The little logo in the corner of the television set read, “Colorado Shootings.”
It wasn’t much of a shock to see it on the 24-hour news channels. We’ve been here before. Way too many times.
Disaffected young man. Chilling Internet rants. Easy access to guns. Missed warning signs. Violent culture.
Last Sunday’s killings shook our collective sense of security — again. If you’re not safe at church, you’re not safe anywhere.
But I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve grown almost numb to the violence, and if we’ve grown weary of trying to figure it all out.
On April 20, 1999, Colorado, and the nation, wept. Then we got angry. We wanted to know why it happened. How?
On Dec. 9, 2007, we mourned and then seemingly moved on. It’s as if we’re saying we’ve heard this story before, and there’s no way to avert the unhappy ending.
In the days after the Columbine High School shootings, hundreds of letters and e-mails poured into our offices. Coloradans were venting about guns, and violent video games, and the parents. The parents. Where were the parents?
We still have boxes of unread letters that flooded into our office in those days that eventually turned into weeks when Columbine was seared into the nation’s conscience.
This past week, we received about three dozen letters from readers, many reacting to the paper’s coverage of the event rather than the event itself.
On Monday, we even struggled over what to say as an editorial board. Should we blame gun laws? The killer? The demons that so clearly stirred inside him?
It was too early to point fingers with any certainty. But one of the lessons of Columbine was to learn from these tragedies.
“Making sense of the senseless” ended up being the headline on our Tuesday editorial.
But how do you make sense of a situation with so many unanswered questions?
With Columbine, many of the answers we sought died along with the killers, so we turned to their parents. Did something cause their children to go off the deep end? Could it have been avoided? What can parents do to help their own children?
But Wayne and Kathy Harris never spoke. Fearing lawsuits that eventually did come, they stayed silent. Tom and Sue Klebold holed up, too. We didn’t even see the faces of the parents in the newspaper until more than four years later, when they appeared in court to defend themselves in a lawsuit.
The Klebolds eventually granted one interview, to a New York Times columnist, five years after the killings. One quote from Tom Klebold struck both empathy and fear in the hearts of parents: “People need to understand, this could have happened to them.”
Ronald and Loretta Murray already have met with some of the families. They appear ready to talk once the burials are done.
Hearing from them is important, and not to satisfy some journalistic need. It’s to learn, and to avoid repeating history.
But we must be ready to accept the fact they, too, didn’t see anything unusual with their child. As parents, we all have blind spots.
As a society, we have to find some way to make up for those blind spots. To make sense of it.
Five people died last Sunday. Five should be an unbearable — unthinkable — number, but sadly Columbine, and later Virginia Tech, have become these macabre benchmarks in our minds for measuring tragedies.
We have to get back some sense of outrage.
Denver Post editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com.
