Columbine: What Have We Learned—and Who Are We Now?

“It brought the nation to its knees, but now that we’ve gotten back up, how have things changed; what have we learned?”

That question is carved into the Wall of Healing at the Columbine Memorial. It is also the question I carried home after visiting it this week.

I had not thought deeply about the Columbine massacre in some time. Not until my recent trip to Colorado.

My goal was to take a break, visit friends and accomplish something big: climb my first 14er.

Colorado is no stranger to people like me. We come and go, experience its tall peaks and outdoor activities, and hope we live to tell the stories.

While visiting friends, I was encouraged to go shopping in downtown Littleton.

“Littleton—as in Columbine, Littleton?” I asked. “I didn’t realize I was that close.”

I took that as an invitation to go shopping, but also to return to Columbine and pay my respects.

I had visited the school several years ago, but this time was different. I could pull right up to it. There was a baseball game happening on a Sunday, and then it started to rain.

I sat in my car and waited out the rain for a bit, watching ordinary life continue around a place forever connected to something horrific. Then I followed the path up the hill to the memorial honoring the 12 students and one teacher, Dave Sanders, who were killed on April 20, 1999.

Three questions kept coming up:

• Where was I when this happened?

• What have we learned since then?

• Who are we now?

I was a student at Ivy Tech Community College in Fort Wayne when the shooting unfolded. I did not have a smartphone. I was not on social media. There was no Facebook or Instagram in 1999.

There was television, and I was glued to it.

I remember watching students run from the school. I remember the boy coming through the library window. I remember the literal horror I felt and how quickly that fear became contagious. I looked around my own school and wondered if we could be next.

That could have been me. It could have been almost any school in America.

The names of the two young men who committed the murders were burned into my memory. Yet before returning to the memorial, I could not have named all 13 people whose lives they took.

That imbalance bothers me. The killers became household names. The people they killed became “the victims.”

That is something else we should have learned to change.

What have we learned?

Well, I did some humbling research.

Defining a “mass shooting” is more complicated than I realized. Some databases count incidents in which four or more people are shot. Others count only incidents in which four or more people are killed. Some include domestic and gang-related violence; others focus exclusively on public attacks.

But changing the definition does not make the reality go away.

Using a narrow definition—four or more people killed in a public place, excluding the shooter, family-related killings, other felony-related violence and organized terrorism—the Rockefeller Institute identified 121 mass public shootings in the United States between 2000 and 2025. Across 73 other countries with similarly high levels of human development, there were 99 combined.

An earlier Harvard analysis found that these attacks occurred in the United States approximately once every 200 days between 1982 and 2011. Between 2011 and 2014, that interval had fallen to once every 64 days.

That was the horrifying statistic I remembered. The exact frequency changes depending on the years studied and how “mass shooting” is defined, but the larger pattern is difficult to dispute.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported more than 48,000 firearm-related deaths in 2022—about 132 people every day. More than half were suicides. Firearms were also the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers ages 1 through 19.

We love our guns. I have them too.

But do we value mental-health care, responsible ownership, secure storage, early intervention and human belonging with the same intensity?

I’m not so sure.

To say we have learned nothing since Columbine would not be fair. We have changed how law enforcement responds to active shooters. Schools and workplaces have developed emergency plans, lockdown procedures, communication systems and reunification processes.

We have learned to prepare.

That reality now shows up in my own work. When I facilitate longer workshops, I have to factor in active-shooter procedures just as I would a fire alarm, tornado warning or medical emergency. I need to know where the exits are, understand the building’s protocols and determine whether a drill is scheduled.

I wish this were not a reality I had to speak to in my work. I wish educators were not spending time teaching children what to do if someone enters their school with a gun.

But pretending this is not our reality will not keep anyone safe.

Preparedness matters. But an active-shooter drill teaches people what to do after a threat is already inside the building. It does not keep that threat from reaching the door.

Research has also shown us that people who plan mass violence often communicate their intentions or exhibit concerning behavior beforehand. A 2026 analysis examined warning behaviors and communications surrounding 171 mass public shootings between 1999 and 2024.

That does not mean we should profile every lonely, angry, bullied or mentally ill person as dangerous.

The lesson of Columbine cannot be “watch the weird kid.”

I know what it feels like to be perceived as different. I know what it is to try so hard to fit in that you start losing track of who you are.

That experience did not make me violent, and being different does not make a child dangerous. But it taught me how easily difference can become shame when young people are left to make sense of it alone.

A study of 15 school shootings found that acute or chronic rejection—including ostracism, bullying and romantic rejection—was present in 13 of them. But rejection was never the only factor. It appeared alongside other concerns, including fascination with guns or death and significant psychological or behavioral problems.

Other research examining adolescents’ responses to public ridicule found that humiliation was related to anger and depression. Young people who imagined responding violently also reported less social support, a lower sense of adequacy, greater hopelessness and more anger-driven aggression.

That does not mean humiliation causes violence. Most children who are rejected, bullied or embarrassed will never hurt anyone. It means humiliation may be an important place for adults to intervene—before shame becomes rumination, grievance and the belief that someone else must pay.

Adults and teachers have a real opportunity here.

We cannot create a world in which children never experience rejection, embarrassment, conflict or failure. We can create environments where they learn how to make sense of those experiences without turning difference into shame or pain into something irreversible.

Resilience is not telling a child to toughen up or tolerate cruelty. It is helping that child understand that being different does not mean being deficient. It is teaching them how to name what hurts, ask for help, survive rejection, repair conflict and move through humiliation without swallowing it as truth—or returning it as violence.

And if we did not receive that kind of support when we were kids, it is never too late to learn how to provide it for ourselves as adults.

Who are we now?

As a nation, I see us grappling with our sense of identity.

There is so much tension around in-groups and out-groups. Us versus them. Red versus blue. I can’t make sense of it anymore.

I have started approaching meetings and encounters with a deliberate thought:

This is a human worthy of love and belonging, because in the absence of that, there is always suffering.

That is enough.

It helps me let go of some of the labels and assumptions I am supposed to make. It interrupts the judgments that keep us disconnected.

That does not mean abandoning accountability, condoning harmful behavior or pretending every person is safe. Empathy and accountability can exist in the same place.

After I left the memorial, I read about Columbine until it made me uncomfortable. Learning ordinary details about the two young men who committed the murders does not excuse anything. They planned an atrocity, murdered 13 people and caused suffering that survivors, families and an entire community will carry forever.

But making them incomprehensible monsters can also prevent us from examining how violence develops. Humanizing someone is not the same as absolving them.

I found myself imagining a different outcome.

One where 13 people got to live the lives described on those memorial stones. One where the injured did not carry lifelong physical and emotional wounds. One where two deeply troubled young men were stopped before their rage became a legacy.

The question on the memorial wall has been waiting 27 years for an answer:

“How have things changed; what have we learned?”

We have learned how to respond faster and prepare for the worst.

We have learned that warning behaviors are often visible and intervention can stop planned attacks.

We have learned that access to firearms matters.

We have learned that mental-health care, responsible ownership, resilience and human belonging matter.

We have learned.

The harder truth is that we have not consistently chosen to act on what we know.

Originally published with the Journal Gazette 9/12/2026