Word: littleton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sure it can. It can even happen in Littleton, a town of 35,000 near the dusty-tan foothills of the Rockies, just southwest of Denver. It was once a small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog. Now it's a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don't lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses, houses than run anywhere from $75,000 to $5 million or so. There's an arch...
Dylan Klebold was said to be the weaker spirit of the two: quiet, reserved, looking for a leader, which he found in Eric Harris when the Harrises moved to Littleton from Plattsburgh, N.Y. Klebold's father Thomas is a former geophysicist who launched a mortgage-management business from his home. His mother Susan worked with blind and disabled kids at the local community college. They lived in a modern wood-and-glass home tucked under a stunning outcropping of red rocks in an area called Deer Creek Canyon. On the day before the shooting, neighbors of the Harrises saw Klebold...
...first day in Columbine history that it was dangerous to be a jock--and that kind of humiliation may have been just what the killers had in mind. Video games and the easy availability of guns may have contributed to the Littleton horror. But what role did the ingrained cliquishness of American high schools play? Part of the story is old: the embittered outcasts against the popular kids on campus. But what kind of new conflagrations should we expect if the Revenge of the Nerds can now be played out to the firing of semiautomatics...
Sift through teen movies of the past 10 years, and you could create a hindsight game plan for Littleton. Peruse Heathers (1989), in which a charming sociopath engineers the death of jocks and princesses. Study carefully, as one of the Columbine murderers reportedly did, Natural Born Killers (1994), in which two crazy kids cut a carnage swath through the Southwest as the media ferociously dog their trail. Sample The Basketball Diaries (1995), in which druggy high schooler Leonardo DiCaprio daydreams of strutting into his homeroom in a long black coat and gunning down his hated teacher and half the kids...
...Littleton's wake, the culture industry has gone cautious. CBS pulled an episode of Promised Land because of a plot about a shooting in front of a Denver school. The WB has postponed a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode with a schoolyard-massacre motif. Movie-studio honchos, who furiously resist labeling some serious adult films FOR ADULTS ONLY, went mum last week when asked to comment on any connection between violent movies and violent teen behavior. That leaves us to explain things...