American Tragedy

April 20, 1999 was a day that changed the world. Columbine High School was under attack by two of its own students: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. It has taken Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, twenty years to reconcile how the son she thought she knew, the son she loved, the son she affectionately referred to as “Sunshine Boy” could willingly and knowingly be a school shooter. “If love could have stopped Columbine,” she says, “Columbine would never have happened.” 

Twenty years later we must ask ourselves why we have failed to prevent these tragedies, and if it is even possible? What happens when we stop looking at these as rare, sensational events, and understand them as a particularly gruesome appendage to a much larger and more common problem? Sue loved her son, but after reading Dylan’s journals she was surprised to learn that he was depressed and suicidal. Yet understanding that school shooters almost always suffer from common mental illnesses does not get us any closer to solving the problem. In fact, it has only gotten us looking the wrong way.