Background

Before April 20, 1999, the word “Columbine” evoked an image of the bell-shaped flower and, for some students in Littleton, Colorado, the name of their high school.

Yet after that fateful day, the word became forever linked with the deadly shooting by two Columbine seniors named Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who attacked that very same school, injuring 21 people and killing 12 students, a teacher, and themselves. In fact, nearly eight years later on April 16, 2007, a 23-year old Virginia Tech senior called Seung-Hui Cho was said to “pull a Columbine” when he wounded 17 people and killed 33, including himself, in separate shootings on campus that day (Milne, 2014).

Map of Columbine Shooting from BBC

Map of Virginia Tech Shooting from BBC

As two of the deadliest school shootings committed by students, they share many similarities, such as their relative proximity in scale and time compared to other major school attacks. The map on the right details how the troubling shooting unfolded, with Harris and Klebold actually planning for the shooting itself to only be the second of three acts, after a main bomb in the cafeteria exploded and sent those who survived currying to the exits, where Harris and Klebold would gun them down (Cullen, 2009, p.33). However, their homemade bombs malfunctioned, causing them to improvise by entering the school shooting (Cullen, 2009).

The map of the left shows how Cho engaged in two separate shootings after he seemingly improvised his attempts to increase his death count (“Virginia”, 2007).

Even with these parallels, the Columbine Massacre and the Virginia Tech Shootings are also widely considered to be different in how the media depicted the shooters. In particular, the media focused primarily on the presumed social outcast statuses of Harris and Dylan in Columbine but emphasized the mental illness of Cho (James, 2009).

However, what is striking is how the media coverage in fact also shares a surprising commonality—they serve to cast the shooters of both shootings as victims of society. Their depiction of Harris and Dylan as members of socially alienated groups paints them as victims of their social peer structure at Columbine High School, much like how their focus on Cho’s mental health shifts some responsibility onto how his illness should have been handled by society.

By examining how the media frames the shooters at Columbine and Virginia Tech as victims of societal issues, we see how the public is then able to address these issues, and thus derive meaning from the otherwise meaningless shootings but also transferring some accountability away from the shooters in the process.

Table of Contents
2. Examples of Victim-Framing in The New York Times Articles
3. Framing Shooters as Victims
4. Collective Responsibility
5. Inspiration
6.Personal Reflections
7. Representations of the Process of Witnessing
8. Works Cited