5 – Littleton, Colorado
The violence in Dunblane, which had affected children so directly, was shocking to many because of the callousness with which Thomas Hamilton had acted. The massacre that would take place in 1999 in the sleepy Colorado town of Columbine would be even more shocking, particularly because the perpetrators themselves were little more than children. Indeed, not only is Columbine the most deadly school shooting in American history, it is arguably the one that has provoked the most soul-searching in terms of America’s relationship with firearms.
The inspiration behind the Columbine massacre has been as debating as anything on this list. The killers, 17-year-old Dylan Klebold and 18-year-old Eric Harris, were bullied at school and thought of themselves as outcasts from the wider student body. A student, whom they met outside the school before the shooting and whom they advised to leave for his own safety, later described the pair as the most unpopular students in the entire school, “the losers of the losers”. Thus, the culture of bullying, especially the way in which it was often overlooked by teachers, came under serious scrutiny. The US Secret Service later commissioned a report that discovered that over two-thirds of school shooters were victims of bullying. The cultural influences on Klebold and Harris – the music they listened to, the video games they played and the movies that they liked – was also pawed over to find reasoning for the attacks.
The attack – in which 15 kids were killed and 24 were injured – took place on April 20, 1999, and lasted for just under an hour. Initially, Harris threw a pipe bomb which failed to properly explode, before the pair revealed guns from underneath their trenchcoats. They killed people in the western entrance of the school, before moving to the cafeteria and on to the library, where they killed themselves. SWAT teams had surrounded the school, but were unable to help those inside.
The massacre at Columbine caused uproar all over America. Many questioned how two teenagers were able to acquire guns and bombs. They had bought their guns from friends and have used instructions found on the internet to make improvised explosive devices with little limitations on them. A battle raged after the massacre between gun control advocates, who thought it unfathomable that children could so easily get their hands on high-potential weaponry, and the pro-gun lobby, who blamed everything from heavy metal music to violent video games and Hollywood.
A 2002 film, Bowling for Columbine, was made by campaigning filmmaker Michael Moore and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, which questioned the influence of the local arms manufacturing industry – Columbine is home to a huge Lockheed Martin factory – and compared gun violence in other countries, particularly Germany (which listens to the most heavy metal) and Canada, just a short distance to the north. The actual impact on US law, however, was minimal. It was made more difficult for minors to get guns, but, as we can see to this day, mass shootings are still common in the United States in a way that they are not in the United Kingdom, Australia and France.