At a school near Moscow in Ivanteevka, a teenager opened fire with a pneumatic weapon; children, frightened by the shooting, jumped out of the windows. Three children and a computer science teacher, who is in intensive care after being hit by a hammer, were injured.
At a school in Ivanteevka near Moscow, a 9A class student opened fire in the classroom with a traumatic pistol, TASS reports, citing a police source. School number 1, where the shooting occurred, was evacuated. “A police cordon was set up around the building, people in helmets took all the children from the school out into the street,” the agency’s interlocutor explained.
“Today, in one of the schools in the village of Ivanteevka, Moscow region, a student, born in 2002, scattered smoke bombs in the classroom and fired a shot from a pneumatic weapon. Four people were hospitalized,” the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported.
Pistol, axe, firecrackers
Hooliganism case
City Mayor Elena Kovaleva on Instagram wrote that there was no shooting at the school. "During the conflict, any shots, as well as the use firearms was not produced. There was a minor fire that was extinguished before fire crews arrived. At the same time, in order to prevent an emergency, children were evacuated,” she explained.
A pre-planned attack by two high school students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, on the rest of the students and staff at their school using small arms and improvised explosive devices, which occurred on April 20, 1999, Hitler's birthday. The terrorists turned out to be Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, students at the school. In terms of the number of victims, the tragedy at one time ranked third among massacres in educational institutions in the United States.
The first signs of aggression began to appear in 1996, when Eric Harris registered a personal website on the company server. By the end of the year, the site already contained instructions on how to harm others and make explosives, as well as stories about all the troubles caused by Harris and Klebold. In early 1997, the blog first began to show signs of Harris's growing anger towards the public.
Due to the low number of visitors, Harris's site did not cause alarm or concern until late 1997, when Dylan Klebold gave the address to Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris. On the website, the young man found numerous death threats directed at himself. Brown's mother contacted Jefferson County police multiple times, and Investigator Michael Guerra was aware of the site's existence.
Future terrorists filmed videos demonstrating their weapons. The recordings showed that the boys were preparing a plan to bomb the school to rival the Oklahoma City bombing. The diaries also contained ideas about escaping to Mexico, hijacking a plane from Denver International Airport and using it to blow up a building in New York.
Harris and Klebold planned the detonation of bombs in the school cafeteria at a time when there would be the largest number of people in it - several hundred. The optimal time for this was determined based on observations and notes made in advance. The attackers hoped that after the bombs in the cafeteria detonated, they would shoot the surviving students and teachers on their way out. Then, as ambulances, firefighters, police and journalists began arriving at the school, the bombs planted in the teenagers' cars were expected to go off and kill the people outside. However, the bombs in the school cafeteria and cars did not go off.
On the day of the tragedy, the boys met at Harris' car outside the school, took two 9-kilogram bombs (each based on a propane tank), after which they entered the school cafeteria a few minutes before the first lunch break and placed several bags of bombs there. When the bombs failed to explode, they began firing randomly, causing a brutal massacre in the library. After leaving the library, the young men headed to the area with offices. They looked into many classrooms through the glass and met the eyes of the students hiding in them, but did not try to break into them. According to witnesses, Hariss and Klebold's behavior seemed aimless. Students hiding in the cafeteria heard one of the attackers say: “Today the world will end. Today we will die."
A SWAT team and police quickly arrived at the scene, trying to evacuate and save the schoolchildren. Because of the gunfire that covered the evacuation, witnesses were unable to pinpoint when Harris and Klebold committed suicide.
It is worth noting that this shocking event gave rise to and inspired about 9 followers (for example, on April 16, 2007, 23-year-old South Korean student Cho Seung-hee opened fire with two pistols, first in a student dormitory and then in the academic building of the Virginia Tech, killing 32 and wounding 25 more people, the shooter committed suicide in one of the classrooms. In his farewell video, he mentioned “martyrs Eric and Dylan”)
School photo 
From CCTV cameras 
Suicide 
Funeral 
Dmitry Kurkin
Columbine High School massacre by two teenagers in April 1999, was not the first outbreak of violence in educational institutions (their countdown in the United States dates back to at least 1840). And yet, it was she who became a pop cultural phenomenon, references to which come up time after time when investigating similar incidents.
