Columbine Quotes
Let's make it clear for the dimmest bulbs among you: the kids at Columbine High didn't die from too many guns, they died from too few. I'm not suggesting that the teachers should have carried guns not as franchised agents of the state. They should have carried guns as ordinary individuals, exercising a sacred right, and in performance of a solemn duty to protect the young lives that were placed very foolishly, as it turned out in their hands.
L. Neil Smith
President Clinton has made a few feeble swipes at addressing this issue [school violence], but one can only gape at the unintentionally comic spectacle of this man chastising the gun-lobby and America's love of violent movies while he rains bombs on Yugoslavia, where at least twenty noncombatants have already died for every innocent student at Columbine High. It is like listening to a man with a crack-pipe in his hand lecture children about the evils of drugs.
Stephen King
A new study by Adam Lankford, of the University of Alabama, which will be presented next week at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association, shows a strong correlation between the availability of guns and the prevalence of gun massacres. With the same certainty that David Hemenway's work established the link between the number of guns in a society and the number of gun killings, we now know that there is a correlation between the availability of guns and the major public assaults that have been a part of American life since Columbine.
Adam Gopnik
You just watch. There is going to be a Columbine-times-10 incident, and everyone will finally get it. Either that, or some video gamer is going to go Columbine at some video game exec's expense or at E3, and then the industry will begin to realize that there is no place to hide, that it has trained a nation of Manchurian Children.
Jack Thompson (attorney)
Slate's Dave Cullen thought he had solved the why riddle in his article, "The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It", published on April 20, 2004, the fifth anniversary of the massacre. Cullen wrote, "[Eric Harris] was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something worse."
Mark Ames
The notion that there might be any need for, or possibility of, profound changes in the institutions that shape American life work, family, technology, the primacy of the car and the single-family house - is foreign to the mainstream media that define our common sense. And so conflicts that cannot be addressed politically have expressed themselves by other means. From public psychodramas like the O. J. Simpson trial, the Lewinsky scandal and Columbine to disaster movies, talk shows and "reality TV," popular culture carries the burden of our emotions about race, feminism, sexual morality, youth culture, wealth, competition, exclusion, a physical and social environment that feels out of control.
Ellen Willis
Yet what's missing from Cullen's explanation is a context for Harris' rage attack on Columbine High School. Even Hitler is given a context by serious historians- the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of Weimar Germany- whereas rampage murderers, like slaves once before them, are portrayed as having killed without reason. Their murder sprees were and are explained as symptoms of the perpetrators' innate evil, or of foreign forces, rather than as reactions to unbearable circumstances.
Mark Ames
