Twenty Years

Although there had been shootings at schools before -- perhaps the most publicized was a 1979 San Diego attack Bob Geldof wrote about in "I Don't Like Mondays" -- April of 1999 saw what we have come to think of as the pattern by which such shootings are known today. On April 20 of that year, two seniors walked into Columbine High School and murdered 12 classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.

Columbine grabbed the national imagination like earlier shootings had not. Perhaps because it was one of the first and certainly one of the worst to happen in the era of the 24-hour news channel. Speculation and opinion that might have been limited to a neighborhood barstool rant or smeared-ink mimeograph newsletters found empty hours ready to be filled. Body-blows to the national psyche such as Waco and Oklahoma City helped ramp up the temperature of national discourse. President Bill Clinton's affair with an intern, followed by his partisan impeachment and equally partisan acquittal, didn't exactly reduce the volume.

Two years after the shooting, Christianity Today editor and writer Wendy Murray Zoba (now just Wendy Murray) published Day of Reckoning, a book which tried to examine the shooting, its immediate aftermath and the following year from a religious perspective. Zoba interviewed some students, parents and people in the town of Columbine and tried to fit together the puzzle of why and how two young men could generate so much hate for their fellow students that they wanted to kill as many of them as they could.

Like many secular examinations of the shooting, Zoba considers the rise of violent entertainment in society and relative ease with which the two acquired guns. Given some access to some of the shooters' online journals and such, she sees how some of the original narrative -- two friends bullied so far they snapped -- started to fray. As more of the journals and videos the pair made came to light, some experts suggested one was probably a sociopath and the other depressive and apathetic.

Zoba unpacks some of the narratives that were important to the shooting at the time, such as whether or not student Cassie Bernall was indeed the one asked about her belief in God before being shot. Another chapter dealt with a man from another state who felt moved to bring crosses to the school site to memorialize the dead students and teacher. Initially he had 15, which included the two shooters. But one victim's father consistently tore down any display that included 15 of any kind of memorial, even at one church of which he wasn't a member.

Day of Reckoning adds a little to the Columbine conversation, asking questions about whether or not the perfect surfaces of the affluent suburb had an emptiness of spirit that contributed to the poison in the hearts of the shooters. Murray conducted most of her interviews only about a year after the shooting, when there were still lawsuits and questions thick in the air. Several of the people she talks to are guarded about what they say because of it, and many might still have been weathering their own storms.

Perhaps because of a sensitivity to the still-grieving community, perhaps because Murray felt unwilling to push too far the people who spoke with her, Reckoning doesn't feel as cohesive today as it did in its time. Murray's a competent writer but does much better in the shorter magazine format -- given room to say more she doesn't do as well in holding focus as she does with smaller word counts. Still, reading it offers some powerful contrasts with today.

For one, everything was so much slower in 1999. Today folks offer opinions about such an event while the ambulances are still en route to the ER -- and given that most of these opinions are on Twitter they're neither educated, informed or worth the time. But even the pushiest indictment of "gun culture," Michael Moore's carefully assembled package of half-truth Bowling for Columbine, didn't come out until 2002.

Other things have changed as well. When the Broward County Sheriff's Office was criticized for its poor response to the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the standard which its officers failed to meet was one that was put in place after Columbine -- enter, seek out and engage the shooter, reduce civilian casualties as much as possible. Some remained the same; Murray outlines just how many missteps Colorado law enforcement officials made during the post-shooting investigation in dealing with the media and release of information. No one was as self-aggrandizing as suspended Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, but several people revealed they'd been promoted past their competence level. Then, as now, school officials struggled with how religious they could be in the days following the massacre. Many of the tributes and memorial gifts left at the fence now surrounding the school were crosses and Bible verses, and they were supposed to be cautious about such signs and displays.

Murray hints at the idea that a culture with a reduced spirituality and connection with the divine makes a Petri dish for people to bring forth evil. But she leaves it at more of a hint level than anything else which may be wisest in the end. Because saying, "A society that paid more attention to God and less to its own violent amusement would be less likely to have a Columbine" is a non-starter. Where it's simple, it's not true but where it's true, it's not at all simple. Murray's book, like the massacre itself, seems a part of a past day, and as the Columbine class of '99 winds down their 30s we get reminders now and again that though we live in a different world than the one which brought us the tragedy of April 20, 1999, we still find some of the same problems.