Tag: #Columbine Massacre

Editorial: “A Matter Of Time”

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A Look At Gun Control and 2nd Amendment Reform           

By Trevor K. McNeil

Still Echoing

The cycle has come back around again, and gun-control has returned to the sociopolitical forefront. Something that has occurred with increasing regularity since the beginning of the 21st century, starting with the Columbine shooting in 1999. A twenty year old tragedy that still has echos today.

Posting Memes

Both Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza and Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz posted memes related to Columbine massacre, before committing their own atrocities. The down time between mass shootings has been reduced from months, to weeks, to hours.  The two most recent shootings in Ohio and Texas occurring on the same day. Something that has never happened before on American soil. It has gotten to the point that in the United States no one is safe anywhere. Not in church, not in school, not at the mall, not at a concert, not at a restaurant.

Efficient Means Of Killing

The main reason this is happening, and will continue to happen, is a lack of political will by law makers to devise meaningful reforms. Finding that ‘will’ seems is apparently hard.  But we must find the will. We must make it more difficult for such crimes to occur by limiting access to guns. Death by gun is one of the most modern and efficient means of killing, on an personal level, ever devised. One such reform would be an extreme overhaul of unlicensed gun shows. Such unregulated gun shows are exactly how the Columbine shooters got the guns they used that fateful day, in April 1999.

Under Age

Despite that both shooters were too young to buy, or own a gun in Colorado, they were able to use a ‘straw buyer’ to get the guns at an unlicensed gun show. In December, 1998 several guns were purchased at an unlicensed gun show by the straw buyer. The buyer later sold the weapons to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, in spite of the seller knowing the boys were under the legal age. It is clear that if they had tried to buy such weapons in a licensed gun store they would have been turned away.  If they hadn’t gotten the guns a lot of people would be alive today, including the shooters.

Gun Love

The gun love is so strong in some quarters, not even Democrats dare stand against them, even in terms of reasonable measures. Conor Lamb, as such, is a self-described “Pro-Gun Democrat.” It was that distinction that was key in his victory over his Republican opponent in 2018. It is a fact that gun law reform will be necessary if America is to slow the number of gun related deaths. Currently, the United States loses 40,000 people annually to gun violence.  Many of these deaths are not mass shooting events, but rather domestic violence or suicidal actions.

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What Happened At Columbine

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NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: This is a piece I wrote about the Columbine tragedy. It turned out a bit different than I thought it was going to, but I think it works. It basically centers on the difficulty of really knowing the past with so many factors and interests involved, and ends with a counter-factual. A counter-factual is a sort of intellectual game we historians do to better understand what actually happened. We go through the facts and find a factor, usually a small one, that plausibly could have changed everything; presuming everything else stayed the same.

My factor was the fact that both of the attackers were under the legal age to buy the kind of guns they used and had to get them through an illegal “straw purchase.” In this case, meaning through a third-party, someone who got them at a gun show from unlicensed sellers. Had this not happened they would have been left with their primary bomb plot which if successful would have been the second largest domestic bomb attack after Oklahoma City. We, however, know that the large bombs completely failed and the homemade pipe-bombs were ineffective, all of the deaths coming from gunshots. No guns, no dead and what is seen as the first-mass shooting becomes an embarrassing fuck-up-T.K. McNeil

What Really Happened At Columbine

By Trevor K. McNeil

When Are Facts, Really Facts?

Recording history accurately is a tricky business at best. Particularly when there is a degree of shock and trauma involved in the events. Passion, stress and the now known unreliability of eye-witness reports make accuracy difficult if not impossible to piece together.  Furthermore, human memory can lead to things being a matter of record that turn out not to be true. The only reason we have a good idea of what happened on 9/11 is that there is video. But to this day, there are theorists who believe there were explosives inside the towers that were the real cause of the towers collapse.

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