A Father at Columbine High
By Dale Anema

On a business trip to Trinidad, Colorado, I’m driving to the local Pizza Hut a few minutes after noon, when suddenly the radio’s regular programming is interrupted by a news bulletin: Two or three gunmen with hand grenades and/or pipe bombs are attacking Columbine High School—where my son Nathan attends.

I pull over and call my wife, Roxane, on a payphone. She’s already heard from most of Nathan’s friends, but not from Nathan. One friend, Tyler, says Nathan was in the crowd ahead of him running out of the cafeteria. Tyler says the kid next to him was shot and went down, and a bullet whizzed by his head. He’s sure Nathan got out, but hasn’t seen him since.

Roxane and I frantically call all of Nathan’s close friends. No one except Tyler has seen him since the gunfire erupted. Roxane rushes in the car to the three locations where they’re holding the kids who’ve escaped so far. Nathan is nowhere to be found. The news says the shooters are targeting minorities and athletes. Nathan, though only a freshmen, is in very good shape and obviously an athlete. We’re frantic. I don’t want to be away from the phone and television for the three-hour drive home. The minutes seem like hours. By 1:15 we are sure Nathan is in the building.

Just this morning I was thinking how lucky I am that both the kids are getting As, are superior athletes, and are very sweet and caring. Suddenly their grades and athletic prowess seem totally meaningless. I think of the times when Nathan, as young as three, defended friends against older bullies. I pray Nathan hasn’t done something stupid. I have often joked with him that no one can run faster than a bullet. I hope he remembers that.

I pray for the best but accept the reality that there is a good chance Nathan is dead. Recently I’ve worried about his having to go to a protracted war in Yugoslavia, but maybe he was gunned down in school. What would I do? He is far better than I deserve, and now he may be gone.

Judy Shipman, our next-door neighbor, has come over to coordinate the calls. Roxane and I are still phoning everyone we can think of, but we’re beginning to lose hope. The television is reporting many bodies in the school. I bark at Roxane that she should revisit the holding sites and drive around the police lines to see if Nathan is there observing things. I call back a few minutes later and talk to Judy. She says Nathan is very considerate and would have called home if he could. I both love her and hate her for saying that.

Each of the past five summers Nathan and I have climbed two or three 14,000-foot peaks. I’m wondering if he’d like to have his ashes scattered over one of them. I pray I’ll be able to carry on for his mother and sister.

Nathan has his learners permit and a few weeks ago he was driving to a soccer game. I was in the passenger seat and two of his teammates were in the back, chattering away with him. I wanted to be one of the guys and thought hard for something interesting to say. Waiting until a lull in the conversation, I repeated something amusing I’d heard on Paul Harvey. His friends ignored me and talked loudly, but Nathan said, "Hey guys, listen; this is really funny." I repeated the joke and they all laughed. Now who will listen to see if I have anything worth hearing?

Just after 3:00, I am watching the news. A telephoto shot from a helicopter shows the latest group of students a SWAT team is leading from the building. The figures are about the size of bees, but one seems to run like Nathan and has a red backpack like his. I go limp. The figures are too small to tell anything. The phone rings; it’s Roxane. She’s been watching a channel with a closer view of the kids—it was definitely Nathan!

Praise the Lord! I feel heartsick for the parents of the deceased, but my son is alive! I run down the motel walkway to tell a guy I hardly know that my son is alive, he was in Columbine High School but is alive and well! The guy has been watching a movie and at first doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t care: I have to tell somebody.

Nathan calls Roxane 20 minutes later from a holding area. She says he is very calm. The police keep him for two and a half more hours, questioning him and making him write down everything he saw.

I talk to him for about an hour as soon as he gets home. He gives an account of what he saw in a calm, precise manner. Roxane and I decide it would be best for him to spend as much time as possible with his school friends for the next several days. He spends that night and the next day with several of his closest pals.

The next week Nathan spends mornings and nights with different groups of friends and the afternoons with us. His friends’ parents agree that the kids need to spend as much time together as they want. Trying not to impose my prejudice against therapists, I ask Nathan a couple of times if he’d like to have counseling sessions. He looks askance and says, "Thank you, but I think that would do much more harm than good."

Before the shootings, Nathan would joke around when I hug him and pull away from me after a few seconds. These days he eagerly hugs back. If he doesn’t know exactly where his mom or sister are, he anxiously asks, "Where’s Mom?" "Where’s Paige?"

The community is in shock. Families and neighbors huddle together and, in my neighborhood at least, avoid the media events as much as possible. Everyone has some connection with a least one victim. Dazed, we talk to each other in low tones on the sidewalk or at the store. Sympathy for the victims’ families floods us, but everyone is dumbfounded by the actions of the police. Why did they wait three and a half hours to get the kids out? Why did they leave the wounded teacher, Dave Sanders, the only real hero during the assault, inside to die while they got the kids out? The more we learn, the more incredulous we become. This is a neighborhood of conservatives, staunch supporters of law enforcement, but everyone I talk to is stunned by the indifference or incompetence of our supposed protectors.

The Columbine High School district is entirely in unincorporated Jefferson County. Some of us now wonder if we should have incorporated into a city government. Perhaps a city police department would be better defenders than a county sheriff’s office? But we quickly dismiss the thought: There were police and SWAT teams from several area forces. One was as bad as the other. In fact, the SWAT teams are now referred to as SQUAT teams. Giving the police every benefit of doubt, we can find no Braveheart in the bunch.

