Columbine High was nowhere near to being the first American school shooting. Less than a year before Columbine, a mentally ill fifteen-year-old killed two of his classmates and wounded twenty-five others at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. The history of such acts is disturbingly long, dating back to the dawn of public education in the New World. But Columbine High represents the baseline for a different level of school shooting—the full incarnation of a nightmare that had previously seemed like a theoretical possibility too extreme to actually occur.
