LESLIE POSADAS
staff reporter
collegian.editor@tccd.edu
The place where parents send their children to learn academic-related topics has now become the place where parents send their children to learn active shooter drills.
The NE Campus Social and Human Sciences Division held a panel discussion April 11 to discuss the impact left behind by the Columbine school shooting 25 years ago.
On April 20, 1999, 13 people died and 20 were wounded at Columbine High School in Colorado. This marked a turning point for stricter school safety protocols.
Lockdown drills are now routine for children as young as 2 years old at the NE Children’s Center, early childhood education instructor Lisa Self explained.
“They know if the bell rings it’s a fire drill,” she said. “But if it’s a different signal – which has no sound – then it leads to immediately going to the bathroom, locking all the doors and having to be quiet.”
Since Columbine, there have been 175 deaths from school and college shootings reported by the School of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.
Among these shootings is the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde in 2022, serving as a reminder of the volume of mass shootings in schools since that day.
Post-Columbine, school security measures have increased. Personnel now receive training, and there is a debate about whether teachers should be armed. In most cases, security check-ins have become a requirement.
“I don’t want to say this is the 9/11 for schools, but it kind of was,” Self said. “It really changed everything.”
Wisely said that living the reality of having to take active shooter training has started to affect the way she navigates her surroundings. She said that she can become wary and makes mental notes of how she might be able to escape if necessary.
“Even people who have never been involved in a school shooting are traumatized by it because of the effects of it,” NE associate professor of history Karen Wisely said.
Gun laws have also become a hot topic as school shootings has increased. Texas is among the 26 states where having a license to carry a handgun is not a legal requirement.
Wisely said people thought that gun laws would change after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, but the focus shifted toward prevention and preparation for a mass shooting.
“If you can’t do something when kindergarteners are being shot, I think they assumed that nothing’s going to be done now,” said Wisely.
Lacresha Moore, a student at NE Campus, said she recalls a time when drills did not have the level of intensity that they now have.
“We really didn’t have drills like that growing up in my time,” she said. “My parents didn’t think, ‘My daughter may go to school and there could be an active shooter.’”
Social media has become another factor in school shootings. The FBI has investigated multiple threats online, including a Houston-based teenager who sent bomb threats to a Minnesota high school.
Moore believes that there could be a variety of reasons for school shootings.
“Some people might say gun laws, some people might say social media, but we just don’t know exactly why. Some of it may be copycat,” Moore said.
Wisely said that she remembers how impactful the tragedy of the Sandy Hook and Robb Elementary School shootings were. She explained that it was difficult seeing how young the children were.
“There were little, tiny bodies that were just devastated by the high-capacity, high-volume rounds that were shot into them,” she said. “It was particularly violent, particularly deadly and unfortunately memorable because of that.”
Reed said that trying to understand the motives and reasons behind committing these crimes does not come easy because of misconceptions about them.
“It’s really difficult when studying school shootings because it’s so hard to put together a profile when these criminals tend not to be bullied,” she said. “The perception is that ‘Oh, they’ve been bullied in some way. They’re targeting people.’ Especially with the Columbine shootings, that’s not the case. Which makes it even more of an atrocity in some ways because they were killing people indiscriminately.”
