Columbine influenced dozens of school shooters over the last 25 years

References in journals, names of the Columbine shooters etched on guns, matching t-shirts, music playlists, and nicknames are just some of the lasting impacts.

Columbine was not the first school shooting, it was not the deadliest school shooting, and other students in trench coats fired guns inside classrooms during attacks dating back to 1983.

Unlike more than two hundred other planned attacks at k-12 schools since 1966, Columbine is the most influential school shooting. The “lessons learned” (or not learned) from Columbine have changed how police respond and how school officials try to prevent the next attack. For teens plotting a shooting on the dark corners of the internet, Columbine is the most notorious plot to mimic.

'We Really Botched Columbine': How the Media Has Erred on School Shootings

The shooting at Columbine High happened just as cable packages with 24/7 news stations became popular and common in many homes. A slow news cycle combined with a local news outlets who had helicopters over the school within minutes provided hours of coverage during the afternoon into evening primetime viewing on the East Coast.

20 years after the attack, Esquire looked back at what went wrong with the media coverage:

"We really botched Columbine," says Dave Cullen, author of Columbine and Parkland: Birth of a Movement. "I mean, to the point where now 99 percent of America thinks Columbine was all about two loner outcasts from the Trench Coat Mafia, who were bullied relentlessly, went on a revenge fantasy to punish jocks and stand up for the outsider and the little guy. Every single bit of that is nonsense."

Cullen attributes this to the rampant speculation that adorned the wall-to-wall coverage, seeping over into the public consciousness until it solidified into rock.

"I went to the CNN transcript over the first four hours, and that was just stunning," he says. "We went from questions—from anchors and interviewers saying, 'Do you know anything about these boys?', to the next half hour or hour, it was 'You know, we're hearing they're loners and they're outcasts.' To, you know, 'It seems like they were loners and outcasts.' To then just stating a fact on air: they were loners and outcasts.

The greatest irony in all of this coverage is that Columbine was not even planned as a shooting, it was going to be a bigger bombing than Oklahoma City (I wrote about this five years ago). When the bombs didn’t go off, the two attackers wandered around the building looking for victims.

Crime scene photos of IEDs, gas cans, and propane tanks found inside Columbine

It’s also important to realize that Columbine wasn’t the first school shooting. There has been planned attacks at schools almost every year since 1966. More than 20 students were shot in Stockton, CA in 1989 and Jonesboro, AR in 1998.

In 1983, a student at Boylan Central Catholic High in Rockford, IL pulled a gun from his trench coat and shot his teacher in front of the class. He told other students he was planning the shooting, but nobody took him seriously. This is the first case I’ve found of a trench coat clad attacker inside a k-12 school, and it happened 16 years before Columbine.

At East Carter High in Grayson, KY in 1993, a student planned a school shooting and took 21 classmates hostage after reading Stephen King’s book “Rage” (written under the name ‘Richard Bachman’) that detailed a fictional school shooting.

After a kid at Frontier Middle in Moses Lake, WA read Rage and then shot his teacher and three classmates, the book was pulled from the shelves. Copies of the original print from 1985 are selling for $60-8000 on eBay depending on condition. Stephen King writing a book about school shootings in 1985 shows how pervasive they were in mainstream culture decades before “everything changed” in April 1999.

3 school shootings that lead up to Columbine

During the two-year period before the Columbine shooting in 1999, three school shooters wore black trench coats during high profile attacks.

Date: October 01, 1997

School: Pearl High School, Pearl, MS

Location: Hallway

Time Period: Morning Classes

Summary: Killed mother, stole her car, and drove to school with rifle. Wore trench coat to conceal the rifle while walking into school. Shot ex-girlfriend, her friend, and then random students.

Date: March 24, 1998

School: Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, AR

Location: Field (General)

Time Period: Afternoon Classes

Summary: Planned attack by two students (12-years-old and 13-years-old). Shot students exiting the school after pulling the fire alarm and then fled in stolen vehicle.

Date: May 21, 1998

School: Thurston High School, Springfield, OR

Location: Cafeteria

Time Period: Before School

Summary: Wore a trench coat to the school hiding a rifle and 2 pistols. Fired 51 rounds (had 1100 rounds total with him) into the crowded cafeteria before being tackled by multiple injured students.

23 school shootings (not comprehensive list) after Columbine with direct connections:

Date: May 20, 1999

School: Heritage High School, Conyers, GA

Location: Hallway

Time Period: Morning Classes

Summary: Shooter used a .22 rifle to fire in a crowded common area of the school before classes started. Shooter was tackled by the principal and began crying. Shooter had been a good student but his grades had dropped. Other students were worried about him. He was obsessed with Columbine and talked about wanting to shoot up the school.