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In the spring of 1999, two high school students shot and killed 12 of their schoolmates and one teacher in at Columbine High School just outside of Denver, Colorado in the U.S. Since that shooting there have been a number of other similar well-publicized shootings with the most recent being in a suburban Cleveland, Ohio school in March of this year. This paper will examine similarities in these shootings to try to determine what may have motivated these students to engage in such extreme behavior. Bullying, the availability of guns, the role of the shooters’ friends, parents and other influential adults, and the influence of media coverage are believed to be some of the factors in these incidents.
Keywords: school shooting, bullying, American availability of guns
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