Columbine survivors can’t believe that the shootings haven’t stopped 25 years later
The haunting images have been seared into the minds of generations across the globe since the day footage broke from outside a town in the Colorado foothills that most had never heard of: Littleton.
Students were running for their lives from Columbine High School as gunmen stalked the halls and set off bombs. One desperate teen hung from a window. Nearby homeowners were taking in fleeing children as law enforcement flooded the school, eventually finding the two perpetrators dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the library.
News cameras – and the snowballing behemoth of 24/7 cable – captured almost all of it.
Viewers couldn’t stop watching and then couldn’t forget. There had been school shootings before, but none like this – and none beamed directly into the living rooms of horrified families all over the world. Twelve students and one teacher were dead; 24 others were injured, mowed down in a middle-class high school on an uneventful Tuesday: 20 April 1999. What had happened seemed unthinkable, a tragic and condemnable one-off.
It wasn’t.
Twenty-five years later, Columbine survivors, the relatives of the dead and the wider, still-traumatised local community have watched in horror as the same type of attacks happen over and over and over again. As of April 2024, there have been almost 400 school shootings since that devastating day in 1999.
“A lot of people will say to me, ‘Gee, are you shocked that
