Anthony Holmes Persuasive Speech

Anthony Holmes woke up on April 20, 1999 around 3:00 pm in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, he was employed by the Air Force, working night shifts that lasted from 6:00 pm to 6:00 am. He turned on the news as usual, ate some food- except, unknown to him, nothing that day was going to be the usual routine. He went to work, and that was where he would learn the horror of what had happened earlier that day. What Holmes did not know yet was that at 11:19 am earlier that day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold began “shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School, located in a suburb south of Denver” (History.com Staff). According to ABC news reporter Susan Donaldson James, by 11:19 am, they had killed twelve students and one teacher. Holmes soon saw on the news at his work that there had been a shooting, but was unaware of the magnitude of the situation. “There weren’t a lot of details at first,” Holmes said, “We knew there was a shooting, but we didn’t know any of the details. We were all pretty confused.” Shortly after 12:00 pm, Harris and Klebold then committed suicide by gunshot wounds to the head (“Narrative…”). “I watched the coverage of the shooting unfold for the next twelve to twenty-four hours,” Holmes said. …show more content…
At the height of the journalistic spectacle that ensued, somewhere between 400-500 reporters were on the scene, along with 75 to 90 satellite trucks and up to 60 television cameras, with at least 20 of the television crews arriving from other countries (“Media Attention…”). However, with all of that media attention came quite a bit of confusion. “We heard so many different things at first,” Holmes remarked, “We weren’t sure how many shooters were involved, or where the guns had come from, or even how many people were injured. We just didn’t know.” In charged topics like school shootings, emotions can come out, along with questions. Questions like “how could this happen”, or “why did the shooters do this”, or maybe