MADRID, (EUROPA PRESS).- This Saturday marks 25 years since the Columbine Institute massacre, the event that finally installed in the conscience of the American population the need to undertake a national debate, which is far from over today, about the possession of firearms in a country that has since suffered almost 400 more school shootings and, in the last decade alone, a total of 655 mass shootings, according to data collected and verified by the NGO Archive on the Violence of Firearms.
Of all of them, the Columbine massacre is the event most remembered by the almost 10,000 readers who responded to an online survey published this week by the ‘Denver Post’. For 35 percent of those consulted, what happened on April 20, 1999 at this high school in the city of Littleton, in the state of Colorado, was a shooting “by definition” and its 37 victims (13 dead and 24 wounded). ), the catalyst for a series of efforts of unprecedented intensity, although few of them fruitful, to restrict the population’s access to firearms.
The American public witnessed at that moment a series of images that have been reproduced in subsequent tragedies, generally through the inaudible and monochrome filter of security cameras: armed young people walking through the hallways, classmates and teachers barricaded in classrooms or escaping through the windows of the schools, special police forces preparing their emergence into the center.
Columbine was the first school shooting of the digital age, the subject of countless studies on its relationship with new media and youth culture and the physical and psychological violence associated with power relations between students in late America. of the 20th century.
The massacre, according to an investigation published in 2015 by the magazine ‘Mother Jones’, “inspired” no less than 74 similar incidents. In 13 of those cases, the attackers declared their intention to “exceed” the number of victims of the Littleton tragedy.
In at least ten, the suspects referred to the perpetrators of the massacre, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as “heroes, idols, martyrs” — both committed suicide at the end of their attack — or, directly, as “gods.”
A quarter of a century later, the association led by former Democratic congresswoman and gun control activist Gabby Giffords, survivor of an assassination attempt in 2011 in which she was shot at point-blank range in the head, highlights the current conflict that a country is going through where popular support for tightening restrictions on the possession of firearms is higher than ever while the violence they generate remains at historic highs: in 2018, the probability that a student could die in a shooting inside its center was the highest in the last quarter of a century.
A Harvard University study published in 2019 showed that each mass shooting in the United States was followed by an increase in legislative proposals, mainly at the state level, to reduce access to weapons; projects that have rarely, according to the text, been translated into firm legislation. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, himself lamented two years ago, after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde (21 dead, 18 injured) in Texas, the lack of progress in this regard despite the succession of tragedies that They followed that of Littleton High School.
Biden explicitly mentioned the cases at the Sandy Hook school in 2012 (28 deaths, around twenty of them children between seven and eight years old), the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (Florida) that left 49 dead and 58 injured in 2016. The Las Vegas incident in 2017, the bloodiest ever committed by a single individual on American soil: 61 dead and more than 860 injured, half from shrapnel and half from the stampede generated by the shooting of attendees at a concert. country. “We have not managed to do anything,” lamented the president.
Giffords has participated in the commemorative events this Friday in Littleton; a vigil organized by multiple local gun control organizations, such as Colorado Ceasefire. One of this group’s board members, Tom Mauser, father of a student killed at Columbine, successfully led a campaign to require background checks for all firearms buyers at gun shows, designed to close a loophole. lawyer who helped a friend of the Columbine attackers obtain three of the four firearms used in the shooting.
Nathan Hochhalter, whose sister Anne Marie was paralyzed by the shooting at Columbine, has also participated. Several months after the shooting, his mother, Carla Hochhalter, took her own life.
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2024-04-21 15:24:01