The other week we were asked, “What If” regarding historical events? Essentially, I was asked, how would the present be impacted if just one detail from history was to change. For example, what if Anne Frank had survived the Holocaust, or what if Columbus never sailed, therefore never discovered America? In light of the recent and tragic Oxford school shooting, when asked this question I thought back to the event that was the catalyst for many of the shootings to follow, Columbine. For those who are unfamiliar with this event, Columbine was a shooting that occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned on releasing bombs in and around the school in addition to shooting students and staff, and while the bombs never exploded, the two high school seniors still managed to kill thirteen students and staff, in addition to themselves, causing the deadliest school shooting in American history. I then asked myself the question “what if?”, and created two completely different alternatives to this tragic event. Firstly, what if the bombs had exploded in Columbine? And secondly, what if the police had filed a warrant for Harris and Klebold?

In this blog, I will be going into detail on the second scenario. It is likely that if the police had signed the warrant for Harris and Klebold or the judge had taken a closer look at Brooks Brown’s report that was filed against Harris regarding his suspicious behavior and writings, Harris’s pipe bombs for what the shooters called “Judgement Day” would have been discovered. Further, Harris would have been arrested and put in jail, entirely preventing the Columbine Massacre. Of course, there is always the possibility that when Harris was released from jail that he would revisit his plan, knowing that many psychologists believe that “he was a full-blown psychopath”. However, for the sake of this theory, we will assume that this would not happen and if the police had put Harris in jail, the Columbine shooting would have never happened. 

Of course on the surface, if there was no massacre on April 20, 1999, in Ohio, twelve students and one teacher would still be here today. Who knows what lives those twelve budding adults would have led? Maybe one of them would become president? What if one discovered a cure for cancer? However, when I began to dig deeper, I realized that not only would thirteen lives have been spared, but twenty first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary, 32 students and staff at Virginia Tech University, and so many more. The Columbine tragedy was one of the first widely publicized school shootings. Because of this, “of the 63 school shootings that took place after Columbine collected by Kiernan Group Holdings in its Active Shooter database, 16 (25 percent) were directly inspired by Columbine, including the Virginia Tech shootings and the Sandy Hook, Connecticut, school massacre.” Knowing this information, we can assume that the frequency of school shootings that occur today, at least 149 this year, would be significantly less, as events like these are caused by a domino effect, saving hundreds of innocent lives.

James, Susan D., “Psychology of Virginia Tech, Columbine Killers Still Baffles Experts,”
ABCNews.com. Retrieved on 7 December 2014 from
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=7345607

Nicholson, Kieran, “Cho: Killers at Columbine ‘Martyrs’,” The Denver Post. Retrieved
on 7 December 2014 from http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_5699066

Lenoir, Andrew. “‘No Easy Answers’: The Full Story of the Columbine High School
Shooting.” Edited by John Kuroski. All That’s Interesting. Last modified
July 11, 2021. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://allthatsinteresting.com/
columbine-high-school-shooting.

 

On April 21, 1998, Eric Harris wrote in his diary, “[School is] societies way of turning all the young people into good little robots and factory workers. I will sooner die than betray my own thoughts. but before I leave this worthless place, I will kill who ever I deam [sic] unfit for anything at all. especially life.” 364 days later, he and his friend Dylan Klebold became known forever as the teenagers who began an epidemic that has become so common in the United States, school shootings. 

The following year, on April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Columbine, Ohio, as they had done every day for years. However, on this day, coincidentally Hitler’s birthday, they had different intentions. Earlier that morning they had planted bombs around the school. Two in the school’s cafeteria, two in their cars which were strategically parked at the two main entrances to the school, and a large bomb in a park a few miles away. Harris’s plan was to have the bomb in the park go off earlier than the others, distracting the police from the massacre that was to inevitably follow. Then, the cafeteria and car bombs would explode. This would collapse the cafeteria roof on the unsuspecting students eating lunch, causing them to run, giving Klebold and Harris targets to then shoot. However, their supposedly “foolproof” plan was unsuccessful. The bombs never exploded. This did not stop the two from causing one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, murdering 12 students, one teacher, and themselves, over the span of an hour.

Perhaps one of the most alarming details of this event was yet to be discovered. Brooks Brown, then a senior at Columbine High School, had been close with Harris and Klebold since elementary school. The boys bonded over a joint love for video games and philosophy. Brooks and Klebold both attended Colorado CHIPS (Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students), a program for gifted students in third grade. While Brown transferred quickly due to the overly competitive environment, Klebold attended the program through sixth grade, bottling his stress and misery to the point of rages. Klebold and Harris met in middle school, however, did not become close friends until partway through high school. Although it is unclear whether the boys were bullied, it quickly became apparent to Brown and his classmates that the boys enjoyed messing with their classmates, playing pranks that gradually became more and more violent as time progressed.

At one point, Brown and Harris got into a fight, resulting in Harris shattering Browns’ car windows, then out of anger, Brown revealed Harris’s poor behavior to his parents. In January 1999, Klebold gave Brown a letter containing a web address, telling his friend, “I think you should look at this tonight, and you can’t tell Eric I gave it to you.” While the motives behind this action are unclear, many assume this interaction was a cry for help. The web address was Harris’s AOL account which detailed his plan to build pipe bombs and wishes to kill people with “voDka”, Klebold’s screen name. At this point, Brook’s parents notified the police. Unknown to them, the two were already arrested for breaking into a van and stealing electronic equipment. The two were placed into a Juvenile Diversion program in which they completed quickly, were deemed rehabilitated, and were let go, records clean. All That’s Interesting (ATI), along with numerous articles and people theorize that “Had the presiding judge seen the Browns’ report, or if the resultant search warrant had been executed, Harris would have been rejected and jailed for the van theft and the police would have found his growing pipe bomb arsenal.” Unfortunately, this information was never shared and the warrant was never signed. So, not only could the Columbine Massacre have been prevented, but it should have been.

Klebold, Sue. My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold.
TED, 2017. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=BXlnrFpCu0c.

Lenoir, Andrew. “‘No Easy Answers’: The Full Story of the Columbine High School
Shooting.” Edited by John Kuroski. All That’s Interesting. Last modified
July 11, 2021. Accessed December 12, 2021. https://allthatsinteresting.com/
columbine-high-school-shooting.

https://online.seterra.com/en/vgp/3007?c=RF8R3