At first I was thinking it was longer than 12 years ago, because I could have sworn I was in high school at the time. Turns out I was remembering Waco, not Columbine.
Thinking back, I do remember watching it on the news as I got ready for some college class or another.
Oddly, I don’t remember, and my 1999 desk calendar (I archive them as a sort of journal) offers no clues. I remember where I was when I heard about 9/11, Challenger, and Reagan getting shot,* but not Columbine. Weird.
*And also when the news broke about the diaper-wearing-astronaut love triangle, because it was on the TV in the hospital waiting room while Mr. S was having surgery. Weirder.
I was at the gym in Boulder, about 30 miles away as the crow flies. There were TV’s showing the local noon news in front of the stairmaster I was on, but the sound was off. Partway through the news, they cut to a shot of Columbine, which I recognised because I had played baseball on the field there. At first there were six or eight cop cars on the scene but as time went on there were more and more and then the SWAT teams arrived. I looked over to the woman on the machine next to and said “This is not good.”
Senior in High School, I had gone up to the Guidance Counselor’s office to talk about ACT or SAT or some other pre-college thing. They had a TV tuned to the reports about it on the news.
It was the bloodiest school shooting in U.S. history!
Almost certainly at work in Houston, for a company that’s since gone out of business.
Honestly, I recall being far more interested in the NATO air war in Kosovo/Serbia that was going on at that time than in a bunch of high school losers who shot their school up.
… so? Do you remember where you were on the bloodiest workplace shooting? How about the most cops killed at one time? Most Improved Stabbing?
I thought I was at home enjoying the morning before having to be in to work at noon, but I just checked at it was a Tuesday, so that’s unlikely. I’m guessing I was just at work like usual.
I was in Georgia ( the former USSR state not US)
West Georgia to be precise. And the only English speaking dude on the project. I spoke passable Russian and at the end of the contract was fluent. Never heard about Columbine till years after.
I was 16, came home from school and saw the footage on CNN. I thought it was absolutely horrifying. I developed pretty severe anxiety around going to school after that. I still have idle worries about mass shootings to this day. (I know it’s statistically improbable. I was at an age where it felt like anything horrible could happen at any time.) 9/11 ain’t got nothing on Columbine in terms of its impact on me, personally.
In school I suppose.
Columbine obviously didn’t make too much of an impression on me in 7th grade, I got in serious trouble with my school a couple months after it happened for comics I was drawing featuring lots of blood, guts, explosions, drunk people, and a teenage assassin (thankfully the guidance counselors were already well-acquainted with me and my sense of humor, and were able to reassure everyone that I wasn’t actually dangerous).
I certainly never had anxiety over people shooting up my school. But I hung with the misfits in trench coats and often fantasized about blowing up the building myself.
I was a senior in college, and the incident happened just before my issues in education seminar met. We were all horrified. As you can imagine, our professor threw out the intended lesson and we spent the class talking about what it was like to plan on being teachers when something like that had just happened.
Like some others, I don’t have a specific recollection of where I was when I heard about it, but I have it in my head as being the worst of a string of school shootings in that period of time. Still insane to think about.
I was getting all my worldly possessions together for a cross-country move to get married, so honestly, though wrenching, I wasn’t paying that much attention as I had a lot of fish to fry at the time.
I don’t think it really hit me as so horrific until things slowed down for me a little and I had a chance to pay attention to it after the fact.
This time 12 years ago (Wednesday 21 April 1999) I was on a flight from Canberra to Sydney. In the taxi from the airport I heard the news about the school shootings on the radio.
Thanks for my laugh of the day.
“And, rookie of the year, arson, goes to…”
Joe
At home watching TV. The news cut in to report it. I thought it was a minor event until they showed more of it on TV.
I was at work where we were still goofing off and relaxing post-tax season. Didn’t hear about it until I got home later that night.
I was at work. Heard about it on the radio. I just thought, “Huh. Another school shooting.” Then I went back to work.
I used to call this week in April Wacko Week because of these things: Hitler’s birthday, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine. In the nineties, it seemed like if some crackpot wanted attention, they did it during Wacko Week.
Wacko Week hasn’t been the same since 9/11. Now, we’re all scared of foreigners again.
I was a high school freshman. My dad had CNN going on the TV when I got home that day. I remember the first words I said were “that wasn’t a shooting - that was a massacre!”
School was different after that. It was really the first big event that I remember affecting my life until 9/11.