Columbine High School Massacre

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the cultural conditions and emotional settings that exist within American society that may cause such atrocities as the one that occurred in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

From the Paper:

"No sooner had the gunfire begun around 11:30 a.m. on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, than accounts of it began to emerge, ranging from what happened to why it happened. In no time, culturally saturated "narrative truths" merged with the "historical truths" of the event and came to define it. It soon began to sound similar to other cultural stories in its cast and type of characters, sequence of events, story line, motivational inquiry (why the actors did what they did), the boundaries of the event (who was and was not on stage), and the like. The massacre quickly became woven into often-competing discourses, diagnoses, or interpretations which variously foregrounded parental responsibility, the power of the peer group, bad genes, and vulnerable temperament. Certain cultural categories quickly emerged as part of a recognizable taxonomy: Violence, schools, teens, gangs, adolescence, workplace, safety, and control. The Columbine shooting became part of standardized ways of accounting for the way events like this happen. Psychohistorian David R. Beisel (1999) describes how his university classroom discussions on the day following the Columbine shootings echoed the discussions in the media. The unsaid and the culturally unsayable are the underside of the said and the sayable. It is almost as if the media provide the secondary elaboration rather than the dream work itself -- yet claim to present the dream itself and are believed. Beisel (1999), states that the media not only provides information, but also performs a defensive function."

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