The Columbine High School massacre (often known simply as Columbine) was a school shooting which occurred on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Columbine, an unincorporated area of Jefferson County within the American State of Colorado. In the school shooting, two senior students named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered a total of 12 students and one teacher. They also injured 21 further students, with three other people being injured while attempting to escape the school. The pair then committed suicide.
The Columbine High School massacre is the fourth-deadliest mass murder committed upon a school campus in United States history; after the 1927 Bath School disaster, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and remains the deadliest for an American high school.
The massacre sparked debate over gun control laws, the availability of firearms within the United States and gun violence involving youths. Much discussion also centered on the nature of high school cliques, subcultures and bullying, in addition to the influence of violent movies and video games in American society. The shooting resulted in an increased emphasis on school security, and a moral panic aimed at goth culture, social outcasts, gun culture, the use of pharmaceutical anti-depressants by teenagers, teenage Internet use and violent video games.
Read more about Columbine High School Massacre: Preliminary Activities and Intent, April 20, 1999: The Massacre, Immediate Aftermath, The Search For Rationale
Famous quotes containing the words high, school and/or massacre:
“No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work on high things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The first rule of education for me was discipline. Discipline is the keynote to learning. Discipline has been the great factor in my life. I discipline myself to do everything—getting up in the morning, walking, dancing, exercise. If you won’t have discipline, you won’t have a nation. We can’t have permissiveness. When someone comes in and says, “Oh, your room is so quiet,” I know I’ve been successful.”
—Rose Hoffman, U.S. public school third-grade teacher. As quoted in Working, book 8, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)