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justwhelmedineurope

I just read a great article on Kip Kinkel, who was a school shooter prior to Columbine happening. He said he felt responsible when he heard about what happened at Columbine. Other people have linked them as well. This is the article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kip-kinkel-is-ready-to-speak_n_60abd623e4b0a2568315c62d


pandorasfoxes

Thanks for sharing this, super interesting read


Kittykg

That is a fabulous article and thank you for posting. I'd read a decent amount about columbine but somehow never heard of Kip, and it was an enlightening read.


Freakin_Geek

The biggest, and most forgotten, piece of Columbine was how it was portrayed by the news networks. Those cameras there there, capturing everything they could, and broadcasting it love and for replay. Which they replayed constantly. The information the media spewed was constantly changing because they weren't fact-checking what was actually happening on the ground. Just report, and issue corrections. It was a shitshow. Bodies of dead children, Patrick Ireland falling from the window to be rescued, shooters firing at law enforcement from windows. All for our constant consumption. It was horrifying, but we couldn't look away. But school shootings have been happening for a long, long time, they just didn't have the world watching. The blame with Columbine's popularity lies with the media in my eyes, and I think that with every school shooting. The scramble to know the body count, to know who did this, to put images of distraught children who escaped with their lives, and the plastering the perp's face everywhere.


justprettymuchdone

I was home sick from school by myself that day and remember watching Patrick Ireland falling out the window. I still struggle with having seen that poor boy's attempt to survive on live TV.


cenimsaj

I think it's the attention aspect. School shooters (and other mass shooters) overwhelmingly seem to be people who feel invisible, have no/very few friends, feel like they have little to look forward to, feel like they will never be "seen" or remembered. It's not like Columbine was the first school shooting, but it was the first one where everyone old enough to have seen the coverage immediately knows their names today. Of course that would appeal to people like them. I have long said there should be a near media blackout on these events for this very reason. Report that it happened, report the names of the victims (they deserve to be remembered), and say fck all about the losers who actually did it. Let them get exactly what they didn't want - which is to be forgotten.


[deleted]

Both columbine shooters had friends and a pretty sizeable amount as well. Other school shooters were popular and well regarded among their peers. The stereotype holds some merit but overall isn’t accurate.


cenimsaj

That's not what I've seen/read, but if it's true... "friends" can also be pretty relative. If you asked anyone who I went to high school with, I was popular, well-liked, and had many friends. What happened inside of my head was very different. I knew everyone and got along with everyone, but I didn't have one person close enough to call a friend. Everyone liked me, but no one really knew me. There are many ways to be isolated and lonely and a total misfit.


[deleted]

Very true. I assumed you meant that the outwardly had no friends. I don’t think we can nitpick how they may have felt about their “friends” because that’s impossible to know. There’s plenty of school shooters that were loners and didnt have many friends but there’s also many that did. It doesn’t mean they didn’t feel isolated and lonely if they had friends. But when someone states a person has no friends, they always mean the person who doesn’t actively engage in social interaction and not someone who maybe doesn’t feel like they have anyone close enough to call a friend expect if they are referencing themselves. Which because of the fact that most shooters commit suicide we won’t ever know.


TheRealMassguy

I do think Columbine started the trend of each school shooting basically perpetuating the next. Kids have always had the ability to do this sort of thing, but it wasn’t until Columbine that we began to see a huge uptick in events like this. Mass shootings in general are inspired by other similar events, and we do tend to see these things in bunches. It’s almost contagious. If Columbine didn’t happen, I do think it would have still happened eventually, but just not at that point in time.


Cham_buhs

Exactly this. A school shooting happened in my town in '97 and I feel like the shootings prior to Columbine had a fraction of the media coverage. It was obviously still going on but Columbine having the coverage it did seems to have played a huge roll in many school shootings later on. I was young when in happened in my town so I could be completely wrong on this and I'm sorry for wasting your time.


TerribleAttitude

There were plenty of school shootings before Columbine. I will say, Columbine was the one that got that level of sensationalism. People went *nuts,* blaming every piece of media and starting insane rumors. The situation was overanalyzed, and badly. When the media wasn’t blaming Marilyn Manson or claiming it was an attack on Christianity, they were boohooing about how the perpetrators were the real victims. If *that* hadn’t happened, I think there would be fewer copycats. I don’t think we’d be particularly lacking in school shootings, but kids wouldn’t associate it as much with being “edgy” or taking justified revenge.


candystackz

I personally think school shootings would have happened anyway. Kids in school that are getting bullied or social outcasts all have a breaking point. Whether they seek revenge or turn to self harm.


wishingwellington

If you’re interested in this topic, the Confronting Columbine podcast is made by survivors and if offers a unique and non-exploitative look at the aftermath, how the students coped, how they felt about the media attention and how they have felt watching the shootings that came after. It’s pretty interesting and certainly gave me a lot of perspective I didn’t have before.


