investigator asking for a search warrant for the Harris residence was never presented to a judge.
Weaponry
Two 9mm weapons and two 12-gauge shotguns were purchased by Harris and Klebold in the months before the assaults. In addition to a Savage-Springfield 67H pump shotgun, Harris also carried a Hi-Point 995 carbine with thirteen 10-round magazines. Klebold carried a Stevens 311D double barreled shotgun and a 9mm Intratec TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun with one 52, one 32, and one 28 round magazine. Both Harris and Klebold violated the National Firearms Act by sawing off the barrel of their shotguns to a length of around 26 inches (0.66 meters) and 23 inches (0.58 meters), respectively.They were too young to legally buy the guns themselves, so on November 22, 1998, their friend Robyn Anderson bought the couple a carbine rifle and two shotguns at the Tanner Gun Show. She informed investigators following the attack.
The massacre
Investigators suspect that the gunmen planned to blow up their propane bombs in the cafeteria during the peak lunch hour, killing hundreds of kids, based on the writings and video tapes that each of them kept. Following this, they would launch bombs and knife and kill survivors. They would eventually set off bombs in their automobiles in the parking lot, killing more children and maybe any media, police, firemen, or paramedics who had visited the school. The bombs in the cars and cafeteria, however, did not go off.According to multiple government sources, their original goal was to shoot the escaping survivors in the parking lot, but they switched to the stairs on the hillside on the west side when the bombs didn’t work.
Crisis ends
Ambulances began transporting the injured to nearby hospitals around 12:00 p.m., while SWAT forces had set up shop outside the school. By 12:20, a request for more ammunition for police officers to use in the event of a shootout received. Pipe bombs were reported by the authorities around 1:00. At 1:09, two SWAT teams broke into the school, advancing from classroom to classroom and finding professors and kids who were hiding. With outdated maps to guide them and no idea that a new wing had just been added, they entered the school at the end, across from the library. The sound of the fire sirens also caused difficulties for them.
Immediate aftermath
The high school was searched by bomb squads early on April 21. The official death toll of fifteen was announced by 8:30 a.m.The original estimate was nearly accurate in terms of the total number of injured students, but ten over the actual death toll. Twelve students—14 of whom included the gunmen—and one instructor lost their lives in all; the shootings also left twenty students and one teacher injured. Three additional individuals suffered indirect injuries while attempting to flee the school. The bomb squad deemed the building safe for officials to enter around 10:00 a.m. An official from the sheriff’s office announced that the investigation had begun around 11:30 a.m. While detectives took pictures of the high school, thirteen of the bodies remained inside.
Motive
The motive for the shooting has never been determined with any degree of confidence, but it was planned as a terrorist act that would result in “the most deaths in U.S. history”. Sheriff John Stone and Undersheriff John A. Dunaway stated in a statement attached to the May 15 report on the Columbine attack that they “cannot answer the most fundamental question—why? The motive of the killers was widely conjectured in the media in the days that followed the incident. Media accounts were widely circulated, speculating on the killers’ motivations, although all of the explanations proved to be falsehoods and were mostly unsupported. These stories featured accusations against minorities and jocks as well as goth culture, video games, bullying, and Marilyn Manson.Other speculations, which weren’t widely reported by the media but were nonetheless circulated locally, included.
Legacy
In the wake of the Columbine shooting, schools around the country implemented new security protocols, including metal detectors, school uniforms, see-through backpacks, and security guards. To enhance the reaction time of public safety, certain schools numbered their doors. Several schools throughout the country resorted to asking kids to wear computer-generated IDs. Additionally, schools have implemented a zero tolerance policy for kids who threaten others or carry guns. Though there has been an effort, a number of social science professionals believe that the zero tolerance policy imposed in schools has been applied too strictly, with unexpected effects leading to further issues. In spite of the safety precautions put in place following the Columbine disaster, school shootings in the US—including the Sandy Hook massacre at Virginia Tech—persisted.
