easy way for someone to buy guns without any records. And that’s what they used. That’s the point. They could so easily get them at the gun show.” For Principal DeAngelis, a neutral stance on guns might be part of surviving what could have been a career-ending disaster.
“I think that Frank says, ‘Well, there’s different points of view,’ because he has to. Anybody who’s in a public position has to be so concerned about how they address the gun issue because the gun lobby is so powerful in this country, and they punish people who step out of line,” says Mauser. “So, if Frank DeAngelis suddenly became a gun-control advocate, I think his job would be at risk. Seriously. How dare you? This isn’t about guns, and you shouldn’t be going there.” We met for breakfast at La Peep, a diner-style restaurant not far from the high school, which was crammed with Saturday morning patrons. Mauser is a Pittsburgh native who made his way to Colorado long ago, married Linda, and raised Daniel and his younger sister. A year after Daniel’s death, they adopted a baby girl from China. Tom works for the state Department of Transportation, where he developed a stand-up persona for all the public presentations he does related to his job. Sort of a wry, Bob Neuhart–style humor with a quirky slide show. “It’s all about timing,” he explains. “You say something about how important safety is, and then click on a picture of a highway worker in a full suit of armor, with the cones next to him and holding a ‘slow’ sign. Things like that.” After Daniel’s death, Tom found a new public persona, speaking out about guns, and he wasn’t kidding around anymore. He’d supported gun control before Columbine, and that year for the first time he’d become active. He wrote letters to his state legislator opposing pro-gun measures, like the concealed weapons bill, in the statehouse. Then came what he calls “an omen.” Shortly before the attack, Daniel was doing research on gun laws for his debate team and talked to Tom about the loophole in the Brady Law—the very one that Harris and Klebold exploited to obtain guns from the gun show. For a grieving father, Daniel’s senseless death was a call to arms for full-throttle activism on gun control.
“What really primed me was the fact that those laws were being promoted,” he says. “On the day of Columbine, the governor of Colorado came to the school and I confronted him. I said, ‘Hey, Governor, here you were promoting these gun laws.’ He said, ‘This isn’t the appropriate time for this.’ He didn’t know I was a victim at that point. But in particular, I was watching a little of the news coverage of Columbine afterwards. I was hearing some of the things that were said, and it was just flabbergasting. ‘If teachers had been armed, this wouldn’t have happened.’” Then, ten days later, Tom’s friend Margie called to say the National Rifle Association was coming to Denver for its national convention. The gun lobby shortened its convention to a one-day event for board business and a few other festivities, eliminating the massive gun show that was the popular draw. But a lot of people, including Denver’s mayor, thought it shouldn’t happen in light of Columbine. Did Tom want to go and speak? Linda was supportive but concerned because it was so soon after the tragedy. It would be Tom’s first time publicly talking about his son’s death and his first public speaking experience outside of work. “When I spoke that day to the crowd, I said, ‘I’m not arguing like many of you that they shouldn’t be here,” he says. “My message was why did they feel the need to cut back on any of it? If they didn’t feel any responsibility for what happened at Columbine, why should they cut the convention at all? I don’t believe they did it out of respect. They did it to save themselves because it would have been extremely embarrassing to have that gun show, that bravado and all those assault weapons, those gun clips. They knew damn well the media would have been there focusing on it.”
Unfortunately, media attention to the issue of guns in school shootings has been sporadic and shallow. Lurid descriptions of the Columbine aftermath and photos of Harris and Klebold dead in the school library, guns nearby, reflect the sensationalized coverage that drove so much news of the tragedy. Several articles did little more than mention the Colorado pro-gun laws being considered and the topic of gun availability in general. A deeper look provides a perspective on school shootings and violence that makes guns more integral to the discussion. First is the question of where the guns come from. Although Harris and Klebold got their firearms directly and indirectly through a poorly regulated marketplace, the single most common source of guns used by students in a school shooting is their home. The second-greatest source is from a relative or friend. The 1998 Jonesboro incident is a good example: two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, shot and killed four students and a teacher at their middle school with rifles they took from a grandfather’s gun cabinet. An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of all the gun-related deaths at schools between 1992 and 1999 found that 123 students used 128 guns to commit violence at school, with 48 of those guns taken from home and 30 from a friend or relative. And not all the gun violence at school is homicidal. While 85 students shot and killed others, 33 used a gun to commit suicide. Five students, including Harris and Klebold, committed homicide and then suicide.11
Suicide is virtually absent from discussions of school violence, and that couldn’t be clearer than with Columbine. Harris and Klebold were suicidal teens whose anger and depression was directed at their school, classmates, and the world—and themselves. Columbine wasn’t simply a horrendous school shooting. It was a multiple homicide-suicide, a not uncommon form of rage killing by adults. But to consider the suicides of Harris and Klebold requires granting them some humanity, acknowledging that despair drove them to end their lives before they’d even really begun. It is easier, perhaps, to think of them as evil and lacking in any humanity. And it is easier to ignore the issue of suicide, especially among young people. In Colorado in 1999, the suicide rate was 14.4 per 100,000 people, compared to a national rate of 10.6. Colorado’s suicide rate is among the highest in the country, and Jefferson County is one of four Denver-area counties with the highest number of suicide deaths. Guns are used in 52 percent of all suicides.12 Nationally, suicide is among the top three causes of death for those aged thirteen to nineteen, claiming about four lives every day—or 1,460 lives every year. For added perspective on the real scope of school deaths, consider this: nationally during the 2006–2007 school year, there were three student suicides on school grounds, compared to two student-on-student shooting fatalities and two stabbing deaths, according to the National Center for School Safety.
Temporarily chastened by the national spotlight on Columbine, the Colorado legislature tabled two gun-rights bills, but they were revived the next session. In 2000, Tom Mauser took a one-year leave from his state job to work as a full-time lobbyist for SAFE (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic) Colorado, where he fought against the pro-gun bills and for a law to close the gun-show loophole in the Brady Law. But legislators were weak-kneed and the NRA’s clout was strong, and tougher control measures foundered. So SAFE Colorado took a new tack, to put before voters in the November 2000 election a ballot initiative to close the loophole. It was an overwhelming success despite the NRA’s well-funded campaign to defeat Amendment 22, as it was known, which passed with 70 percent of the votes. “When someone says, ‘Well, if this law had been in effect, would it have prevented what happened?’ We will never know,” Mauser says. “I believe there is a chance if that law was in effect and Robyn Anderson couldn’t get the guns so easily, that she would have said, ‘No, I can’t do this.’ They [Harris and Klebold] would have gone to somebody else. Sure. But maybe that next person would have said, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here. I better talk to somebody about this.”
Mauser still speaks out on gun control and lobbies for safer gun laws as president of Colorado Cease Fire. Their push now is for a CAP law—child access prevention—to hold adult gun owners responsible if children shoot others or themselves with their firearms. “I’ve seen too many cases where kids have gotten access to guns, especially in accidental shooting cases—not so much school shootings—and the parents don’t get charged,” Mauser says. “A gun under the mattress, a gun in the nightstand, and the parent says, ‘I told him to get it.’ We’re charging a child for God’s sake, and we don’t charge the parent.” Mauser’s group made suicide prevention a big focus of the bill in 2008, and hoped to find allies among groups doing such work. Instead, they waded into taboo territory. “Nobody wants to talk about suicide. In fact,
