Last week, Jefferson County (Colorado) Attorney Frank Hutfless began selling grisly videotapes of the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre -- for $ 25 a copy. Survivors, relatives of the dead, and school officials were aghast and enraged at the tasteless move. THE SCRAPBOOK shares their dismay. All the more so now that the origins of some of the footage have been clarified by Hutfless and his associates. It seems a Littleton, Colorado, Fire Department employee recorded tape of the high school's cafeteria and library: bullet-pocked walls, bloodstained floors, note cards marking the locations of bodies. It also seems that the fire department has used this tape in "training sessions" for law enforcement officials in 32 states and Canada.
THE SCRAPBOOK hopes that none of them supervises an emergency-response team in your neighborhood. For as David B. Kopel recently explained in these pages, "Heavily armored police with machine guns protected themselves, instead of rescuing teenagers who were being murdered a few yards away." The Columbine response is not a proper "training" model for anyone. The tape should be pulled.