Misconceptions Of The Columbine Massacre

On April 20, 1999, a school shooting occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The shooters were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The pair were 18 and 17-year-old seniors attending Columbine at the time of the shooting. They shot and killed 13 people, 12 students and one teacher, and injured an additional 21 people in less than 20 minutes (Columbine 2). The shooting ended around noon when Dylan and Eric shot themselves in the library, but students were not completely evacuated until hours after. This meant hours of waiting, hoping, and praying for people all over the world, but especially for those who had loved ones in the school. Amid that waiting, multiple stories were developing about the happenings inside the school. There

Most notably, Cassie Bernall’s story. Cassie happened to be in the library when the shooting took place; hiding under a table just like all her other classmates. In the days immediately following the shooting, it had been said that Cassie died after Eric asked her, “Do you believe in God,” and she said yes. Cassie quickly became a martyr for the Christian faith and inspired thousands of people across the world. In actuality, Cassie never even got the chance to talk to Eric before she was shot. According to Alissa Wilkinson, “...eyewitnesses stated that Harris found her cowering under a table, said ‘Peekaboo,’ and then shot her, without Bernall uttering a word” (Wilkinson 8). This quote shows that while Cassie did believe in God, she had not been targeted because of her faith. Rumors such as this one replace the real story with one that is more tragic or dramatic in hopes that they get more attention. It is important to know that all deaths are a tragedy, no matter if one becomes a martyr or

On December 14, 2012, a school shooting happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut. 26 people were killed; 6 adults and 20 children, all either aged 7 or 6 (Sandy Hook 2). This was a very tragic event for the world, much like other school shootings that came before and continue to come. Alex Jones, host of the radio show, “The Alex Jones Show”, claimed that the shooting was a hoax. According to Joanna Slater, “Within hours of the shooting, Jones was telling his audience that it was staged as a pretext for confiscating guns. Within days, he began to suggest that grieving parents were actors. In the years that followed, he repeatedly said the massacre was faked” (Slater 1). This quote shows that people are still devaluing the lives of innocent people who were murdered for a chance at attention. Fortunately, Jones has been ordered by a Connecticut jury to pay $965 million to families of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Even so, what would possess a person to say such things? Doug Criss, author of “The mass shooting conspiracy theories that just won’t go away (and why they should)” quoted Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com, when he said, “...people who dream up and spread these untruths about tragedies probably never learned the most basic thing about compassion” (Criss 6). Binkowski says this because conspiracy