Article Summary –
The article reflects on the Columbine High School massacre 25 years ago, highlighting its lasting effects and the lasting trauma it caused. The massacre’s live media coverage and its broadcast in real time, made possible by the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet, shocked the nation and shattered the belief that children were safe at school. Its aftermath led to major changes in school safety, sparked enduring activism for gun control, and became an unwanted blueprint for several copycat shootings.
Remembering the Columbine High School massacre 25 years later
A quarter-century ago, the media reported the first shots fired at a school in Littleton, Colorado. Dave Cullen was just settling down for a lunch when the news broke. Jaclyn Schildkraut was home sick from college, engrossed in a soap opera when the broadcast was interrupted by aerial videos of SWAT teams and panicked students fleeing Columbine High School. Robert Thompson spent the night consuming media coverage of the tragedy, which included interviews with survivors and their parents, and a haunting video of a bloodied 17-year-old falling from a school window into the arms of first responders.
The April 20, 1999, Columbine massacre, during which 12 students and one teacher were killed, wasn’t the first school mass shooting in the US, but it quickly became one of the most infamous. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the internet allowed the tragic event to reverberate through the nation in near real-time. This shook the previously held belief that children were safe at school.
“The trauma of Columbine still haunts the country 25 years later, including students who weren’t alive to witness it. The massacre became a blueprint for dozens of copycats, led to major changes in school safety, and sparked an enduring legacy of activism as survivors push for better gun control and offer their support to the next generation of Americans affected by gun violence,” recalls Cullen, author of “Columbine.”
Mass shooting news can cause stress
At the time of the massacre, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC had already been established, allowing the event to be the first school shooting to receive 24/7 television news coverage. As a result, the Columbine shooting was more extensively covered than any other news story in that decade, except for the 1992 verdict in the Rodney King beating and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800, according to a 1999 survey from the Pew Research Center.
Read More US News
This article may have been created with the assistance of AI.
Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our web site. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of photos and graphics.
