School Shootings

A Day Without Hate: High school movement spreads to CU-Boulder, Governor's mansion

In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Tech, killed 32 people in one of the deadliest campus shootings in U.S. history. About 1,500 miles away, Ben Reed, a teacher at Standley Lake High School in Westiminster had seen enough. But little did he know what his search for a positive way to deal ... More >>

Aurora Century 16 reopening: See changes made to ten other massacre sites

At 5 p.m. today, the Aurora Century 16, the site of the July 20 attack that killed twelve, officially reopens following a ceremony featuring Governor John Hickenlooper and many others. Some family members have called for a boycott of the event -- an indication of the strong emotions stirred by decis ... More >>

Columbine to Newtown: A tragic list of school shootings since 1999

The senseless massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, which took the lives of twenty children, including Olivia Engel, seen here, plus seven adults, instantly stirs terrible memories of the 1999 attack on Columbine High School. On the tenth anniversary of that tragedy, we assembled a horrific roster of sc ... More >>

Photos: Aurora theater shooting and ten massacre sites that were changed (or not)

The City of Aurora is conducting a survey, asking folks through August 31 what should be done with the Aurora Century 16, the theater where James Holmes allegedly killed twelve people. Many other massacre sites have faced this unfortunate question in the past, with responses ranging from minor chan ... More >>

One Book One Denver may have trouble feeling Colorado, but Texas doesn't

4/20: Teen volunteer program aims to take day back from marijuana, Columbine

April 20 is simultaneously a day of celebration and a day of mourning -- claimed by both pro-marijuana activists and those impacted by the 1999 Columbine shootings. But this year, the Substance Abuse Coalition of Douglas County is looking to reframe these associations. The coalition is organizing "T ... More >>

The Columbine shootings continue to "inspire" Hollywood

Thirteen years and a hundred school shootings later, why is Hollywood still obsessed with this one?

Columbine on TV: The five most convoluted school shooting episodes

This week's feature, "The Columbine Effect," reports on the controversy over a proposed miniseries about the shootings at Columbine -- and the way filmmakers have made use of the tragedy to advance various agendas of their own. But references to Columbine in indie films and documentaries, however up ... More >>

Columbine-era zero tolerance rules: Bill to end them faces challenges

Last September, we told you about a movement to end school zero-tolerance policies enacted after the 1999 Columbine massacre. These efforts led to Senate Bill 46, which passed its first committee test last week. But its narrow margin of victory leaves sponsoring Senator Evie Hudak worried that some ... More >>

School shootings: Some bogus Columbine myths resurface

There's no coherent explanation yet for seventeen-year-old T.J. Lane's attack on Charndon High School in Ohio on Monday, which killed three students and injured two others -- and the "why" may prove elusive for some time to come. The shootings have been treated as utterly random, although recent rep ... More >>

Reader combines South Park, Columbine, New World Order & guns in five sentences: Amazing!

Trey Parker.​Plenty of comments affixed to our blog posts are intelligent and thoughtful. Many of them are angry and passionate. Some are rude, obscene and/or offensive. But only a handful are jaw-slackeningly bizarre. Here's an example of the latter -- a paragraph just posted on a two-year-ol ... More >>

David Lawless, charged as Colorado Mills mall bomber, is in the Earl Moore tradition

Big pic below.​David Lawless stands accused of planting anemic explosive devices at Colorado Mills on Saturday, around the same time a bunch of windows were broken at a nearby Best Buy -- and Lawless is the suspect in that incident, too. As for his reasons, they're not clear yet, as remains th ... More >>

Comment of the day: Get over it?

​It's been over a decade since the Columbine High School shootings, but the wounds are still pretty raw for a lot of folks out there; certainly they are for the people of 13 Families, a documentary that looks at the coping process of the families who lost kids to the massacre. Earlier this wee ... More >>

Tom Mauser and the Fix Gun Checks Tour: Disarming lunatics isn't such a crazy idea

Tom Mauser ​Grief alters people. It can devastate and give a new sense of purpose. The murder of his son Daniel in the Columbine shootings has set Tom Mauser on a crusade against gun violence that, over twelve years, has yielded small victories and gradual change -- and plenty of blowback from ... More >>

Columbine effect 12 years later: Are schools and cops going too far in prosecuting juveniles?

