At least that’s the way I’ve seen the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School shootings, where I was one of the first reporters on scene and ten years later published the book “Columbine: A True Crime Story.” The 13^th anniversary is Friday.

The 10-year anniversary of the shootings, which prompted the greatest round of media attention since the shootings themselves, was no exception. The storyline then came, appropriately enough, at the culmination of a series of observances: A sunset ceremony at Clement Park adjacent the school. Former President Bill Clinton, who was in office at the time of the shootings, spoke by videotape, and approximately 1,000 people attended, according to one estimate.

The storyline from many of those who had gathered, as The Denver Post put it, was “The time to write a new meaning for ‘Columbine’ has come.” The paper quoted teacher Lee Andres as saying, “It’s my hope you look at your school as that — your school — not the most famous high school in the world.” Andres added that the world may then see Columbine as “a symbol for strength, courage and hope.” That same storyline was echoed earlier in the day when the state legislature passed the resolution “Columbine High School Triumph Over Tragedy.”

These were not bad thoughts. But the truth is that Columbine will never cease to be the scene where two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher before taking their own lives. It may never cease to be the archetype of school shootings. With apologies to Andres, Columbine alumni, and current students, this is not a bad thing either. To whitewash what happened at Columbine would also be a crime.

And yet, as we approach the 13^th anniversary, the Columbine story is being revised in legitimate and important ways. This is not a nod to the pronouncements made on the 10-year anniversary, but like other historical turns, this change appears to result from the random yet timely collision of various factors: the rise of social media, one person’s vision, and enough distance from the original event to bring perspective and healing. And it is happening on film.

Last year the film “13 Families” was released portraying the journeys of the victim families. This was not the first time these families had taken ownership of the tragedy – there had been everything from lawsuits to the successful drive for a new school library, where most were killed. But the film was seen as another triumph for victim families in telling their story rather than the killers’.

And now Columbine grad and Denver resident Samuel J. Granillo, who works in film and television as a freelance camera and production assistant, is trying to raise funds for a film called “Columbine: Wounded Minds” about the survivors. Other Columbine students have explored the shootings, including Brooks Brown’s book “No Easy Answers.” Granillo was a 17-year-old junior lunching in the cafeteria when the shootings began. He and 17 others were then trapped in a kitchen cafeteria for three hours until rescued by SWAT.

As Granillo writes on the film Website, the “unofficial thought” for making the film was “how to get help to those still suffering from the mental and physical traumas of the event.” He adds, “The DREAM is to create a formula or foundation providing free services to all those who need mental health help. From soldiers coming home to other school shooting survivors, a plan needs to be devised….”

Granillo has raised approximately $15,000 of the $250,000 he is seeking for the film, but is already doing some interviews, fueled by his passion and the volunteer help of friends. Granillo’s film has been mentioned in a number of Denver media stories, and emerged as a counterpoint to an already controversial miniseries on the shootings proposed by Lifetime. Granillo and I are Facebook friends, and his Facebook page has become an online forum for discussing the healing and history surrounding the shootings.

The highly publicized 10-year anniversary of the shootings produced the call to rewrite and take back Columbine High. But this 13th anniversary – surely a blip on the media and public radar – may go down as the year that made that pronouncement reality.

From what I’ve seen so far, I think Granillo gets it right on his Website when he writes, “This documentary isn’t just a message, it’s a movement.”

Three students from Chardon, in northeastern Ohio, are dead and two are injured. The suspected shooter has been identified as T.J. Lane. 

The first similarity that came to mind is that Columbine and Chardon may both be classified as suburbs and small towns, where many school shootings have occurred.

According to the U.S. Census, Chardon’s 2010 population was only 5,148, and overwhelmingly white — 96.9 percent. As I point out in my book, Columbine: A True Crime Story, Columbine does not even exist. It is not an official city, but a “Census designated place” with a population of about 24,000 that is 92.5% white.

School shootings tend to occur in these places because they are so homogeneous that youths who are different from others feel like complete outcasts who have no place else to turn. Social services in such small areas may also be limited.

While shootings have traditionally occurred in suburbs and small towns, they are still seen as everyday Americana — a point the Chardon schools superintendent drove home: “We’re not just any old place, Chardon,” he said, according to the New York Times. “This is every place. As you’ve seen in the past, this can happen anywhere.”