Over the course of nineteen years, the very word “Columbine” has become almost an official synonym for reprisals against classmates and/or teachers. A recent armed attack at a Permian school was almost immediately dubbed the “Permian Columbine,” as soon as it became clear that one of the attackers was keenly interested in the story of the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The incident at the Ivanteevka school, where a high school student, who called himself Mike Klebold on the Internet, injured a teacher, became “Columbine in Ivanteevka.” The attack at the Ulan-Ude school has not yet been linked to the events of nineteen years ago, but out of inertia it was also called the “Buryat Columbine”. The Russian media have already picked up the label and, it seems, have no intention of abandoning it.
Despite the fact that the original plan of Harris and Klebold, by and large, failed (otherwise there could have been many more victims), their followers from among the so-called Columbiners over and over again try to stage their actions, trying to imitate them in everything, including their choice clothes. Let’s figure out how it happened that two murderers acquired a romantic aura of people who “avenged everyone who was bullied at school,” and whether it is possible to fight the Columbiners as a destructive subculture.
Video games are to blame
The tragedy at Columbine shocked America: researchers note that the school massacre even displaced the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City (at that time the largest in US history), the second anniversary of which Harris and Klebold initially chose during the day for the attack.
In trying to assign blame, the public blamed it on industrial metal and (which by 1999 had finally become an all-American bogeyman), the film Natural Born Killers (which, strictly speaking, satirizes the media cult of Bonnie and Clyde) and “violent video games that promote violence.” (note that the realism of video games at that time was relatively low). When it became known that the psychiatrist who had been seeing Harris had prescribed him medication, some suspected that stopping the antidepressant could have caused the teenager to become violent, but the theory was not confirmed: an autopsy showed that Eric continued to take it.
Much more prosaic reasons - the anger of two teenagers, one of whom (Harris) complained of depression, anger and thoughts of suicide, and the second (Klebold) was bullied by classmates - became obvious within a year: after conducting a study of similar incidents, they found that two-thirds of these were related to bullying.
However, this explanation did not give the average person either a pointer to blame for the tragedy, or a simple answer to the question of how school shootings can be prevented in the future. As a result, the Columbine legend, fueled by the media and preserved by the Internet, took on a life of its own. Columbiners appeared.
The Cult of Dylan Klebold
It was only three years before Columbine exploded from provocative tabloid headlines into a sinister pop-culture phenomenon that put Harris and Klebold in the same league as serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. The tragedy formed the basis of “Elephant” by Gus Van Sant and the lesser-known “Zero Day” by Ben Coccio - both films were released in 2003 and became a kind of artistic reconstruction of “Columbine”. The documentary Bowling for Columbine, in which director Michael Moore focuses on the gun lobby that supports the free sale of firearms in the United States, won an Oscar. Direct references or indirect references to a mass shooting carried out by two teenagers in song lyrics have become commonplace. Columbine has become part of the city's folklore.
Generation X author Douglas Copeland, concerned that the Columbine story was giving far more attention to the killers than the victims, wrote Hey Nostradamus! trying to cope with . However, this attempt to shift the focus has changed little in the coverage of the story: its main characters in popular culture are still two teenagers who took up arms.
The core of the Columbiners who romanticized the crimes of Harris and Klebold were teenagers bullied by classmates or suffering from lack of attention. What is noteworthy is that thematic communities focused primarily on the figure of Klebold. “[They] admire Dylan, the tragic depressive boy, and the girls are just in love with him,” says journalist Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, calling attention to the discrepancy between the online myth and the nuances of the real story. - Although Eric was the leader at Columbine, and one would expect him to be more attractive, the cult of Dylan is much larger than the cult of Eric. Girls fall in love with him the same way grown women fall in love with drug addicts or alcoholics - believing that they will save his lost, suffering soul."
Cullen notes that columbiners are most often driven by a desire to shock their peers and an interest in research: “I’m sure that for most it’s a pose: when a teenager is not particularly successful in real life, he sees a way out in constructing a tough personality on the Internet. They pretend, but at the same time they believe that the others are saying this all seriously... It becomes scary when you realize that in 0.01% of such cases the conditional Adam Lanza may turn out to be (teenager who committed the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 - Ed.), who is really serious in his words. After all, he discussed Columbine with his peers - they responded with interest, which he regarded as support.”
It is still not difficult to find the killers' diaries and school surveillance videos that show what Klebold and Harris were wearing and how they acted on the day of the massacre. New incidents in Russian schools have once again fueled interest in the story: it is claimed that users have become five times more likely to use the hashtag #columbine.
