In the words of author Dave Cullen, the Columbine High School massacre “was not the first mass shooting, but it definitely started the mass-shooter era.”
That era is now a quarter century old. The 25th anniversary of the Columbine shooting is on Saturday, leading journalists and elected officials to commemorate the moment when, as Cullen put it, “all hell [had] broken out in this suburb of Denver.”
Cullen, who wrote the definitive book on Columbine, reflected on the impact of the school shooting on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, which also includes an interview with Vanity Fair’s Dan Adler on covering Donald Trump’s hush money trial.
In the wake of Columbine, Cullen said, parents across the country suddenly wondered, “Am I sending my kid off to die?” And the same fears are still palpable today.
The author compared the massacre to a couple of landmark events that reshaped public opinion: “Vietnam and Watergate, together, are famous for having destroyed America’s faith in institutions. And I think Columbine was another version of that.”
“There’s this massive problem of gun deaths in America,” he said, “and it ‘proved’ that we couldn’t solve it and that we just had to give up, that we were powerless.”
After Columbine, “we thought everything was gonna change. It didn’t.”
The massacres of college students at Virginia Tech and elementary school students at Sandy Hook reinforced this belief, he added.
But Columbine did spur changes in other realms. Law enforcement protocols for active shooter situations “changed drastically,” Cullen pointed out. Schools implemented a wide array of new security measures.
“I talk about depression as the great unlearned lesson of Columbine,” Cullen said. Experts have comprehensive tools for screening and treating teen depression, but they are not used widely enough.
In the updated preface to his book, Cullen writes that he has tried to leave the Columbine story many times. But “I keep coming back,” he said, “because it keeps happening.” Numerous mass murderers were inspired by the killers, and Cullen said he has nightmares of a “spider web of all these mass shootings coming out of Columbine.”