osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2012-04-18 07:29 am
osprey_archer) wrote2012-04-18 07:29 am
Entry tags:
Columbine
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.
no subject
no subject
And Dylan Klebold was clinically depressed and wanted to die and apparently thought this sounded like a stellar way to commit suicide.
Which still begs the question, why did it sound like fun? - but I don't think there's a good answer to that, not just in this case but for most evil acts. If evil made sense - if there was a good reason for it, something that justified it - then it wouldn't be evil.
I think that's why people like scapegoats: because if they can point at something and say, "THAT caused it," they don't have to deal with uncertainty.
no subject
Eh, I get where you're coming from, but most people were not in full possession of the facts. In historical context, that's not all it was, simply because before Columbine, the vast majority of educators, administrators, counsellors and parents were in deep deep denial about how ugly high school (and school in general) can be. Columbine happened when I was being bullied like hell in school; when I overheard an adult say, "I don't get how anyone could hate their classmates that much!" my brain kind of bluescreened.
It felt like Columbine (and in Canada, the Taber shooting and Reena Virk's death) were a real wakeup call for parents and educators about bullying--realizing that it is a real thing with serious consequences. When years of, "Stop bullying because it's the nice thing to do" failed, "Stop bullying because otherwise those kids will turn around and shoot up the school" got laws passed and policies made.
no subject
And even though the false belief did have some positive consequences, it still has pernicious consequences. It doesn't seem right to me that the families and classmates of school shooting victims (and if they lived through it, the victims themselves) should have to hear them described as vicious bullies (who, it is implied, deserved what they got). That's just rubbing salt in the wound.
no subject
no subject
However, I also think it's true that a lot of people believe that school shooters are victims of bullying because they identify with the desire to shoot their classmates. I remember reading comments after the Criminal Minds episode about the teenage spree killer, "Elephant's Memory": a lot of the commenters were positively gleeful about the shooter's vengeance against the kids who bullied him (and the episode is set up to ensure that viewers sympathize with him).