1999: Columbine High School
Even before the turn of the century, there were shootings at American schools. One that an entire generation will remember is the massacre at Columbine High School, a high school in Colorado. There, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two teenagers aged 17 and 18, shoot 12 fellow students and a teacher for unknown reasons, before killing themselves as well. Another 21 others are hit by bullets.
It could have all turned out worse: the two have planted homemade bombs in the school that never exploded. At the time, it was the deadliest shooting at an American school since the 1960s and will be the prelude to dozens more shootings. This is also called the ‘Columbine effect’ in America: the massacre is widely reported and may have also led to subsequent shooters to act.
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2005: Red Lake
At a high school in the northern state of Minnesota, 16-year-old Jeff Weise kills five students, an unarmed security guard and also a teacher. In the morning before the murder, his grandfather and his girlfriend also had to suffer. The boy, who was allegedly bullied a lot, commits suicide after his act, killing a total of ten people that day.
2007: Virginia Tech
A new low follows two years later on the campus of the American university Virginia Tech. There, 23-year-old Korean-American student (and psychiatric patient) Seung-Hui Cho shoots a total of 32 people and then himself. Striking: the university was later fined for negligence because, according to the authorities, it should have raised the alarm earlier.
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2012: Sandy Hook Elementary School
It’s mid-December when 20-year-old Adam Lanza invades his old elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. There he kills twenty children with a semi-automatic firearm, all of them between the ages of six or seven. Before Lanza kills herself, six staffers are also shot, bringing the number of casualties to 27. Lanza’s motive will never be traced, but according to relatives, he was inspired by advertisements from arms manufacturer Remington, which subsequently settles with family members for tens of millions. As a result of the massacre, President Obama wants to change gun laws, but in the end that doesn’t work.
2015: Umpqua Community College
It was just after 10:30 a.m. Thursday morning when 26-year-old college student Chris Harper-Mercer fired a warning shot into the hallway of Umpqua Community College in the western state of Oregon. Inside, he forces fellow students to gather in the middle of the classroom, asks them if they are Christians, then opens fire. Eight students and a teacher are killed. The perpetrator, who has 13 weapons with him, also shoots himself after a firefight with the police.
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2018: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School
In the southern Florida town of Parkland, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz kills 17 people, including 14 students, in five classrooms within seven minutes. Another 17 people were injured in the shooting. Unlike many of his predecessors, Cruz – a former problem student at the school – allows himself to be arrested by the police without resistance. This after he first orders a drink at a Subway and then walks into a branch of McDonald’s. A few days later, 18-year-old Emma Gonzalez, a student who survives the shooting, calls for action in an emotional speech. Later, young people in many places march for stricter gun laws.
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2018: Santa Fe High School
A month after ‘Parkland’, things go wrong again. This time it is a 17-year-old boy who causes a massacre at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Eight students and two teachers are killed. It turns out that the perpetrator, student Dimitrios Pagourtzis, left several fellow students he liked alive so that they could ‘tell his story’. Pagourtzis is said to have committed the ten murders after he was rejected by one of the victims, although a clear motive has never been fully established.
2022: Robb Elementary School
Two days before the start of the school holidays, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos drives a gray Ford truck into a ditch at an elementary school in the Texas town of Uvalde. The teenager storms into the school building just after half past eleven and kills 21 people in a classroom. The discussion about gun laws in the US flares up again.
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