About the Columbine Massacre Anniversary

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On April 20, 1999, two students from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, entered the school, heavily armed, and proceeded to murder twelve of their classmates and a teacher. The two shooters then shot themselves.

The victims of Columbine were:
Cassie Bernall, age 17
Steven Curnow, 14
Corey DePooter, 17
Kelly Fleming, 16
Matthew Kechter, 16
Daniel Mauser, 15
Daniel Rohrbough, 15
William "Dave" Sanders, 47
Rachel Scott, 17
Isaiah Shoels, 18
John Tomlin, 16
Lauren Townsend, 18
Kyle Velasquez, 16

When did school shootings start?

On November 12, 1840, University of Virginia law student Joseph Semmes shot and killed his professor John Anthony Gardner Davis. That is the first known school shooting in the US.

The first known school shooting at an American K-12 school occurred in 1853. Former student Matthews F. Ward murdered teacher William Butler. Ward was "defending" his brother's honor after he had been disciplined the day before.

Until the 1960s, school shootings were usually individual disputes with 0-2 fatalities, like the above—until August 1, 1966, when a gunman climbed onto the observation deck at the University of Texas at Austin. For the next 96 minutes, he picked people off as a sniper, killing 17 and wounding 31.

Canada experienced its Columbine ten years prior at École Polytechnique (December 6, 1989), where 14 women were killed. England saw 18 killed at Dunblane on March 13, 1996.

Columbine heightened awareness of school shootings in the United States. Since, school shootings have become more frequent in the United States, which leads the world in school shootings.
Some of the worst school shootings in history include

Beslan (RU—September 1, 2004; 333 killed)
Sandy Hook (US—December 14, 2012; 26 killed)
Uvalde (US—May 24, 2022; 21 killed)
Virginia Tech (US—April 16, 2007; 32 killed)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (US—February 14, 2018; 17 killed)
Erfurt (DE—April 26, 2002; 16 killed)
Winnenden (DE—March 11, 2009; 16 killed)
Realengo (BR—April 7, 2011; 12 killed)
Azerbaijan State Oil Academy (AZ—April 30, 2009; 12 killed)

Aside from Russia's Beslan, which was a terrorist operation and included over 1,100 hostages in addition to over 300 fatalities, the two worst individual school shootings were also terrorist attacks:

Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan, on December 16, 2014. With guns and grenades, they killed 145 people.
Al-Shabaab attack on Garissa University College in Garissa, Kenya, April 3, 2015 killing 147 people

Have School shootings increased?

The short answer is yes—one could say exponentially.

During the decade of the 1970s, there were 29 school shootings, the worst being Cal-State, Fullerton, with seven dead and two injured. Between 1980 and 1989, there were 40 shootings at schools. In the 1990s, there were 63, including Columbine. Between 2000 and 2009, another 60 school shootings occurred.

Between 2010 and December 2019, the number of school shootings in the United States reached 427. Between January 1, 2020, and June 2022, the United States experienced 504 school shootings, with over 30 percent of schools closed during 2020-2021 due to COVID-19.

As school shootings have drastically increased in the United States, legislatures in many states have made gun ownership easier, sometimes removing concealed carry permits entirely. School shootings will continue to rise exponentially as access to guns becomes easier and safeguards such as training, requiring permits, background checks, and waiting periods fall by the wayside. The vast majority of guns used in crime within the US and Mexico originate in US states with lax gun laws and are smuggled into other states with strict gun laws or Mexico.

For more information on gun issues in the United States, see this excerpt from Jon Stewart's March 3, 2023 episode, The Problem with Guns. The segment highlights the issues surrounding why the vast majority of the world's guns are in the United States and the political issues surrounding their ownership that often confound people outside of the US.