Columbine at 20: how school shootings became ‘part of the American psyche’
It was an attack that could have been exception. Instead, its brutality has been made routine
When the US’s glaring failure to respond to gun violence was spotlighted – again – after 50 people were killed and dozens wounded in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, Tom Mauser looked on in pain.
Not only was the Christchurch attack a brutal reminder of the assault at Columbine high school that left his 15-year-old son, Daniel, dead, in 1999, but New Zealand’s decisive action to ban assault rifles threw into stark relief decades of US inaction.