I Lived Through a School Shooting and There is Something We Can Do to Stop the Next One

I lived through a school shooting. I thought it was an isolated event, a horrible rift in the fabric of normalcy. I was wrong—it was barely the beginning. And it was in fact near the beginning: a month to the day after Columbine. The first of the copycats. Before the copycats of the copycats of the copycats of the…
 
It was nothing compared to so many of the gun massacres that have followed, whether in schools or in, for instance, a grocery store that I had visited many times a few miles down the road from me in Boulder, Colorado where 10 people were murdered on an early spring weekday afternoon. In the shooting at my school, no one died and only one person was significantly injured. But it was still shocking and upending. And his intentions were far worse.
 
I knew the shooter. Years before he was actually a really funny guy, awkward and weird as teenagers often are, but funny. I liked him.
 
But things started to change. And I knew it, better than anyone else. Only I didn’t know what to do—it didn’t even occur to me that I should do anything at all. How could I have known?
 
In this article featuring Beverly Kingston, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, she states that there are nearly always ample signs, and thus opportunities for intervention, to prevent such events:
 
“They're stockpiling weapons. They're talking to other people about what they're going to do. They have more interest in following the Columbine shooters or others who have been radicalized. You can also see changes in their behavior: depression, isolation, intense or escalating anger and changes in their appearance. Shooters in these studies had five or more of these signs. One study found 81% of attackers told someone about their plan, and 93% exhibited strange behavior or other red flags.”
 
I saw nearly all these signs. He would leave the cafeteria during lunch and sit by himself at the furthest possible hallway—just sit there and stare. His girlfriend (yes, surprisingly he had one) would futilely plead with him to snap out of it. His demeanor was utterly changed—he was dark, brooding, humorless. I don’t however ever remember him mentioning Columbine, but he did mention it to others.
 
He invited me to his house one day, the first and only time I ever visited it. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and I was impressed by its size compared with my own. No one was home. He showed me his parent’s guns. He shot one into a nearby hill.
 
At some point, I must have been in the bathroom. I just remember walking into a living room with no lights on, only faint sunlight streaming in from some distant window. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room with a gun against his head. He asked me if he should do it. Of course, I told him no, begged him to stop playing around. He pulled the gun away. I think he said he was just kidding. It was terrifying. But at the same time, I thought it was all a joke. Despite such obvious signs, I still had no idea what was to come.
 
I never went back to his house, and I don’t think we ever spoke again.
 
Then one morning some time later, just after leaving my bus and approaching the school doors, a flood of kids suddenly came bursting out. I heard pops in the distance. He had entered the school cafeteria with a revolver and a shotgun and fired at the floor. Ricocheting bullets injured six people. He fled the building and put the shotgun in his mouth. The school principal stopped him. And the rest is history as they say.
 
In retrospect, over 20 years later, he was trying to recruit me, to enlist me in his death plot. Or maybe it was a plea for help. Or both. In retrospect, I could have stopped it, as minor as it was. If I had known what to do. I was a stupid kid, trying to do the right thing, but not properly equipped to do so.
 
My intention here is not to say that increased gun control measures are not part of the solution. They probably are. But this is a deep seeded, multi-faceted issue that likely has no simple solution. What I can share is my own experience, which strongly affirms the analysis by Beverly Kingston.
 
Every potential mass murderer knows someone.