Can the Cycle Be Broken?

From Columbine to Evergreen, the persistence of school shootings reveals a cultural contagion we have yet to confront.

Nine Minutes in Evergreen

Nine minutes. That doesn’t sound like a long time.  It’s long enough to brew a pot of coffee or scroll a through a few social media posts. But inside Evergreen High School, nine minutes stretched into an eternity. For the kids huddled behind locked doors, the sound of those shots would have been frightening and disorienting.  Ask anyone who’s ever been in a firefight: time bends, minutes stretch, and seconds drag.  For those children, those nine minutes will never be forgotten.

Time as the Real Weapon

Because firearms have become a political hot button, people and the mainstream media often fixate on the weapon. But Evergreen shows how time itself is just as lethal. A revolver is slow to reload compared to a semi-automatic rifle, yet even that window was enough to wound two classmates and terrorize hundreds more. In that short span, the shooter let off about twenty rounds, which implies he reloaded his revolver. So, nine minutes proved that time, not just firepower, can decide the scale of a catastrophe.

Revolver vs. AR-15

The revolver used by the shooter is the kind of gun many consider old-fashioned or even obsolete. Yet it was small enough to conceal in a backpack and simple enough for a teenager to operate.

Contrast that with the Blackstone/NFL shooter, who carried an AR-15, loud, powerful, and politically polarizing. One gun is associated with the mythology of the Old West, the other with modern battlefields. Like other veterans, I carried the AR platform in combat, and I know the damage its rounds can do to the human body: But in Evergreen, a revolver was enough to leave two kids critically injured, the shooter deceased, and classrooms full of kids hiding in fear.

There’s a lesson here. A revolver hidden in a backpack can be almost as lethal as a rifle slung across a chest. The difference in firepower didn’t change the outcome for the kids forced to hide and pray. 

Columbine’s Cultural Contagion

Evergreen High School is only 20 miles from Columbine High School, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 people in 1999. More than twenty-five years later, the violence of that day still resonates across the country. While Columbine was not the start of our school shooting problem, it marks the moment they became a recurring national tragedy, one that continues to inspire copycats to this day.

That contagion spreads in different ways, really. For some, it is the pursuit of notoriety, young shooters who imagine themselves joining a strange and grim hall of fame. For others, it is tactical emulation, following a script written by previous shooters, and the fascination with weapons.  And for all of us, it is the slow normalization of something that once seemed unthinkable, kids crouched behind desks while a psychopath maneuvers through the school hallways looking for victims.

Evergreen High School was not Columbine High School, but it grew out of the same soil. Until that contagion is confronted, through better threat assessment, stronger community vigilance, and a reckoning with the culture of notoriety, each new attack becomes part of the lineage, not an anomaly. Sadly, for kids across the country, the Evergreen High School tragedy is proof that the cycle will happen somewhere else in America.

The Cycle That Will Not Break

Unfortunately, Evergreen High School now joins a grim roster of names, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde; places that should have been remembered for ordinary school days with laughing children but instead became shorthand for tragedy.

What Evergreen reveals is not a new story, but the persistence of an old one. The weapon changes, the setting changes, but the pattern repeats. As a former soldier, federal agent, and now a consultant, I have spent a career planning for and defending against violence. Those experiences have made one reality clear: opportunity and intent are what transform a weapon into a massacre, and unless we address the cultural contagion that feeds them, the Evergreen High School tragedy will happen again.