David Hogg called out adult America for letting children die. The Parkland students immediately led an uprising against lax gun laws. Last year, when a shooting erupted at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, I broke that promise, because Parkland seemed different. I experienced two breakdowns of secondary traumatic stress seven years apart writing Columbine, so I studied the subsequent tragedies at a safe emotional distance and swore I would never plunge back into the scene of a crime. He amassed a hoard of Columbine information on his hard drive, frequented a chat room dedicated to the attack, and role-played the killers in an online game. It details just how obsessively Lanza was following Harris and Klebold. The FBI released more than 1,500 pages of documents about the horror at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, when Adam Lanza killed 20 first-grade students and six members of staff, as well as his own mother. A troubling trend emerged: many of the mass murderers emulated Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. I have joined the Academy of Critical Incident Analysis (ACIA) team in studying several incidents, including on-site studies at Virginia Tech after the 2007 shooting and in Las Vegas in 2017, and an off-site analysis of Norway’s 2011 Workers’ Youth League attack in Utøya. I have written about them individually and collectively. Since 20 April 1999, I have studied most of the major mass shootings and some of the smaller ones. We were shocked and horrified and desperate for answers, serving a public hungry for a reason for the “madness,” so we found an answer. Twenty years later, I am still on this story not just because of what happened, but also because of how the media responded. This is not going away, it’s getting worse. In a five-day period near the end of last month, the US suffered four mass murders in four different states: Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Florida. Four of the five deadliest attacks in the US have occurred since then, three of them in the past three years. While I despise the media scorekeeping – awarding the killers titles like prizefighters, giving them exactly what they crave – one stat is worth noting: what was then the most notorious mass murder in recent American history no longer ranks in the top 10. It had been going on far too long, but it was hard to predict its endurance or trajectory. Even 10 years after Columbine, I still couldn’t perceive what we were living through in that way.
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