Those 5,000 are now over 5,600 people who have put their names to the SignOn.org online petition titled “Say ‘No’ to Columbine Movie.”

“We ask for basic human respect be shown to a community that does not want to be exploited over a sensitive, and persistently prodded event,” the petition begins. It adds, “There is no mention of any proceeds being directed at programs that address school violence. There has been no indication that people were actually consulted from the community. There is no indication that anyone has been contacted for likeness rights. How the network has gone about making this movie is questionable, which begs the question, ‘How tasteful is this movie going to be? Will it be historically accurate or just a gore-fest?’ ‘How distorted are they going to make the film to sell ad space?’”

The number of petition signers rocketed in a little over a week, and many indicated they were closely tied to the shootings that left 15 dead, including the two killers. The current goal is 7,500 signatures.

“I would argue that no one owns a tragedy such as Columbine,” I wrote in the commentary. “But why does Lifetime want to own a piece of it? No compelling answer has emerged. Does the network want to solve an unanswered question about the shootings? Or does it just want to entertain?”

The other part of the commentary was, “If Lifetime wants to enlighten us, it has already stumbled. Anyone can investigate for themselves what happened at Columbine. But Lifetime has chosen to tell a specific and unfounded story about Columbine….”

Almost 13 years later, Illinois gets to vote on a legacy of the world’s most iconic school shooting, and I urge them to get it right.

I was one of the first reporters on scene on April 20, 1999 and covered the shootings as a staff writer at the now defunct Denver Rocky Mountain News. My colleagues and I broke major stories: the 911 tapes, the diversion files of the killers, and leaked crime scene photos. I wrote about the shootings for national publications including the Boston Globe, US News & World Report, and Chicago Tribune. On the 10-year anniversary of the shootings my definitive book was published Columbine: A True Crime Story (Ghost Road Press).

Another book, Columbine, by blogger Dave Cullen, is now in the running for the Illinois School Media Library Association Abraham Lincoln Award. The Lincoln is given “annually to the author of the book voted as most outstanding by participating students in grades nine through twelve in Illinois. The award is named for Abraham Lincoln, one of Illinois’ most famous residents and himself an avid reader and noted author,” according to the ISMLA Website. The award “is designed to encourage high school students to read for personal satisfaction and become familiar with authors of young adult and adult books.” Past winners have included Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (2008) and A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer (2005). The Lincoln award will be announced in March, one month shy of Columbine’s 13^th anniversary.

Columbine, in many places, is a good attempt. But it has far too many serious shortcomings to be considered by ISMLA.

The nation’s most trusted media outlets may have misled ISMLA – and the rest of the country. Frank Rich, arguably the New York Times‘ most prominent columnist when Cullen’s Columbine was also released on the 10-year anniversary, wrote, “Dave Cullen reaffirms Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.” Aside from the shootings themselves, there are plenty of examples that the alleged bonhomie was not reciprocated. “You people could have shown more respect, treated me better, asked for knowledge or guidence [sic] more, treated me more like a senior and maybe I wouldn’t have been so ready to tear your [expletive] heads off,” Harris wrote a few months before the shootings in a typical diary entry.

(In another story New York Times literary critic Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Kass, whose tough account is made even sadder by the demise of The Rocky Mountain News in which his Columbine coverage appeared, has also delivered an intensive Columbine overview. Some of the issues he raises and information he digs up go unnoticed by Mr. Cullen.)

Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin reviewed Columbine and heralded the supposed revelation that student Cassie Bernall was not shot dead in the library after saying “yes” she believed in God. The false Bernall story did quickly travel worldwide after Columbine.

But five months after the shootings, the media dissected the Bernall myth once police investigators themselves sorted through events. (“Cassie probably never said yes, or anything else,” The Washington Post reported in September 1999.)

Many reviews of Columbine were not just faulty. Among the most egregious errors in the book itself is portraying the killers as normal teens accepted into the student body, and Harris as among the most popular (at least with the girls). The killers’ alienation, however, was one of their greatest motivators. Five days before the shootings, a recruiter made clear to Harris and his family he could not join the Marines, at least while he was on the psychotropic drug Luvox. Cullen claims it never happened. Cullen attributes thoughts to the killers – implying that Klebold lost his nerve during the shooting and was in general nothing more than a blameless lackey. Yet both killers share equally.

