Mass and the films trying to make sense of senseless violence

..."On 20 April 1999 18-year-old Eric Harris and 17-year-old Dylan Klebold walked into their high school in Columbine, Colorado and, with one act of violence, changed America forever. Harris and Klebold's plan, which they had been working on for over a year, was to set off homemade bombs, but when those failed to detonate they instead walked through the halls and used the four guns they'd acquired to injure 24 people and kill 13 more before taking their own lives.

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The scale of the incident, plus the fact that it occurred just at the beginning of a new era of rolling news, meant the world looked on, gripped in horror. The police, unable to figure out how to handle it, took hours to enter the school and much of the massacre unfolded live on television. Reporters spoke to students on air, while they were still barricaded in their classrooms. Then, just as soon as the incident was over, the debate about what happened, and why it happened, began – one that continues to this day. Was the root cause of Harris and Klebold's actions the easy accessibility of guns in the US, the bullying they had allegedly been subject to, or the violent videogames they played – or was it that they were psychopaths, as some experts subsequently concluded about Harris, at least? Harris and Klebold left behind preparation videos and manifestos to be pored over by those searching for an explanation, or a way to prevent such an atrocity happening again. But in the years since Columbine, there has been a continuous stream of mass shootings, at schools and elsewhere; 298 schools in America have now experienced shootings since Columbine, leaving hundreds dead and many more injured."...