I lived about two miles from Columbine High School and was student teaching at a middle school one suburb away from Littleton in Englewood, Colorado when the shooting occurred at Columbine. People talked about all the changes that were going to take place "thanks to Columbine". And that was the attitude, why let a tragedy go to waste.
Of course all the religious nut cases came out, one church put up fifteen crosses to memorialize the dead, one of the victims parents figured out that two of the crosses represented the killers and up cut them down.
A marylin Manson concert was cancelled, and bill Clinton was discouraged from visiting the state, everyone used the tragedy to further an agenda, Years later the parents of the victims were still fighting over what kind of memorial to put up. Interestingly it was Bill Clinton who stepped in and helped them raise enough money to build anything. But nothing changed.
Today one of the cheapest places to buy guns is the sports store in southwest plaza about a mile away from Columbine high school, and a couple of my friends that work at the school say the place is as sports obsessed as ever, and administrators take great pride in getting students that "don't belong" to transfer or drop out.
Some cultures are way to dysfunctional to learn from mistakes and I fear the U.S may be one of them.