Everyone I talk to also finds the media hype contemptible. There are constant interviews with Wellington Webb, the mayor of Denver, and with the mayor of Littleton. What do they have to do with anything? The attempts by some reporters to wheedle the kids and the victims’ parents into calling for more counselors or more gun control are particularly despicable.

Two pending gun bills are immediately dropped by the Colorado legislature. One is a proposal to make it easier for law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons; the other is a measure to prohibit municipalities from suing gun manufacturers. I wonder: If two crazy hoodlums can walk into a "gun-free" zone full of our kids, and the police are totally incapable of defending the children, why would anyone want to make it harder for law-abiding adults to defend themselves and others?

The cultural elite is using our own tragedy to thrash us soundly. Televisions and newspapers echo with the causes of the carnage, all failures of us Colorodans: Lack of gun control, insufficient number of mental health workers, meanness of jocks. The cultural elite sense this is a golden opportunity, much like the Oklahoma City bombing. They now have the upper hand and can whittle away at the First and Second Amendments. After all, if they could control the content of movies and video games, they could better brainwash our youth. And if all kids had to periodically see government mental health workers, think what influence they would have! Not to mention that the elites, or at least many of their friends, would have a lot more well-paying government jobs.

And so the choruses of trendy ideas ring out: Gun rights are indefensible in the wake of slaughter. Promoting athletics in schools is archaic; it increases testosterone, adrenaline, and self-confidence, making jocks more independent and less likely to submit to community goals. Besides, it’s unfair that some kids are naturally more athletic than others. (The shooters are said to be targeting athletes and minorities, but the media utterly separate those groups: The minorities are lambs, the athletes, goats.)

The social conservatives have been typically silent in response. The National Rifle Association is successfully browbeaten into shortening their annual convention in Denver to one day. Of course, nobody on TV mentions that perhaps gun-free zones are potential magnets to crazed killers, or that concealed-carry laws have invariably lowered crime rates everywhere they’ve been tried. Or that earlier school shootings have in fact been stopped by armed citizens, long before police arrived. [see John Lott’s "How to Stop Mass Shootings," July/August 1998—Ed.]

I don’t hear any call for private groups to organize national boycotts of companies that produce and advertise smut and senseless violence; only governmental solutions are being suggested. Even some conservative leaders seem to think all efforts must come from the federal government, which bans even the mention of God in our schools, passes out condoms to our kids, and refuses to enforce existing gun laws. Certainly no one has voiced the possibility that shooter Eric Harris’s watching the nightly bombing of Yugoslavia might have added to his aggression.

Other undiscussed angles on the horror: A psychiatrist prescribed an anti-depressant for Harris. Did the drug or withdrawal from it increase Harris’s sense of isolation or anger? Could a mental health worker have played some part in this carnage? On the other hand, do athletic programs perhaps increase self-reliance and camaraderie, and offer incentives to do better academically? Apparently this is not the time to talk about such possibilities.

My neighbors and I feel the shooters’ parents were unbelievably negligent, but most of our comments place much blame on government actions: banning prayer and the Ten Commandments in schools, having a President devoid of morality, no parental choice or control of schools, prohibitions on expulsions of bad kids, incompetence and indifference by the police and school administrators in dealing with the would-be killers.

We’re all very careful not to discuss our views of the police in front of the kids, so as not to make them more fearful. A bogus copycat e-mail is circulating, warning there will be more carnage at Chatfield High School where the Columbine students are to finish the school year. Nathan is a bit leery. I tell him because of what happened it will be the safest school in the world. He laughs nervously and says, "Yeah, right. The cops couldn’t keep armed kindergartners out of the building."

Our daughter Paige is in sixth grade at a charter school. Since that fateful Tuesday she has been badgering Roxane to home-school her next year. She’s scared of some very disruptive kids in her class whom the school is not legally permitted to expel. We haven’t made a final decision, but are leaning toward granting her request.

I hear one commentator say, "Well, the people of Littleton have a different view of guns now." I don’t know what the people of Littleton think, but the people in my neighborhood think that overbearing government controls are the problem, not part of the solution. The contempt my family feels for the posturing of President Clinton and Vice-President Gore is vehemently echoed by many. Even some of my most moderate neighbors are livid.

The media parades one psychological expert after another saying the shooters were as much victims as anyone—they were bullied and just snapped. Somehow these experts are also transferring the racism of the shooters onto the entire student body, which dared to "ostracize" the murderers. This really upsets Nathan. Roxane, the most easygoing person I know, is beside herself: The shooters were neo-Nazis at best. They chose to be different. They were largely ignored by their classmates because they were hateful racists who created their own weird subculture, which had no appeal to normal kids.

Nathan and his friends seem to be doing fine. They are very sad over their fallen comrades and talk with surprising openness about how their friends’ deaths won’t be forgotten, how the memory of their friends will make them strive harder to make a positive difference in the world.

All of our lives have been disrupted by the actions of two very sick hoodlums, the incompetence of local government, and intrusive, mindless babble from outside politicians, analysts, and reporters. Our little cul-de-sac has been very tight knit since we moved in 11 years ago, but nothing like the way it is now. We’re under siege in many ways. The gentleness shared is impossible to describe—we love each other for our tears. The deaths of the children won’t be for naught; at least not on our block.

Dale Anema is a businessman who travels the West from his home in Colorado.