Columbine’s legacy – schools remain in the crosshairs: Reporter’s notebook

On April 20, 1999, a tragedy in our schools changed them forever. Two students, who created a plan for mayhem, launched a devastating attack inside a school – once considered a safe and protected space – the likes of which our nation and the world had never seen before.

The plot, well-planned, was focused on one thing: killing. The end result was twelve murdered students and one murdered teacher, all within a school that, prior to the attack, was far removed from this type of violence – a violence that more often associated with large cities, but now occurred in the Denver, Colorado suburb of Columbine.

The Columbine school attack sent a shockwave around our nation and the world. Schools, faculty, students, parents, and the law enforcement community were deeply shaken. These “safe spaces” were now considered a target for violent behavior, and no one readily understood why. This dangerous new dynamic triggered a sea change in school safety and security that we are still dealing with today.

One of those changes was the deeper involvement of the federal government in school safety. Congress passed a multitude of laws to try to address this new school threat, including schools being designated part of the nation’s critical infrastructure in 2011. In January 2013, Congress passed a landmark law called the Investigate Assistance for Violent Crimes Act, which empowered the federal government, if requested by state law enforcement officials, to task various government agencies to “assist in the investigation of violent acts and shootings occurring in a place of public use and in the investigation of mass killings and attempted mass killings,” including schools.

Why was this law passed? Another school shooting occurred just one month earlier, this time at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. I had the opportunity to visit the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School during President Obama’s visit in the aftermath. The attack devastated the local community, which lost 20 first-grade students and six school staffers to yet another act of seemingly inexplicable gun violence.

That tragedy, and the passage of the Investigate Assistance for Violent Crimes Act, compelled every federal agency to act, including the U.S. Secret Service, for which I worked at the time. As an agency within the Department of Homeland Security with a focus on the prevention of targeted violence, both the Secret Service and I found ourselves in the center in what was, and continues to be, an attack on our schools.

As part of the federal response, the most valuable things the Secret Service brought to the table from its decades of tracking and preventing deadly violence against political figures was its expertise in preventing targeted violence and ensuring physical security, both of which could help schools put in place better practices and protocols to make them safer.

Prior to Columbine, school shootings and attacks were a relatively unknown occurrence. The most notorious was the University of Texas at Austin tower shooting in 1966, in which 14 people were murdered by a sniper and 31 injured. More recently, schools across the nation saw a drastic increase in gun violence following pandemic school closures.

So far in 2024, as of this writing, there have been 18 reported shootings at K-12 schools in the U.S., resulting in eight deaths and 21 people injured, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. The statistics can be misleading, however, since the motives behind such shootings are largely unclassified – they could be the result of gang violence, criminal activity, or other reasons, as opposed to a school and its occupants being specifically targeted, as was the case at Columbine.

Even prior to the passage of the Investigate Assistance for Violent Crimes Act, the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) had been working on preventing school violence. The groundbreaking 2002 study, titled “The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative: Implications for the Prevention of School Attacks in the United States,” sought to answer the questions of why these acts were happening and how to identify them, and to propose methods by which to mitigate them via the threat assessment process.

That NTAC report helped identify some precursor behavioral patterns that could be used to identify and potentially mitigate acts of targeted violence in schools. It included 10 key points to that end:

• Incidents of targeted violence at school rarely were sudden, impulsive acts.• Prior to most incidents, other people knew about the attacker’s ideas and/or plans to attack.• Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.• There is no accurate or useful “profile” of students who engaged in targeted school violence.• Most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.• Most attackers had difficulty coping with significant losses or personal failures. Moreover, many had considered or attempted suicide. Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted or injured by others prior to the attack.• Most attackers had access to weapons, and had used weapons prior to the attack.• In many cases, other students were involved in the attack in some capacity.• Despite prompt law enforcement responses, most shooting incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.

Through the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service began to conduct presentations for schools, law enforcement officers and parents around the nation about how to identify these behavioral patterns, and mitigate the pathways to an attack.

Of course, with the advent and proliferation of the internet and social media, much of these behaviors have been and continue to be emboldened online.

“The most common question parents ask me is, ‘is social media safe for my kids.’ The answer is that we don’t have enough evidence to say it’s safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health,” said U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy last year.

“Children are exposed to harmful content on social media, ranging from violent and sexual content, to bullying and harassment. And for too many children, social media use is compromising their sleep and valuable in-person time with family and friends,” Murthy added. “We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis – one that we must urgently address.”

Yet social media has been and continues to be almost universally used by students – and many parents remain cyber and social media ignorant.

Due to the accessibility and use of social and online media, Columbine-inspired attacks are a concern on this, the 25th anniversary of the shootings. The January 2024 Perry High School shooting in Perry, Iowa, and the March 2023 shootings at Nashville’s Covenant School were committed by people later believed to have been at least partly inspired by Columbine, based on social media and other online activity.

And despite the creation of a school safety website resource page within the Department of Homeland Security, we watched in horror as 19 students and two teachers were fatally shot, and 17 more injured, by a former student at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which exposed the ongoing flaws in school safety, security, and proper response.

Which is why, with the advocacy of my spouse, I took a job as a security coordinator in a local school district, one that has placed me in direct contact with what I’ve described, which schools deal with on a daily basis. Like many Americans, I too have children in schools, and I worry about their safety.

Donald J. Mihalek is an ABC News contributor, retired senior Secret Service agent and regional field training instructor who served during two presidential transitions. He was also a police officer and in the U.S. Coast Guard.