It’s horrible that the nation’s major media outlets could not bring accurate analysis to reviewing one of the nation’s major social issues. But the librarians at ISMLA – and its voters – should be a backstop to such media shortcomings and not vote Columbine.

I will be speaking on Sunday at a Colorado Authors book festival in Denver (free admission). They have given us each six minutes to speak before answering questions, and selling and signing books. Speaking for myself, while it will only be six minutes, it will be a good six minutes.

I’ll talk about the first days covering Columbine, and what set me on the road to writing the definitive book on the shootings, Columbine: A True Crime Story (Ghost Road Press, 2009). I’ll also be talking about a couple of the exclusives in the book, and how I uncovered them. Sometimes it’s a question of good reporting or an innovative approach, such as obtaining the college essay of killer Dylan Klebold.

“During my sophomore year and junior years, I had trouble keeping a high G.P.A.,” Klebold wrote to the University of Arizona about three months before the shootings. “This was partially a result of my hanging out with the wrong crowd; not caring about my future. It took me a long time to finally realize that the decisions I was making would affect me for the rest of my life.”

Sometimes, it’s simply calling someone up and asking the right questions. That helped get the psychological profile featuring Klebold’s mom that was published under a pseudonym long before the shootings. Psychiatrist Hugh Missildine quoted her as saying, “I think the fear of death will always be there. I wish I could turn off this part of my mind.”

Event Details:

Colorado Authors Program.

1 p.m., Sunday, October 23.
JCC (Jewish Community Center) at Phillips Social Hall. 350 S. Dahlia St. Denver, CO 80246
Phone: (303) 316-6360

Free.

Reporters, understandably, are focused on getting out the details before trying to make sense of them. The New York Times is now saying 93 dead in the Oslo bombing and nearby shootings allegedly undertaken by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. The Times is also noting 96 ­injured.

Norway, according to various postings, seems to have strict gun control. The Times had this:

“Arild Groven, secretary general of the Norwegian Shooting Association, a sports shooting group, confirmed that Mr. Breivik had belonged to Oslo Pistolklubb, one of the 520 clubs in the association, which has 30,000 members.

“‘We all read and watch the news about ­­the shootings in the United States,’ Mr. Groven said. ‘But it doesn’t happen here.’

“He said the process of obtaining a handgun license for sports shooting was strict, requiring a safety certification and a police background check.”

This is not meant to be a pro or anti gun control posting. But what may be strict gun control in Norway will support those who say gun control is not the answer.

Gun control did flare as an issue after Columbine. Tom Mauser, the father of slain Columbine student Daniel Mauser, took it up after the April 20, 1999 shootings that left 15 dead, including the two killers.­­

The Columbine killers showed great determination in carrying out their act. The $64,000 question is whether they would have given up at some point if it had been harder to obtain guns, or kept going until they found a way to obtain the weapons. I have blogged about mass killings in China that have shades of Columbine, despite strict gun control in that country.

The other question I would raise is whether the Norway shootings would have occurred without Columbine. The perpetrators may have different motivations. But incidents like Columbine and Oklahoma City build upon themselves and give people the idea that a mass killing is the art of the possible.

In examining school shootings for my book Columbine: A True Crime Story, I found that they often occurred in the South and the West of the United States. In these two regions there is a character trait, confirmed in psychological studies, of a “culture of honor.” It means that when someone in these regions feels their honor has been violated, they feel it is appropriate to retaliate with violence. The other point here is that the perpetrator takes it upon him or herself to level the revenge. There is a name for that too: Being your own sheriff.

News on the Arizona suspect so far seems to include little more than a name: Jared Loughner. The snap judgements are that the shooting may have been politically motivated.

The New York Times noted that Giffords “has been an outspoken critic of Arizona’s tough immigration law.” And reports indicate there are five to six dead, including, “John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for the District of Arizona,” according to The Times. “He had been involved in immigration cases and had previously received death threats.”

School shooters are prompted to take revenge against those they feel have made them outcasts or slighted them. The idea in Arizona would be that the shooter was motivated to seek his own sort of political justice for policies he opposed.

