Frank DeAngelis was principal during one of the worst school shootings in US history and stayed on until 2014 – why doesn’t he campaign for gun control?

Over the past 20 years Frank DeAngelis has learned to be respectful of the month of April. His anxiety levels spike at this time of year, sometimes so badly he fears he is having a heart attack.

He has had no fewer than six car crashes, always in April. That’s not counting the three times, also in April, when he backed his vehicle out of his garage without having opened the garage door.

“That’s when I knew I needed help,” he said.

DeAngelis remembers 20 April 1999 as a beautiful spring day. The principal of Columbine high school in suburban Denver, Colorado, he was working in his office at 11.19am when his assistant burst in reporting gunfire in the building.

“I assumed it was a prank,” he said. “Someone has a paintball gun or firecrackers – never in my life did I think it would be a school shooting.” He rushed out of his office and realized within seconds that this was anything but a prank.

A teenager was walking towards him armed with a carbine and a pump-action shotgun. One of the worst gun massacres in US history, the event that is widely seen as initiating the modern era of school-shootings, was underway and coming right at him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inscriptions at the Columbine memorial in Littleton, Colorado. Photograph: Benjamin Rasmussen/The Guardian

On Saturday, DeAngelis will be called upon to relive those terrifying moments, as he has every year now for two decades. Having stayed on in the job as Columbine’s principal through the traumatic aftermath of the shooting until he retired in 2014, he will lead the 20th anniversary commemorations in front of 1,000 students who were present on that awful morning as well as scores of first responders who were also at the scene.

DeAngelis will conclude the services at the Columbine memorial by doing what he has made a point of doing every year: he will read out the names of those he calls the “beloved thirteen”. They include his very good friend, teacher Dave Sanders, as well as 12 students who died in the killing spree.

To mark the occasion, DeAngelis has written a book recounting the long road towards healing that has been travelled by himself, by the families of those who died and the 21 people injured in the shooting, as well as by the Columbine community of teachers and students. They Call Me Mr De: The Story of Columbine’s Heart, Resilience and Recovery reads like a self-help manual for how to cope in the wake of a gun rampage.

It tells the story of his personal journey as he grappled with trauma of what happened that day. Not only did one of the two shooters come towards DeAngelis that morning, he actually opened fire, shattering glass behind the principal’s head. DeAngelis’ life was only spared when the shooter was distracted by Sanders, who drew his attention and was shot and killed instead.

DeAngelis said he still suffers from survivor’s guilt over that. “It’s been difficult to live with that knowledge: if Dave Sanders hadn’t come along I wouldn’t be here.”

The first few times he re-entered the school building, just weeks after the shooting, DeAngelis had intense flashbacks. “Each time I walked in the hallway I could see the gunman coming towards me. I saw the kid whose face was blown off who I had to identify.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students being led from Columbine high school in Littleton, Colorado, on 20 April 1999. Photograph: Rodolfo Gonzales/AP

With the help of his counselor, he came to appreciate that the antidote for such horror was to supplant the images in his mind’s eye with positive thoughts about each of the fallen students. He would conjure up a memory of Lauren Townsend playing volleyball, of Rachel Scott on stage, of Isaiah Shoels high-fiving him.

“Instead of mourning their deaths, I began celebrating them. Now I wasn’t seeing the kids dying, I was envisioning them living their lives.”

The book contains several poignant details about how he and his colleagues dealt with the fallout of the shooting.

He turned to counseling and encouraged others to do so, at a time when therapy was considered for wimps.

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He dealt with the distorted media coverage in which the two gunmen, themselves students at the school, were widely portrayed to be misunderstood outcasts lashing out against the bullying they had suffered under the jock culture prevalent at Columbine.

It was a completely false narrative, one that Dave Cullen, the author of the definitive account of the massacre, Columbine, has said had the highly damaging effect of glorifying the shooters and helping to spawn copycat attacks that to some extent still replicate today.

