They recall that a shooting took place at a school, that lives were lost, that the shooter was female, and that by way of explanation for her actions she said "I don't like Mondays," but some have her as a high school student gunning down students at her own school, while others remember her as a high school teacher who turned a gun on some of her pupils: Of course fallible memory being what it is, people who now remember the shooting spree behind the song recall it in only the most haphazard of fashions. Of all the pre-Littleton school shootings, the one most remembered by people at the time was recalled primarily because of its impact on pop culture: it inspired the popular Boomtown Rats song "I Don't Like Mondays." Released in October 1979, this song captured the insanity of the moment by working the shooter's chilling utterance into its lyrics:
Poulin had earlier raped and stabbed a 17-year-old friend to death. Pius X High School, killing one student and wounding five others before turning the gun on himself. One of the earliest mass school shootings occurred in 1975 in Ottawa, Canada, when on 27 October of that year, 18-year-old Robert Poulin went on a killing spree at St. Deadly shooting sprees at schools perpetrated by troubled teens took place at least as much as a generation before Columbine. That today's death tolls are higher and the media coverage surrounding them more intense might serve to encourage belief that this sort of random murder by, and of, young people is a recent phenomenon, but the sad history of such attacks belies that belief.
Horrifying events like the April 1999 killing of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, by two of their classmates might have left some believing deadly school shootings were a new ill bestowed upon us by a society only recently gone mad, yet that was not the case.
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