ABSTRACT
The indiscriminate massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg on 16 April 2007, where 32 people were killed and 25 injured by Seung-Hui Cho, a mentally ill South Korean student, has somewhat cast the preceding “spate” of multiple shootings in America’s high schools, most evidently newsworthy during the late 1990s, in the shade. This chapter attempts to place into historical perspective the 20 April 1999, shootings when 15 died at Columbine High School in Littleton, near Denver, Colorado, and also to examine critically the validity of the initial media responses to, and the frenzied search for supposedly rational explanations of, that tragedy.
