Friday, November 2, 2007

Columbine High School massacre

The Columbine High School massacre occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado near Denver and Littleton. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting rampage, killing 12 students and a teacher, as well as wounding 23 others, before committing suicide. It is the fourth-deadliest school killing in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and the 1966 University of Texas massacre.
This tragedy led to a broad debate regarding the gun control, school violence, goth culture, etc... People try to find out the reason why these two young student commit a such terrible incident. Many argued that the isolation of Klebold and Harris from the rest of their classmates prompted feelings of helplessness, insecurity and depression, and eventually caused them to take a revenge to their schoolmates. In the aftermath, lots of rumors around this tragedy spread out through the media, some press potrayed these two young as part of a goth cult, such characterization were found to be questionable afterward, and people started to discuss this issue and deplore the 'goth' subculture.In July 1999, the FBI organized a major summit on several severe school shooting incidents. And the experts who participated in this project argued that these two who commited Columbine high school shooting had psychological disease that caused them to commit this crime. But recently, a US psychiatrist, provided a different view , arguing that the killers' actions were affected by computer games like Doom. Once they are banned from their computers, the two teens became homicidal and began documenting plans to attack the school. However, there were still some warning signs to notify people some information regarding the coming shooting incident. Right now, many schools instituted new anti-bully policies as well as so-called "zero tolerance" approaches to weapons and threatening behavior and raised the security level to prevent any violence. But the most important thing is to focus on students who fit a profile or show warning signs and help them release their anger and range.

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