20 years after Columbine, what's changed -- and what hasn't -- for school shootings in America.
at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, gunning down 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves.
She was sitting by the door, so she and her classmates rushed out, running through the parking lot to a residential street, where they knocked on strangers' doors for help. Once Farber was safely inside a home,Then-Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis was in his office when his secretary ran in and said there was a report of gunfire.But as he stepped into the hall, "My worst nightmare became a reality." About 100 yards away was a gunman coming toward him.
"Today, that strategy of waiting seems nuts. But it was the protocol of the time," DeAngelis wrote in his newly-released book.Another question of protocol concerned the school resource officer, with whom the gunmen exchanged gunfire outside before storming the school, DeAngelis said. A security officer stands guard at the entrance to the Columbine High School library on June 15, 1999, nearly two months after the shooting.
"The simplistic training is 'run, hide, fight,'" Garrett said. Some schools teach students about the best hiding places in the classroom, how to barricade the door and how to throw objects at an intruder as a distraction, he said. "It really felt like we were going to go to school the next day," and she figured she needed to do her homework, Farber recalled. "You're so immature and innocent."Farber wanted life to go on "as normal as possible," but "there's just always this underlying feeling of guilt," she said. "Could I have done something to make this not happen?"
Each student dealt with the tragedy in a different way, he said. DeAngelis soon realized Columbine could no longer serve Chinese food because that was served the day of the shooting. Some students wouldn't participate in fire drills. The school couldn't show war movies, he said, and the administration banned camouflage clothing because first responders wore it that day.
Despite the overwhelming trauma, DeAngelis noticed an immense stigma surrounding mental health treatment, and he said he was discouraged from disclosing he was seeing a therapist in case he'd be "deemed unfit for duty."DeAngelis, who spent 18 years as principal, retired in 2014 -- after he felt he had done his duty to heal the community.Demonstrators attend the March for Our Lives rally, March 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, 2018.Weeks before the Parkland massacre, two teenagers were killed and over a dozen people were hurt in a shooting at Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky. One month after Parkland, a boy shot two classmates at Great Mills High School in Maryland. A 16-year-old girl -- the gunman's target -- was killed. The second victim survived.
So if you restrict the way they buy weapons, they can just wait or go to another state to buy an assault weapon. Farber is now a filmmaker and released a documentary this month in which she followed several of her fellow survivors as they returned to the Columbine room where they were when gunfire erupted.
"When you take those different pieces of the puzzle, put them together, I think we have a better chance of stopping these things."
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