The 20th anniversary of the Columbine high school massacre in Littleton, Colorado, was a few days ago. When it happened, I worked in Lakewood, Colorado, ten or fifteen miles up the road; as memory serves productivity that day kinda ground to a halt as we listened to events on the radio. But then, productivity was never really all that good at that place on days when the boss was in the office, since he made it kind of a “toxic” environment (i.e. he was a dick).
Columbine was perhaps the first of the “modern” mass shootings in America. It seemed novel at the time, but would seem kinda meh today. This is not due to the availability of firearms, which have *always* been available, but more likely due to the media. Prior to Columbine, the internet barely existed and the 24-hour news cycle was still relatively new and novel; if an event like this had occurred a decade earlier, it would have gotten coverage on the evening news and the next days paper, and that would have been about it. But in 1999, CNN was all over this, 24/7. So it became fodder for other messed-up whackaloons.
Sadly, the events of Columbine have generated a wide-ranging set of factually inaccurate mythologies, including just what kind of people the shooters were, what their motives were, what their actual plan was (bombings, not shootings.. the guns were just backup), and rather bizarrely, the existence and religious importance of “martyrs.” The video below, by the always interesting “Ask A Mortician” channel, covers a lot of these myths… and continues to trot some of them out in the process, such as blaming the ready availability of “high power guns” for the incident. The guns actually used were shotguns and nine millimeters (and cheap, crappy ones at that), not a rifle in the bunch; and as the prior Oklahoma City Bombing and the Sri Lankan Church bombings from a few days ago show, if you really want to rack up the bodycount, you use bombs, not guns. Had those behind Columbine actually been competent bomb makers (and they weren’t), the body count would have been far, far higher.
Many myths persist because they are useful to someone. The martyrdom story helped a family grieve, and helped a *lot* of people make bank. Blaming this on guns helps those who wish to disarm and enfeeble the citizenry. Blaming this on certain musicians or video games helps those who don’t like certain musicians or video games. Other myths are errors that persist, I guess, because they sound good: these guys were goths (they weren’t), or cheesed off at being incels (the leader of the two was apparently quite the ladies man), or were part of the “trenchcoat mafia” (they weren’t… and BTW I had *just* bought a $200 leather trenchcoat myself that I wound up almost never wearing again because of this).