Violence in the School Shooting Film

Defined most broadly, a “school shooting” is simply firearm violence that takes place on the grounds of an educational institution. However, the term is most often used to refer to a very specific subgroup of such crimes, namely, ones committed in suburban and rural American elementary and secondary schools by white, middle-class youth against victims who are to some extent random (Ferguson and Ivory, 2012). This tendency in nomenclature is largely the result of one specific event: the murder of thirteen youths and one teacher by two white, male teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado on April 20, 1999. From that point on, “Columbine” became a euphemism for a “school shooting.” In turn, the term “school shooting” became largely synonymous with acts of violence that most closely resembled Columbine, especially in terms of location and perpetrator.