Concerned social activists have already called on the Prosecutor General's Office to recognize “any mention” of Columbine as extremist, but this proposal does not seem to be either effective in essence or implementable in practice (see “Streisand effect”). Columbiner communities will most likely be purged from social networks in the coming months—VKontakte has already begun deleting the corresponding public pages—but there is no doubt that they will “overwinter” on the deep web and return to public access again.
"Top 10 Bloody Crimes"
“Columbine” may have become a household name because it immediately asked several painful questions regarding both the psychological climate in schools and modern ethics. How responsible is the media (in the broadest sense of the word) for the “glamorization” of mass murders and is it right to limit access to information about them? How to talk about particularly cruel crimes that go far beyond the ordinary, without falling into cheap sensationalism and savoring the grief of others? Is it possible to assume that selections of “the bloodiest massacres” encourage embittered and psychologically unstable people to try to break into the “top 10”? And is it possible to prevent the emergence of new columbiners by “banning the Internet”?
The tragedy at the Kerch college has already been reclassified from a terrorist attack to a mass murder. Probably, 22-year-old fourth-year student Vladislav Roslyakov admired his peers who went down in history as mass murderers. In 1999, at Columbine High School in Colorado, two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before committing suicide. It later turned out that the schoolchildren were practicing the “virtual” execution of their comrades on their home computers. Since then, cases of shooting of classmates in schools have become more frequent, and the Columbine shooters themselves have become idols for dozens of teenagers with an unbalanced psyche and access to weapons around the world, including in Russia.
Lev Bijakov, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold. Left - Perm, right - Columbine
Then no one attached any importance to the fact that a 15-year-old schoolboy from Ivanteevka near Moscow, Mikhail Pivnev, used the pseudonym Mike Klebold on social networks - an American-style name, and the surname of the shooter from the Columbine school. The teenager came to school No. 1 with firecrackers, an air gun and a cleaver. He burst into the computer science classroom and hit teacher Lyudmila Kalmykova on the head with a cleaver. Then, with the words “I came here to die” and “I’ve been waiting for this for three years,” he shot several times into the ceiling and into the head of the teacher lying on the floor.
Many of his classmates jumped out of second-floor windows and were injured from the fall. The teacher survived, and the teenager himself tried to commit suicide, but he was detained. Earlier on my page in social network On VKontakte, he mentioned Columbine School - and on April 20, 2017, he even wrote a post saying that he was sorry that he was not there.
At Virginia Tech, too, no one paid attention to the quiet and modest student from South Korea, Cho Seung-hee. Meanwhile, this 23-year-old student had long and carefully hatched a plan of attack and did not hide his admiration for the Columbine shooters.
He began the implementation of his diabolical plan from the hostel, where he opened fire with two pistols. Cho then ran into a training building, where he killed 32 people and wounded 25 more. The shooter then committed suicide, recording a farewell video in which he mentioned “martyrs Eric and Dylan.”
The police worked effectively in this city. Two 17-year-olds were arrested before the school was attacked. Ten rifles and pistols, about 20 “crude” explosive devices, camouflage uniforms, gas masks, walkie-talkies and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were seized from them.
William Cornell and Sean Sturtz also wrote suicide notes in which they wrote that they were inspired by the experiences of the Columbine shooters. The court sentenced Cornell to 20 years in prison and Sturtz to 15 years in prison.
When Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold roamed the school with guns, they periodically caught students and asked them if they believed in God. 16-year-old Jeffrey Weese did the same thing when he opened fire at his school in Red Lake, Minnesota.
He killed seven and wounded five people, and then, after being wounded by police, committed suicide. Before the attack, the “goth boy” (as his classmates called him) shot and killed his grandfather and his girlfriend.
Cedar Park (USA), January 2004
In Texas, two teenagers were arrested for preparing to recreate the Columbine-style massacre at their own high school. Christopher Levins, 17, and Adam Sinclair, 19, were charged with terrorism.
To hide their weapons, the couple planned to wear long coats, just like the Columbine killers did. Both boys said they had access to weapons.
Lovejoy (USA), December 2003
The 14-year-old was planning to block fire exits, raise the alarm and shoot panicking people. But he was detained in time and this diabolical plan was not allowed to come true.
He later admitted that he wanted to become famous just like the Columbine shooters. He didn't have a weapon, but planned to take his father's gun.
15-year-old Charles Williams did not have time to kill himself, or perhaps he simply did not have the courage, but during interrogation he admitted that he wanted to repeat the experience of the Columbine shooters.
A student entered Santana High School with two revolvers. He managed to kill two students, 13 more received gunshot wounds, but survived. Williams was sentenced to 50 years in prison.