Oh I’d say it started before 1999. Back when I was in 7th grade, circa 1997, a friend of mine was a recent transfer from one of the big middle schools to our small little charter school. The straw that broke the camel’s back for her parents (she’d been home schooled prior to going there) was the fact that school called a parent meeting over the fact that she brought her knitting to school (as part of a presentation) and “knitting needles could be used as weapons” (they were the big wooden kind too), and so could be grounds for expulsion (the school was more reasonable in that they weren’t going there, but the fact that they could have, sheesh). That whole story lead to a year-long joke among our group about how “X isn’t allowed at school, because it could be used as a weapon,” with X being everything from students to dry erase pens to shoe laces.
Whatever started this malady, it wasn’t Colombine.
