Columbine

Dave Cullen

4 ideas

1. Columbine was a failed bombing

   On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold placed two 20-pound propane bombs in the Columbine High School cafeteria, timed for the crowded first lunch period, intending to kill hundreds. The bombs failed to detonate, and the pair improvised the shooting that killed 12 students and a teacher before they killed themselves. Cullen argues that the event remembered as the template school shooting was designed as a mass bombing, with guns meant to pick off survivors fleeing the blasts.

2. Two killers with different driving pathologies

   Cullen argues Harris was a psychopath driven by contempt, grandiosity and a wish to dominate, while Klebold was a suicidal depressive whose journals dwell on loneliness and self-loathing. He also traces Klebold's anger turning outward and his active part in planning the murders, so Klebold was a willing participant rather than a mere follower. In Cullen's account, the attack came out of how the two different pathologies fit together, and treating the pair as one unit with one motive obscures that.

3. Instant myths outlive their corrections

   In the first hours and days, reporters working from frightened, secondhand student accounts produced explanations that became canon: bullied outcasts, a 'Trench Coat Mafia' clique, revenge targeted at jocks, and a girl martyred for saying 'yes' when asked if she believed in God. Investigators later found each account false or unsupported. By then the stories had supplied a satisfying motive and a moral shape, and corrections could not dislodge them.

4. Harris's performed remorse fooled his diversion program

   After his arrest for breaking into a van, Harris excelled in juvenile diversion, wrote a moving apology to the victim, and was released early with praise. Meanwhile his private journal mocked the process and planned the massacre. Cullen presents this as a case where a program that judged him by compliance and expressed contrition was deceived by a psychopath skilled at faking both.

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