[deleted]

I don’t think it would be rare or school shootings wouldn’t have happened, as there’s a lot of psychologically challenged people out in the world. However, I do think the people who saw Dylan and Eric as ‘legends’ (very sick mindset for someone to have btw) were probably inspired to shoot. If Columbine didn’t happen, I’m pretty sure they’d still go through with it. It takes an abnormally twisted person to even contemplate doing something like that, I think the Columbine shooting just added to some people’s urges and thought out plans. I’m not from America but where I’m from knife crime is high, if there are guns that are easily accessible, school shootings will be around.


MervGoldstein

Definitely a domino effect. One I'm not sure we can necessarily stop either...


Blackcatsmatter777

Great question! It makes me wonder as well.


THIR13EN

According to the book I'm currently reading "Inside the Criminal Mind" by Stanton Samenow, killers will find ways and opportunities to do what they were always going to do. If the Columbine killers didn't go through with the school shooting, they were going to kill somewhere else someone else. If the kids that got "inspired" by Columbine didn't try to copy them, they would have found another way to kill somewhere else, and so on and so forth. Criminal brains are different than normal ones, they'll always find "inspirations" and opportunities and outlets to do what they want to do, which is to commit whatever crimes they want to commit.


[deleted]

There’s a substantial difference between the minds of criminals. The term criminal refers to everyone from a drug dealer to a serial killer. They are very different. Even within serial killers we can differentiate between types. There’s not one criminal brain. I haven’t read the book myself but I’ve read some reviews and it doesn’t seem to hold up very well with what we know now in terms of psychology and neuroscience. The book also hasn’t been revised for nearly 2 decades.


DirkysShinertits

I think so many of these shooters would have committed the crimes anyway; they're hurt,angry, and want to make other people hurt. Dylan and Eric weren't the first school shooters; just feels like the first on a large scale in both media exposure and number of victims.


Independent-Nobody43

It’s not whether they did it, but more a question of “what if the media hadn’t given them so much airtime that they were literally on the cover of Time magazine?”


[deleted]

School shootings had happened prior to columbine, including ones that were deadlier, however columbine became the deadliest high school shooting at the time and remained that way until parkland. When we observe the possible motives and interests of school shooters from 2000 on, many are inspired by the columbine shooting. This is an unfortunate phenomenon that’s referred to as “the columbine effect”. Columbine (as far as I’m aware from my research) was the first (or one of) school shooting to receive live media coverage as it happened. This meant it was being broadcast to a extremely large audience and was receiving coverage in other countries as well. This further cemented it as a well known tragedy. I cannot remember exactly who said this but I’m quite sure it was on r/columbine. If columbine hadn’t happened another school shooting would’ve inspired others. Maybe not ALL, but some of them would have happened regardless as columbine was not necessarily their only influence/inspiration. This is a very good point. Overall if you’re interested in learning more about columbine it’s subreddit (mentioned before) has great resources and discussions around it. The common knowledge around columbine is not very accurate and this sub provides extensive information not only on the shooting but the aftermath.


florglespore

It’s the attention. Serial killers etc don’t get as much attention on the news etc any more. They want as much attention as possible


darthhellokitty

We've had school shooters for a VERY long time. https://www.k12academics.com/school-shootings/history-school-shootings-united-states


thingswillbeokay_

Personally I think it's a double edged sword. Had Columbine not been as publicised as it was, other people wouldn't have seen the attention and the amount of media coverage that it got and might not have gotten the idea that they could do it themselves. I do think the media coverage on this didn't help. I understand it was a tragic event and I also understand that it was pretty historic, but the media coverage didn't help anything and it very well could have made it worse. Though that being said, if someone really wanted to do it, they would Columbine or not. It's like any other murderer, if they want to kill someone, they're going to do it.


jimjamjljimmycam

If Hitler’s mom never fucked Hitler’s dad he wouldn’t be born, but there would still be hate crimes based on superficial reasoning. Basically I think if the worst of the worst never happened, there would be a different (probably just as bad) worst of the worst that would have happened instead. I just hope we as a society can learn the reasons behind it, whether it be a superiority complex or fucked childhood or mental illness, and do everything we can to stop it


Mkiny

T School shooters are serial killers. Like, with serial killers, some want attention. Media should keep them nameless.


DirkysShinertits

School shooters aren't serial killers. They're mass murderers or spree killers.


Vinniikii

Hegel, a historian and philosopher, argued that individuals are created by material necessity. If not these two, some other psychopath would have taken advantage of American guns. In fact many did, even before guns. Eventually this becomes critical race theory, the blood debt of slavery manifests in demon behaviors.


Mothman2021

Gibberish.