ABSTRACT
The “Columbine event” crashed into our collective present on April 20, 1999, and to add further aspects of incomprehensibility to the event, the authors chose Adolf Hitler’s birthday to symbolize their rage at the students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. This event marked the trauma of school shootings in so serious a way that it took school violence outside the intelligible boundaries in which it had been previously contained; further, the choice of date identified the event with fascism. In the years preceding Columbine, the hermeneutic bandages provided by experts neutralized the effects of prior shooting events. Focusing on the specific themes raised by the means of violence, they exploited the obvious features (violent film, guns, psychiatric disorder), ignoring the role that schools and society might play in provoking violence. The public was able to contain its anxiety/hysteria by ingesting these explanations and managed to separate the experiences of those traumatized communities from ones that might take place closer to home. The media interpretations managed these events for the viewer by containing them to precise determinants/precipitants for indicators of school violence. After Columbine, the school became the locus of intervention, but when the critical gaze turned inward, it wasn’t the school that was examined, it was the student body.
