Adolescent shooters at American high schools

             On April 20th in 1999, two students, Eric Harris (17) and Dylan Klebold (18), conducted an attack at Columbine High School during lunch period at about 11:20 a.m. They were armed with semi-automatic handguns, shotguns and explosives. In less than fifteen minutes, they killed twelve students, one teacher, two suspects and wounded 21 people. Then they committed suicide. 24 students were transported to six local hospitals and 160 students were treated on the school campus.
             The Columbine High School attack became the most terrible shooting in US history of all and it caused all the consequences that have been taken concerning the "new- orders of violence prevention in American schools [stressing of every word in bold-type throughout the whole paper by Christina Gieseler]. It set off the "ongoing debates over gun control, the Internet, music, race and adolescent alienation-. .
             In these debates the causes of juvenile violence were supposed to be carefully examined to find a way of essential violence prevention. .
             The massacre had much influence on many Americans who wanted a massacre like this never to happen again. Juvenile violence suddenly gained more importance in the American society.
             An elementary school teacher to whom I talked about the attack at Columbine High School remembered that everybody was shocked after the tragedy and she herself felt the danger of such shootings at her own working place since then. A student who attended middle school at the time of the high school massacre told me that she had never expected something like this to happen and she said that many students felt insecure and nervous after the shooting and doubted each other whether their classmates are still trustworthy and if they are still safe. Most of them could not understand why something like this had happened.
             The staff and the students at Penn High School, Indiana, were especially shocked by this tragic event at Columbine High School (which is actually the building shown on the photo on the cover of this paper), as Penn is even a bigger school than Columbine.