26 years after Columbine: This is the staggering number of school shootings in the U.S. since the tragedy in Colorado

Twenty-six years ago today, two teenaged students at a high school in Colorado embarked on a shooting spree which, in the space of around an hour, left 13 people dead, in addition to the attackers themselves.

“A defining moment”

It was by no means the first school shooting ever witnessed in the U.S. But the Columbine High School massacre has gone down in the country’s recent history as one of the highest-profile examples of such gun violence.

Indeed, Jaclyn Schildkraut of the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government has described April 20, 1999 as “a defining moment” for many Americans, “one where people can tell you exactly where they were when it happened.”

How did the Columbine High School massacre unfold?

At around 11:20 a.m., 17-year-old Dylan Klebold and 18-year-old Eric Harris opened fire on students outside Columbine High School. Wearing trench coats and armed with a variety of guns, Klebold and Harris then stormed into the school building and continued killing, in a frenzy of violence that also left 23 people injured.

Soon after midday, the perpetrators then turned their guns on themselves. (Although it wasn’t until several hours later that police were able to confirm the danger was over.)

Earlier this year, the Columbine death toll rose. On top of the 12 students and one teacher who were killed on the day of the attack, Anne Marie Hochhalter - a student who was left partially paralyzed - died in March. Hochhalter’s death, caused by sepsis and complications relating from her paralysis, has been officially ruled a homicide.

The Columbine massacre is credited with sparking a nationwide debate over gun control and the safety of students at American education institutions.

Notably, it inspired the Oscar-winning 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine. Directed by Michael Moore, the film examines the causes of such acts of violence in America, adopting a highly critical stance on the easy accessibility of guns in a country whose constitution enshrines people’s right to “keep and bear arms”.

How many U.S. school shootings have there been since April 20, 1999?

In the quarter of a century since Columbine, however, hundreds of school shootings have followed in the U.S.

Indeed, a running count kept by the Washington Post says there have now been 428 school shootings in America since Columbine, with more than 394,000 students experiencing gun violence at a school.

What’s more, the Post’s tally only includes incidents at primary and secondary schools.

It does not, for example, take into account this week’s shooting at Florida State University, where two were killed and six others injured by a gunman believed to be 20-year-old FSU student Phoenix Ikner, the son of a local sheriff’s deputy. Nor does it include the deadliest mass shooting at an educational establishment in U.S. history: the 2007 massacre at the Virginia Tech university, where 32 people were murdered by 23-year-old student Seung-Hui Cho.

In 2018, a tally by CNN - which did include college-level education - found that the U.S., with its looser gun laws, had had 57 times as many school shootings over the previous nine years as all other G7 nations combined.

“We lived through it live”

While it was not the first - or deadliest - school shooting in U.S. history when it happened, the nature of the media’s coverage of Columbine helped to secure the event’s place of prominence in the public’s consciousness.

With live, round-the-clock TV news not nearly as established then as it is now, being able to follow developments in real time was a new experience for viewers. “Shocking images were broadcast and television anchors interviewed students calling from inside the building,” explains the USA Today journalist N’dea Yancey-Bragg.

Speaking to Yancey-Bragg, Dave Cullen, the author of the book Columbine, an in-depth account of the shooting, agrees: “We lived through it live.”

Schildkraut notes that the comprehensive, as-it-happened coverage of Columbine was partly because many members of the national media were already nearby, reporting on a major murder case capturing the American public’s attention.

In Boulder, Colorado - just over 40 miles from Columbine - a grand jury was at that time considering whether to indict the parents of JonBenet Ramsey, a six-year-old girl found dead at her family home on Christmas Day 1996.

“When word of the shooting broke,” Schildkraut recalls, “the media sprinted towards the school and began a seemingly endless stream of coverage that set the mold for how such tragedies are covered today—aerial videos of the scene, images of children with their hands in the air being led away by police, and interviews with traumatized individuals who just experienced the worst humanity has to offer.”

Columbine’s influence on other school shooters

Given Columbine’s particularly high profile, it comes as little surprise that Klebold and Harris’s act of mass murder proved an influence on the gunmen in numerous subsequent shootings.

According to a study by researchers at The Conversation, who looked into 46 such atrocities in the U.S., around half of the shooters were found to have shown a deep interest in the 1999 massacre.

They include perpetrators such as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who killed 26 people in 2012’s Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut; and 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who murdered 17 people in the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

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