Colobine High School There has been a lot of events that have happened over the years that have changed the that people veiw things. Like when Terry Fox decided that he wanted to run across Canada, even though he could only do it on one leg. Some people probably thought he couldn’t even run ten miles with an artificial leg.
So that was an event that changed the way people thought about something. The Colombine High School shooting, in Littleton Colorado, is one of those things. On April 20th, 1999, two students who attended Colombine High, Dylan Klebold, and Eric Harris opened fire in the school, and shot and killed twleve students and one teacher, leavind 28 students injured (ten of them in critical condition), before killing themselves. Eric and Dylan both were in a clique called the “Trenchcoat mafia”.
The Trenchcoat mafia was a group of outcasts who would wear long black coats everyday, always bragged about owning guns, and disliked people of a certain colour or race. The shooting started at eleven thirty in the morning, during that time the students and the teachers hid in classrooms, closets, or underneath desks, until police could take them out of the building. The bodies of the victims weren’t removed from the school until April 21, for fear that there might be bombs attached to them. A lot of people are blaming things on the movies that Dylan and Eric watched, the video games they played, or the music they listen to.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame what they did on all of that because I bet that almost every kid has either seen the same movies, played the same games, or listened to the same music as they did, but none of them are going to school and opening fire on there classmates. And why are people blamming things on how Eric and Dylan’s parents raised them? I don’t think that their parents had anything to do with what Dylan and Eric did, they had a mind of their own, if they were influenced by anyone, it was probably their friends. To find the background information on my essay, I decided that I would look on the internet. There were a lot of webpages, pages dedicated to the victims at Colorado. One page that caught my attention was a page that was called “Stop The Hate:Dedicated to Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold”. I couldn’t belive it, who would make a website dedicated to two people that killed thirteen people and destroyed the lives of the people that knew them? Out of curiousity, I went into the page.
The first thing that came up was a picture of Eric and Dylan and a quote from Eric saying “I did not choose this life, but I have indeed chosen to exit it.” And that was the quote, I can’t even imagine how his parents must have felt after reading that. The person that created the web page wrote something that said “Stop the hate, stop judging people by what they dress like, who they hang out with, and what they do in their spare time. If you strike a match too many times, it’ll set your hand on fire.” After reading that I left the page. How can there be people that can possibly think that just because Eric and Dylan were teased a lot, that’s any kind of reason to kill innocent people. The one thing that got me really upset was the fact that the website was called “Stop the hate”, and the site was praising two people that killed thirteen people out of hate.
The weird thing about the shooting was that the reason that Dylan and Eric started to open fire in Colombine was because they didn’t like being judged by other people, by what they wore, and who they hung out with and stuff like that, but isn’t that kind of a double standard since they judged people by their colour? Since the shooting in Colombine, it seems that police, and school authorities have been taking things a lot more seriously now then they did before. In the Winnipeg Sun, there was a poll the statement was “School Authorities are over reacting to certain situations since the Colombine tragedy”. Sixty percent agreed, and forty percent disagreed. Personally, I don’t think that people are over reacting, I think they are just being aware of more things, and they’re trying to prevent anything like this from happening again. It’s sad that it took the shooting in Colorado for them to realise it though. One week after the Colorado shooting, in Taber Alberta, a fourteen year old boy killed one student at the school he attended, and shot another.
If you think about it, it’s pretty scary, Taber Alberta? I haven’t even heard of the place, it must have been a pretty small town, I bet what everyone was wondering is how it could have happened there. There has even been some bomb threats in Winnipeg. At Saint John’s High School, in the past three days, there has already been two bomb scares, and the whole school had to be evacuated. The “bomb” that was found in a backpack, wasn’t real, and the police say that it was just some kid trying to pull a practical joke. What kind of joke is that? One of the saddest things about the Colorado school shooting are that the victims were so young.
Eric and Dylan must have been two really smart young guys, to be able to plan that whole thing. They could have done great things with there lives, and the victims and Colombine, some of them would have been going to their graduation, but now they never will graduate, or become something big, because they didn’t get the chance because two boys were upset about being teased, and decided that this was how they would solve the problem. So in conclusion, I think that the Colombine High School shooting, is one of the events that have changed the thoughts of a lot of people, since this happened, people are now watching students more closely, and maybe that can prevent something like this from ever happening again.
