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:
“How high they build hospitals!
Lighted cliffs, against dawns
Of days people will die on.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“[How] the young . . . can grow from the primitive to the civilized, from emotional anarchy to the disciplined freedom of maturity without losing the joy of spontaneity and the peace of self-honesty is a problem of education that no school and no culture have ever solved.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“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)