The tyranny of Columbine 25 years ago, America handed evil a gun

The 25 years since the Columbine massacre have given us many occasions — other massacres, alas — to invoke it. But this repetition has had the strange effect of dimming and narrowing our sense of what “Columbine” was in its details. From reading up on the tragedy in recent weeks, I learned that my own sense of Columbine had dimmed and narrowed very much over those 25 years. For me, “Columbine” had become a sort of placeholder, a vague signifier for the few things it has in common with all...