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C H A P T E R O N E The Gun Control (Participation) Paradox ON APRIL 20, 1999, two alienated teenagers armed with an arsenal of semiautomatic firearms calmly made their way into their suburban Denver high school and began shooting indiscriminately. The young gunmen shot fellow students as they ate lunch on the school lawn, as they ran for cover in the school cafeteria, and as they crouched in terror in the school library. When the shooting spree at Columbine High School was over, one teacher and fourteen students (including the shooters) lay dead, and another twenty-one were wounded. With satellite trucks and cameras stationed outside the besieged school, coverage of the massacre was beamed live to television stations across the nation. Columbine, the Colorado state flower and the massacre’s ironic shorthand term, may have been the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, but it was not the first. Between 1997 and 2000, there were three dozen mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and other seemingly safe spaces across the United States. But Columbine seemed “different,” as one gun control leader noted at the time. “The focus on gun control seems to be more immediate and more lasting.”1 On April 20 and in the weeks that followed, the nation indeed was galvanized to confront gun violence. Newspapers and talk radio featured impassioned testimonials about the historically tragic role of guns in America. Amid a popular outcry, pro-gun legislators’ efforts to ease access to firearms stalled in state legislatures, including Colorado’s. President Bill Clinton renewed calls for congressional passage of modest gun control measures, and previously reluctant lawmakers made tentative moves in that direction. Donations poured in to national gun control organizations, and their memberships grew.2 And thousands of people, including students from Columbine and other Denver-area high schools, gathered for an unprecedented protest against the nation’s mighty champion of gun rights, the National Rifle Association (NRA), whose long-planned annual meeting was held in Denver two weeks after the Columbine shootings. As it turned out, Columbine was different in some ways—but sadly routine in others. The aftermath of Columbine looked a lot like the aftermath of many other high-profile shootings in American history: collective outrage, followed by a momentary flurry of unorganized calls and letters and donations from thousands of individuals, and then a quick return to 2 • Chapter One the status quo.3 In the months after Columbine, Americans witnessed four particularly traumatic shootings: a white supremacist’s racially motivated killing spree in Illinois and Indiana in July 1999 that killed two people and wounded nine; an indebted day trader’s massacre at his home and two Atlanta brokerage houses later that month (thirteen dead, including the shooter’s wife and children, and twelve injured); a white supremacist’s attack in August 1999 on a Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, California (five injured), and on a Filipino postal worker (who died); and a six-year-old boy’s fatal shooting of his classmate in February 2000 at an elementary school near Flint, Michigan. If ever the country had been primed to confront its gun violence problem, this was the time. Within two years of Columbine and the traumatic shootings that followed , leading American newspapers decided to investigate the political fallout from these dramatic national events. What they found was not the stuff of banner headlines. Instead, headline after headline told a story of mass political quiescence. “New Gun Control Politics: A Whimper, Not a Bang,” concluded the New York Times.4 “Hill Reaction Muted on Latest Shooting; Lawmakers Largely Silent on Gun Control,” the Washington Post reported.5 “Rampages Elicit Little Outcry for Gun Control,” sighed the San Francisco Chronicle.6 Even though Columbine had seemed different , like a watershed moment that would radically alter the history of gun politics in America, in fact very little had happened legislatively or electorally. The nation seemed to have returned to normal, with Columbine and the other shootings nothing but a terrible memory. The headlines notwithstanding, Columbine and the other high-profile shootings that followed appear to have accomplished what countless other gun violence traumas failed to do. These shootings planted the seeds of a sustained, visible, grassroots, nation-spanning gun control effort. New leaders emerged, new tactics were pioneered, and new interest groups formed. Whether a full-fledged movement will arise remains to be seen; that question is best left to future scholars. But Columbine...

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