Echoes of Columbine

13 April 2012

The worst school massacre in American history was at Columbine High when 15 pupils and one teacher were gunned down by two boys who marauded through their school.

The shootings traumatised America, led to two acclaimed films and once again reopened the debate on gun control.

On 20 April 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, marched through the school in a suburb of Denver, Colorado, shooting automatic weapons at will. They were apparently members of a small group of Nazi-obsessed outcasts known by fellow pupils as the Trench Coat Mafia.

A month earlier four students and a teacher were killed when two boys, aged 11 and 13, shot classmates at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Columbine and Jonesboro followed some of the bloodiest episodes of US school history.

On 1 May 1992, Eric Houston, 20, killed four people and wounded 10 in an armed siege at his former high school in Olivehurst, California.
On 2 February 1996, 14-yearold Barry Loukaitis turned an assault rifle on his algebra class, killing two classmates and a teacher, in the central Washington city of Moses Lake.
On 21 May 1998, a day after being expelled for bringing a gun to school in Springfield, Oregon, 17-year-old Kip Kinkel killed two students in the cafeteria, wounding 22 others. His parents were also found shot dead.

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