A further read of The New York Times article adds more to the “culture of honor” thesis in this case emanating from the South and West, although that term is not actually mentioned or alluded to in the story. “Last March, after the final approval of the Democrats’ health care law, which Ms. Giffords supported, the windows of her office in Tucson were broken or shot out in an act of vandalism,” The Times notes. The paper adds that other Congress members had also been threatened, and names Washington Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, from yet another Western state.

Another idea being pushed early on in this story is that such violence may be prompted by Republicans and/or right-wingers. Here The Times notes:” During the fall campaign, Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, posted a controversial map on her Facebook page depicting spots where Democrats were running for re-election; those Democrats were noted by crosshairs symbols like those seen through the scope of a gun. Ms. Giffords was among those on Ms. Palin’s map.” I would add that Palin comes from another Western state: Alaska.

There is one other thing I found hard to ignore in The Times article about the shooting: “Television coverage showed a chaotic scene outside a normally tranquil suburban shopping spot.”

The other common denominator among school shootings is that they occur in suburbs and small towns, but that may be a topic for future discussion as more information emerges.

Committing suicide at the end of such rampages is commonplace, and even school shooters who do not kill themselves often express a desire to die in the midst of the shooting. It’s hard to find a clear cut answer for these suicides. Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold often expressed a desire to die in his diaries; life on Earth was so terrible for him, and he dreamed it would be better in an afterlife. But there are other reasons that may contribute to a suicide. Shooters see it as empowering to script their own ending, and/or killing others does not quench their thirst for revenge or violence. They can only put out that fire by killing themselves. And while the ultimate goal may be suicide, shooters feel they need to make a point first (such as revenge or a show of power).

One of the things that struck me about today’s early news reports is that the Connecticut suspect was scheduled to attend a disciplinary hearing. Experts say rampage shooters do not snap; there is often a simmering (and clues left behind) before the actual event. At the same time, there do seem to be final, precipitating events. In the case of school shooters, it may be a breakup with a girlfriend, or a discipline.

I discuss in my book how the juvenile diversion program meant to set the Columbine killers straight after they broke into a van may have actually fed their anger; they may have chafed at having to attend seminars, do volunteer work, meet with a counselor, etc. in the approximately one-year program. Psychologist Aubrey Immelman, who I quote in my book, asks whether the Columbine shootings would have occurred if the killers had not been in diversion. (Which is not to say that they should have gone undisciplined.)

Today, we might ask the same question as to whether the disciplinary hearing set off the Connecticut shooter. Again, this is not to say that people shouldn’t be disciplined. And something else may end up setting them off. The key point is trying to recognize the warnings before the shootings.

Memorials such as the one for Columbine also have economic stories. They need time and money to be built, and the path to the Columbine Memorial has been well-documented in The Denver Post and now defunct Rocky Mountain News (where I worked for 10 years). And even when the finishing touches are completed, the work is not done. Memorials, like any other structure, need to be maintained.

So it should be no surprise that I got an e-mail the other week from Kirsten Kreiling, president
Columbine Memorial Foundation. She is soliciting volunteers (for as little as an hour) to help maintain the memorial.

One of my first thoughts, however, was “Can I just show up and start doing stuff?” I figured that is the kind of situation that makes a government official like a park worker or police officer cringe.

Kreiling assured me that the park staff is aware a call has been put out for volunteers to show up. I tried it out myself the other week; the only problem I had was dealing with the afternoon heat (bring a bottle of water). And if the idea of volunteering for a cause isn’t enough to motivate you, you might appreciate eavesdropping on the comments of visitors.

This is the list of work Kreiling sent out:

Deadheading perennials in all the flower beds; including the columbines
Cut back the spring bulb growth (ie cut off the wilted green stalks from the tulips, hyacinth, etc.)
Weeding under the pine trees on the hill
Weed whacking around the rose bushes up above the fountain (and weeding as needed)
Weeding of the flower beds
Sweeping of the entire Memorial
Trash pick up along the hillsides
Clipping / pruning of dead growth on trees
Spraying of weeds with Round Up in any of the sidewalk areas

You can contact Kreiling at:

Foundation@ColumbineMemorial.org