"Is this the first school shooting since Columbine?" a colleague of mine asked me. I am considered the go-to guy for school shooting info because I am currently completing a book on the subject.
I replied that to my knowledge there had been about 25 school shootings since Columbine not counting the Chechen hostage situation in 2004, where 186 children were killed, or the Amish school house killing of five girls, since those were perpetrated by adults. These 25 other shootings had not registered in my colleague's already over-crowded brain because, while they had been covered by the media, they had been Small Stories. Even the biggest of these Small Stories, Jeffrey Weise's slaughter of seven at Red Lake High School, had caused only a little media ripple.
The public had become blood-weary. In April of 1999 there was Columbine, the most closely followed news story of the year. With its eerie surveillance footage of black clad killers stalking the cafeteria, its heart-breaking spontaneous memorializing of Rachel Scott's abandoned car, and its high body count, Columbine seemed like the climax of the "epidemic" of school shooting that had begun to tease the public's attention in 1997. (Of course it wasn't really an epidemic, because it involved the spreading of an idea, not a virus. Some people have argued that an idea can be spread like a virus and they call it a "meme." Nor was Columbine the climax of anything; eight days later two students were killed in a shooting at a high school in Alberta, Canada.)
A second source of blood-weariness was the World Trade Center disaster in September of 2001. (And really, a school rampage shooting is nothing but an act of terrorism without an ideological core.) While post-traumatic stress disorder is usually only diagnosed in those who have had "direct exposure to a traumatic stressor," new research showed that children around the country were exhibiting PTSD symptoms just from hearing about the World Trade Center and watching the endless repetitions of the videos of the twin towers caving in on themselves. In other words, the news reporting itself was traumatizing children! Time to cutback on coverage of large scale horrors.
The final source of blood-weariness was and remains the Iraqi War, which has now been going on so long that it threatens to become part of the background noise, like the hum of the refrigerator, or the neighbor's TV. In the context of the Iraqi War, school shootings seem like an ironic, tasteless commentary on the deaths of young American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
How then is a new school shooter to capture the front page? How will he inspire a Big Story using an old idea like school shooting? And the answer, of course, is to up the ante. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris understood this when they prepared six hours of video-tape documenting their preparations, their bomb-building, their philosophy, and their cunning. They planned to make the streets of Littleton "run with blood," but then, after killing 13 people they became blood weary themselves and quit.
Seung-Hui Cho outdid Klebold and Harris. He killed 31, riddling each body with bullets to be sure that they their names would appear on the "deceased" list rather than among the "wounded," pausing only to mail his own multimedia press-kit directly to NBC.
How will the next wannabe outdo Cho? By nuking a whole neighborhood with a dirty bomb, prehaps? By recording a marathon interview with Geraldo prior to his suicide?
I tremble to think.