Evie Hudak​In the dozen years since the Columbine shootings, school officials have become hypervigilant about potential troublemakers in their midst -- so hyper, in fact, that state lawmakers are now seeking a formal review of school disciplinary procedures to determine if principals are too q ... More >>

Candice & Kristin Hermeler: Judy Brown on Columbine tie to Australian twins' suicide pact

Kristin Hermeler.​Last week, we learned that Australian twins Kristin and Candice Hermeler, whose suicide pact left the former dead and the latter seriously wounded, had an interest in the 1999 Columbine massacre, but we didn't know the roots of the connection. Now, however, Judy Brown, whose ... More >>

Grey's Anatomy finale fails the Columbine test

Sarah Drew (April) in the "Grey's Anatomy" season finale.​From a conceptual standpoint, last night's season finale of Grey's Anatomy had a lot in common with the famous it-was-all-a-dream episode of Dallas. Fans haven't been wowed by many of the new characters introduced of late, so Grey's cre ... More >>

Columbine: A True Crime Story author Jeff Kass sets book tour for other sites of school shootings

Jeff Kass. Former Rocky Mountain News reporter Jeff Kass is the author of the other book about Columbine -- and while his effort, Columbine: A True Crime Story, has received only modest attention on a national level, he feels his account has much to recommend it over Columbine, local journalist Dav ... More >>

Today's featured event: Author Mark Obmascik's got his eyes on the sky again

Mark Obmascik. Back in 2002, Mark Obmascik, part of the Denver Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, took a year off in order to write a book about, of all things, bird-watching -- and the slower pace agreed with him. "In journalism, we do ... More >>

The Columbine effect: A horrific roster of school shootings since 1999

The most resonant information that's come my way thus far today in relation to the anniversary of the April 20, 1999 shootings at Columbine High School was contained in an e-mail sent to Westword by Vicki Newell, a public-policy director with the Colorado PTA. It's a list of school shootings since ... More >>

Wake-Up Call: Columbine, redux

There have been other school shootings in the ten years since Columbine, horror scenes with even bigger body counts. But for some reason, Columbine is the crime that resonates; "Columbine" is the word that keeps getting repeated in the tales of similar plots -- some carried out, some foiled. It w ... More >>

School shooting in Finland treated as breaking news in Denver

What's in a Name?

Marilyn Manson

Wednesday, February 13, Fillmore Auditorium, 303-830-8497.

Max Karson Given a Wrist Slap

Now it really is Safe2Tell

Cho's Columbine Martyrs

The Twenty-Year Itch

Columbine Study Questions

More Messages: Greatest Hits

Flyleaf

Sunday, May 21, Bluebird Theater, 1-866-468-7621.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Are Columbine's remaining secrets too dangerous for the public to know -- or too embarrassing for officials to reveal?

Zebra Junction

Waterborne (Self-released)

Off Limits

Out of the Box

Best Career Switch for a TV Reporter

Julie Hayden

The Plot Sickens

Another "lost" Columbine report triggers new questions -- and a long-overdue investigation of police ineptitude.

Deeper Into Columbine

The settlements. The spin. The remaining secrets.

Dave's Dilemma

Playing hide-and-seek with the truth -- the Jeffco way.

Back to School

The bullet in the backpack and other Columbine mysteries.

Chronology of a Big Fat Lie

Tracking the official story of the secret Columbine affidavit.

Best director

Chip Walton

Best radio rise and fall

Bob Visotcky

Anniversary Post-Mortem

The media's coverage of the Columbine anniversary was the journalistic equivalent of slow-pitch softball.

Off Limits

The son also rises...

The Time of Their Lives

The wheels of justice keep spinning in Jeffco.

Back in Black

The goth culture is in for a dark time at Arvada West High School.

Off Limits

The Black Sheep

Unitarian minister Joel Miller finds out it's hard to lead the wrong kind of church in southwest Jefferson County