Columbine High School could be torn down over 'morbid fascination'

Twenty years after the massacre at Columbine High School that claimed the lives of 13 students and teachers, the school district is considering tearing it down.

The 1999 attack sparked a movement of 'Columbiners', people obsessed with the shooting and the shooters, and also serves as an inspiration for other would-be school shooters.

Superintendent Jason Glass said the school has a "gravitational pull" for these sorts of individuals.

"Annually, local law enforcement and Jeffco's Department of School Safety make contacts with hundreds of individuals seeking to enter the school and reconnect with the 1999 murders," he wrote in an open letter to the Jefferson County community.

"Most of them are there to satisfy curiosity or a macabre, but harmless, interest in the school. For a small group of others, there is a potential intent to do harm."

Glass is now asking the community if the school should be torn down and a new one built near the current location.

"Today school safety experts recommend tearing down buildings where school shootings take place," he writes.

"Since the morbid fascination with Columbine has been increasing over the years, rather than dissipating, we believe it is time for our community to consider this option for the existing Columbine building."

However, the proposal has been met with mixed reactions from those who survived the attack.

"I hate it," Will Beck, a survivor, told CNN. "Even though something bad happened there, it is a special place to me. It'd be devastating to lose it."

"It's not right," Josh Lapp another survivor, told NPR. "This community has had to deal with enough of a burden, to ask them to pay for this new construction isn't fair, just because of what the shooters did."

But Frank DeAngelis, the principal at Columbine at the time of the shooting, approves of the idea.

"I am in full support of building a new facility. It is the people that make us a family, not the building," he said on Facebook.

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