Free Republic

SANTA FE, Tex. — The exact reasons a teenage gunman shot his fellow students and teachers here at Santa Fe High School remain a mystery. His model for carrying it out is more clear. The 17-year-old junior wore a black trench coat and fired a sawed-off shotgun, the same attire and weaponry used by the two gunmen who killed a dozen students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. He wore a T-shirt with the phrase “Born to Kill” on it in bold, similar in design to those worn by the Columbine attackers, which read “Wrath”...

On another terrible day, I hate to introduce even more pessimism, but when we discuss mass shootings, one of the first questions we ask is the simplest and also the hardest to answer. Why? Why does this keep happening? Those who advocate for gun control have an immediate answer — the prevalence of guns in the United States. Yet guns have been part of the fabric of American life for the entire history of our republic. Mass shootings — especially the most deadly mass shootings — are a far more recent phenomenon. But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to...

Patrick Neville was outside, sneaking off to smoke with friends, and avoided the outburst of gunfire at Columbine High School nearly two decades ago, but he did not dodge the heartbreak. A close friend died, and the anguish in his father’s eyes is seared in Neville’s memory. Samantha Haviland was fundraising in the cafeteria and froze, uncomprehending, at the sound of screams just outside the window. Trance-like, she and others fled the room, then pressed against a wall of lockers, windows shot out down the hall. She, too, lost a close friend. […] Haviland, now director of counseling for Denver...

A Columbine survivor is pushing legislation that would allow guns in Colorado schools. Colorado State Rep. Patrick Neville (R) says schools should fight gunfire with gunfire. He reintroduced legislation Tuesday that would allow teachers with concealed weapons permits to defend their students at gun point. “The only thing that is going to stop murderers intent on doing harm is to give good people the legal authority to carry a gun to protect themselves and our children,” Neville said in a statement. Neville, who graduated from Columbine High School, was in school on the day of the horrific shooting in 1999....

Federal Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin said on Tuesday that the students who carried out attacks in January at high schools in Perm, Chelyabinsk, and Ulan-Ude had frequented “sadistic” websites “that propagate school violence,” including a website dedicated to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in the United States that killed 15 people, including the two shooters: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Speaking at an agency board meeting, Bastrykin also discussed the existence of “suicide websites” dedicated to Russian teenagers who have killed themselves. According to the chief investigator, 40 juveniles in the Moscow region alone committed suicide after finding...

Three separate bloodbaths at Russian schools recently are all linked by the alleged teenage attackers 'worshipping' the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre in the U.S. 18 years ago. In the latest outrage on Friday, axe-wielding masked suspect Anton Bichivin, 16, wore a T-shirt linked to German band KMFDM as did sinister Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The shirt was visible as the blood-drenched Russian was detained in the snow by military police, and in an ambulance as he was rushed to hospital. He and accomplice Alexander Rogalsky, 16, are believed to hold Nazi sympathies and gave themselves fascist...

Russian police are investigating whether three school attacks this week are connected after a teenager attacked a class with an axe and Molotov cocktail in the Buryatia region. The instructor involved, Russian language and literature teacher Irina Ramenskaya, told Mash, “I started to take the kids out. When I came out, I saw that a person was just chopping the kids with an axe,” she said. “I brought them back in the classroom, where everything was burning. I was bleeding. Before my eyes stood Anton with an axe.” The Ulan-Ude incident came on the heels of a knife attack that...

A Catoctin High School student faces felony charges for what investigators called a detailed plot to carry out a mass shooting at the school. Her father tipped authorities to the alleged plot, which included a timeline, phases of the attack and a target date, as well as a gun and potential bomb-making materials. FREDERICK COUNTY, Md. — An 18-year-old woman faces felony charges for what investigators called a detailed plot to carry out a mass shooting at her high school. “There is no doubt in our minds that we averted a disaster out there,” said Frederick County Sheriff Charles Jenkins,...

Two Troy High School students have been taken into custody on accusations they plotted a school shooting, police announced Wednesday. The two 16-year-olds were arrested on charges of making criminal threats and conspiracy to commit a felony, the Fullerton Police Department reported. According to police, the two suspects were overheard Tuesday night at a Troy High athletic event plotting to “shoot up” the school. A witness told police the suspects discussed various types of guns and described the shooting plot as being “bigger than Columbine,” referring to the 1999 school shooting that left 13 innocent people dead. The witness snapped...

The liberal media continues to lie on behalf of lazy bum teachers in the Massachusetts schools. The schools that have let down our children for decades and have made them into brainwashed zombies, underachieving socialists and have destroyed their desire to make any accomplishment, destroyed their self esteem and have made them into automatrons who believe what the media, pop culture and government says without question The biggest lie fed to the public is that question 2 would take money out of public schools and make them fail more. This is a lie... FACT: The funding of schools in...

