Violent Media, Guns and Moral Panics: The Columbine High School Massacre, 20 April 1999

Abstract

This essay attempts to place the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on 20 April 1999, and the initial media response, in some kind of historical perspective. In attempting to interpret what happened, a hierarchy of causation (presuppositions, preconditions, predpitants and triggers) is adopted. Moral panic assumptions that media violence or the availability of guns are the immediate causes of shootings in middle‐class, white American suburbs are questioned. The institutionalization of adolescence in American high schools is proposed as a more direct predpitant, while new evidence suggests that the trigger for the Littleton shootings should be located in harassment of outcast students (“the Trenchcoat Mafia”) by athletes and its effects on two psychologically disturbed students, killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

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