“Athletes at school were getting heat for being jocks, and that was hard to push back on. Staff would come to me and say people are making up lies about us. It was all untrue – the shooters left behind accounts of their motives and they never mentioned bullying in any of them,” DeAngelis said.

Much of the book is devoted to discussing ways in which school security has been improved in the wake of Columbine. In 1999 there was no such thing as a rapid response to active shooter incidents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Frank DeAngelis baseball field at Columbine high in Littleton, Colorado. Photograph: Benjamin Rasmussen/The Guardian

Astoundingly, it took the local Swat team four hours to reach the two killers, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, in the school library, by which time they had already been dead – having killed themselves – for more than three hours.

Nowadays, Swat teams engage gunmen within seconds. DeAngelis records the change approvingly, noting that his name is attached to the Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety – an elementary school that has been converted into a training institute where police, firefighters and paramedics can simulate mass shootings.

There is something peculiarly compliant about DeAngelis’ way of looking at the post-Columbine world. His focus is almost exclusively on how to reduce the bloodletting, very little on how actually to put a stop to it.

Of the 235 pages of DeAngelis’ book, only seven discuss the issue of gun control.

It’s as if, as Cullen recently put it, “the US has settled into a state of defeatism” where horrendous school shootings can only be mitigated, they cannot be prevented.

The issue of America’s globally lax gun laws was raised in chilling fashion just this week when Denver schools – including Columbine high school – were closed and a massive police hunt launched after a potentially violent 18-year-old female school student from Florida travelled to the area. Sol Pais was reported to be “armed and extremely dangerous” and “infatuated” with the 1999 shooting.

She was tracked down but found dead on Wednesday, apparently having shot herself.

Woman accused of making threats against Columbine high school found dead Read more

Remarkably, Colorado’s gun laws remain so loose 20 years after the Columbine tragedy that Pais was able to land at Denver airport and immediately buy a pump-action shotgun and ammunition at a nearby store. Entirely legally.

The dramatic events articulated a puzzle in DeAngelis’ approach: why, with the megaphone that has been presented to him, hasn’t he used it to shout about the fact that as a result of its gun-friendly laws the US has a vastly greater rate of civilian gun ownership than any other country, and a steadily escalating rate of school shootings? Last year was the worst on record.

“I do worry we are becoming too accepting of these events,” he said. “We are desensitized and that scares me.”

So why not speak out more forcefully about measures that would help to staunch the rise of school shootings, such as universal background checks on gun sales?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inscriptions and flowers at the Columbine memorial in Littleton, Colorado. Photograph: Benjamin Rasmussen/The Guardian

He replied: “My answer to that is that I worry when people state that if we have tougher gun laws we’re never going to have another school shooting. Do people need automatic weapons? No. But to say that’s the single thing that is causing these shootings – we need to look at all the pieces of the puzzle.”

DeAngelis added that the two Columbine killers acquired their guns illegally. “If you and I wanted to buy a gun right now and bypass the gun laws, there’s somewhere we could do it. It’s just America. It’s unfortunate, but that happens.”

Isn’t that precisely the defeatism that Cullen talked about? To say that gun laws can be circumvented is to accept that more Columbines are inevitable.

“Well but,” he said. “We end up going back to the US constitution. People talk about second amendment rights, about their liberties. And so it’s been going on for how many years.”

Such an approach contrasts jarringly with the laser-focused demand for action that has emerged in recent months. It rocked America when the Parkland kids reacted to the massacre of 17 people at their Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida in February 2018 by stating that enough was enough.

It startled the world when the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, responded to the killing of 50 people at two Christchurch mosques last month by banning semi-automatic rifles. It took her all of a week. Yet here we are 20 years after Columbine talking about how difficult it all is.

“What upsets me so much in America,” DeAngelis said, “is that anti-gun and pro-second amendment people are so passionate about their cause they don’t even take time to sit down and listen to each other. That’s what really worries me. If we can’t sit down when kids are dying, what do we need to do?”