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Dave Cullen’s Columbine is top notch: a thoroughly researched, absorbingly written history of the Columbine shootings, the media frenzy that followed, and the many myths about the shootings that have become ingrained in the American (possibly international?) psyche. His book is a thoughtful, measured refutation of many myths about the Columbine shootings and Columbine shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. A sampling:
Harris and Klebold were outcasts.
Only in the sense that they weren’t part of the football-and-cheerleading crowd. But they had lots of friends of their own, and very active social lives, and no desire to be part of the football crowd anyway.
Harris and Klebold were gay.
They weren’t. (As it happens, Klebold left behind an extraordinarily mushy diary about how much he loved, loved, LOVED a girl who he never quite worked up the nerve to speak to. He was also depressed, probably clinically, though IIRC it wasn’t diagnosed. It would be appallingly easy to give him a kind of Tragedy of Young Werther treatment.)
Harris and Klebold targeted students who bullied them!
No. This one contains about three different kinds of wrongness, which is pretty impressive for such a short sentence.
First, they didn’t target specific students (or specific races, or jocks) - they shot at everyone who got in their line of fire.
Second, they didn’t plan to be shooting anyone anyway. Their original plan was to blow up the cafeteria with homemade bombs, thus killing five hundred people in one go; they defaulted to shooting when the bombs failed to go off. (They brought the guns along in the hopes of picking off survivors as they fled the building, hopefully ending with shoot-out with the police.)
Third, they weren’t bullied. They were not the tormented victims of endless bullying, nor did they see themselves that way. They were far too busy picking on freshmen and kids they thought were “gay” to be teased much themselves.
Fourth - and this is my editorializing, not Cullen’s, although it can be inferred from his book - why the hell is it okay to assume that the victims of school shootings must have deserved it? People cite this idea with a certain reverence - as if Klebold and Harris were tragic heroes, standing up to their oppressors in the only way they knew how. “The kids that Klebold and Harris shot may have bled to death all alone in a charnel library,” the argument goes, “but think of the CRUEL TORMENT that must have led Klebold and Harris to take such a fatal step. They are the TRUE VICTIMS of Columbine.”
No. No. NO. They didn’t target people who tormented them, because they weren’t tormented in the first place, and even if they were bullied, shooting someone and leaving them to bleed to death is crueler than bullying. No, really. Murder is worse than saying mean things. It’s even worse than saying mean things every day for years on end. Because you can grow up, and get counselling if necessary, and live a full and happy life despite the cruel words of high school classmates, whereas there’s no way to recover from being dead.
The victims of Columbine were the people MURDERED there. Not the shooters. The shooters were only bullied in the fevered imaginations of people who like to fantasize about shooting the kids who were mean to them in high school.
(Todd Strasser wrote a novel, Give a Boy a Gun, that is a book-length paean to this "the shooters are the TRUE VICTIMS" theory. Criminal Minds also has a school shooter episode built on this premise, which is especially disturbing in a show that usually deglamorizes serial killers.)
This blame the victims mentality ties into the last myth about Columbine, the debunking of which is Cullen’s main thesis: that Columbine was the fault of bullies/the teachers/the parents/violent video games/society.
No, says Cullen. Klebold and Harris bear responsibility for Columbine. No one drove them to it; they were not abused by their classmates or their video games or - everyone’s second-favorite target - their parents. (It’s pretty clear, from Cullen’s description of the Klebolds, that the only thing they’re guilty of is respecting their son’s privacy too much to read his diary.) Harris and Klebold were seventeen and eighteen, old enough to know what they were doing. The guilt is entirely theirs.
Harris and Klebold were outcasts.
Only in the sense that they weren’t part of the football-and-cheerleading crowd. But they had lots of friends of their own, and very active social lives, and no desire to be part of the football crowd anyway.
Harris and Klebold were gay.
They weren’t. (As it happens, Klebold left behind an extraordinarily mushy diary about how much he loved, loved, LOVED a girl who he never quite worked up the nerve to speak to. He was also depressed, probably clinically, though IIRC it wasn’t diagnosed. It would be appallingly easy to give him a kind of Tragedy of Young Werther treatment.)
Harris and Klebold targeted students who bullied them!
No. This one contains about three different kinds of wrongness, which is pretty impressive for such a short sentence.
First, they didn’t target specific students (or specific races, or jocks) - they shot at everyone who got in their line of fire.
Second, they didn’t plan to be shooting anyone anyway. Their original plan was to blow up the cafeteria with homemade bombs, thus killing five hundred people in one go; they defaulted to shooting when the bombs failed to go off. (They brought the guns along in the hopes of picking off survivors as they fled the building, hopefully ending with shoot-out with the police.)
Third, they weren’t bullied. They were not the tormented victims of endless bullying, nor did they see themselves that way. They were far too busy picking on freshmen and kids they thought were “gay” to be teased much themselves.
Fourth - and this is my editorializing, not Cullen’s, although it can be inferred from his book - why the hell is it okay to assume that the victims of school shootings must have deserved it? People cite this idea with a certain reverence - as if Klebold and Harris were tragic heroes, standing up to their oppressors in the only way they knew how. “The kids that Klebold and Harris shot may have bled to death all alone in a charnel library,” the argument goes, “but think of the CRUEL TORMENT that must have led Klebold and Harris to take such a fatal step. They are the TRUE VICTIMS of Columbine.”
No. No. NO. They didn’t target people who tormented them, because they weren’t tormented in the first place, and even if they were bullied, shooting someone and leaving them to bleed to death is crueler than bullying. No, really. Murder is worse than saying mean things. It’s even worse than saying mean things every day for years on end. Because you can grow up, and get counselling if necessary, and live a full and happy life despite the cruel words of high school classmates, whereas there’s no way to recover from being dead.
The victims of Columbine were the people MURDERED there. Not the shooters. The shooters were only bullied in the fevered imaginations of people who like to fantasize about shooting the kids who were mean to them in high school.
(Todd Strasser wrote a novel, Give a Boy a Gun, that is a book-length paean to this "the shooters are the TRUE VICTIMS" theory. Criminal Minds also has a school shooter episode built on this premise, which is especially disturbing in a show that usually deglamorizes serial killers.)
This blame the victims mentality ties into the last myth about Columbine, the debunking of which is Cullen’s main thesis: that Columbine was the fault of bullies/the teachers/the parents/violent video games/society.
No, says Cullen. Klebold and Harris bear responsibility for Columbine. No one drove them to it; they were not abused by their classmates or their video games or - everyone’s second-favorite target - their parents. (It’s pretty clear, from Cullen’s description of the Klebolds, that the only thing they’re guilty of is respecting their son’s privacy too much to read his diary.) Harris and Klebold were seventeen and eighteen, old enough to know what they were doing. The guilt is entirely theirs.
