April 20,1999 a day no one would ever forget and a day no one wanted repeated. On that day only ,13 years ago, two teenagers went into their high school, Columbine High, with guns and shot a total of 37 people, wounding 23 and killing 14 including themselves. Out of those 14 that died one was Rachael Scott who is the reason why we now have Rachael’s Challenge. The challenge is that we can fulfill her legacy of creating a chain of kindness. Wouldn’t you think that with all of the prevention methods that our schools install into the curriculum the rampages would end? Sadly they have not as we had hoped, since that day over 50 school shootings have occurred with fatalities.

Now, here we are in 2012 and only less than a week ago a timid student named T.J Lane went into Chardon High School’s cafeteria and shot 5 students , 3 now deceased. He said he chose his victims at random and gave up after only an hour. Maybe he did it because his father had also had a criminal infested past, but why now, in his school? No word of his motive has been released to the public yet, but when it is maybe it will give us some sort of idea to what this 17 year old boy was thinking of when he walked into his high school cafeteria and took the lives of three of his peers. One family has already forgiven the shooter for killing their son, and they hope along with everyone else that it will be  the last shooting that will plague our schools forever.

-Lizzie Heisler