‘Damaged masculinity’ may help explain Columbine and other mass shootings mike.rosenwald@washpost.com Follow @mikerosenwald View Archive RSS Feed April 20 at 6:34 AM Columbine High Schoolshooter, Eric Harris. (AP Photo/HO) Wednesday marks the 17th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre — the terrible day in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 and wounded dozens more before killing themselves in Colorado.In the strangely American phenomenon of mass shootings, Columbine comes up again and again. As I wrote last year: It was Columbine that changed everything…a horrifying event that occurred just as the Internet was taking root in the...

Full Headline ... "Mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold gives first TV interview since massacre: 'I had all those illusions that everything was OK'" The mother of one of the Columbine shooters still has trouble calling her son a "killer," nearly 17 years after the bloody high school massacre that left 13 people dead. "There is never a day that goes by where I don't think of the people that Dylan harmed," Sue Klebold told ABC's "20/20 Friday" in her first TV interview since her son's gun rampage. She then explained why she used the delicate term "harmed."

If you got your degree from the University of California, you might want to demand a refund. A newly surfaced video, recorded in October, shows Professor Ross Avila of UC-Merced teaching his class that 90% of terrorism in this country is carried out by “white Caucasian men.” I think he meant to say “white Christian men,” though it’s possible the professor doesn’t understand redundancy. Avila was trying to demonstrate to his class that people use mental shortcuts when thinking about complex issues such as terrorism. Implied in his statement, of course, is the idea that most Americans’ mental shortcuts amount...

(...) Following the on-air shooting of two television reporters in Roanoke, Virginia, she declared: “I feel just great heartache at what happened. I want to reiterate how important it is [that] we not let yet another terrible instance go by without trying to do something more to prevent this terrible killing that is stalking our country.” She added: "We have got to do something about gun violence in America — and I will take it on." She said the same thing back in July, in an obvious shift away from avoiding Second Amendment issues during the presidential campaign to avoid...

They were the most notorious yet least-seen artifacts from one of the worst school shootings in American history -- roughly four hours of home videos made by two teenage killers-to-be, shot in the last weeks of their lives and offering glimpses into the methods and motives behind the 1999 attack on Columbine High School that killed thirteen people and seriously injured two dozen more. The so-called "basement tapes" of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been the subject of intense litigation and media speculation, morbid curiosity and outrage, half-baked psychoanalysis and earnest requests from violence-prevention researchers to make them available...

Radio report says sheriff reports two shot, no more details. Wait for ABCNNBCBS to make even more publicity about this considering their reaction to Newton's anniversary tomorrow.

In the years leading up to the December 2012 massacre at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, Adam Lanza went from a merely shy pre-teen to a mentally ill recluse obsessed with school shootings. But during that long descent, Lanza never gave anyone any indication that he would one day turn a gun on his mother and then storm his onetime grade school with a semiautomatic rifle, killing 20 first-graders and six adults, investigators reported Monday. And so Connecticut authorities closed the book on the second-deadliest shooting in U.S. history with the motive still a mystery. Lanza shot himself at the...

Inquiring minds want to know – to those who support gun free zones throughout the country, do you feel any remorse at all when so many high profile gun tragedies occur in, wait for it…gun free zones? The entire city of Chicago is a gun free zone. Yet, the city sees some of the highest crime in the nation, including a particularly hideous crime this week that took the lives of 3 people and wounded 23 others, including a 3-year old boy. Or what about Columbine? Sandy Hook? Virginia Tech? All gun free zones. But let’s not forget the Aurora...

Security: As the usual suspects call for stricter gun control, the fact remains that a gunman with two prior gun-crime arrests entered a secure military facility with a stolen ID and found no one able to shoot back. It was Fort Hood all over again. Aaron Alexis, a gunman whose prior behavioral warning signs were ignored, opens fire in an installation belonging to the most powerful military on Earth and those who protect our nation and design our weapons are not allowed to have a weapon to defend themselves. He was more equipped than the 12 people he killed on...

“The system of terror was essential to Stalinism. … Terror was the creation to mold politically the control that they wanted.”– Condoleezza Rice, “Joseph Stalin: Red Terror” As we look back at the atrocities that have devastated America over the past 12 years since 9/11, one has to reflect upon history and see how it is that past dictators have profited from the use of “terror.” For example: Hitler was responsible for attacking his own Reichstag to start a world war. He perpetuated a war against the “enemies” he himself created. His propagandists had the Germans believing they were under...