April 20, 1999 Edition

Columbine
by Dave Cullen

At 11:10a MDT on April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris arrived at Columbine High School. At 11:19a they began shooting at their fellow classmates in the cafeteria during lunch. They would proceed to shoot and throw pipe bombs at their classmates and teachers both inside and outside of the school until approximately 12:08p, when Harris and Klebold killed themselves in the library. In just under one hour they killed 13 people (12 students and 1 teacher) and injured 24 others.

It is the worst school shooting at a high school in American history. And if Eric Harris knew how to properly wire the propane bombs he set up, it would have been the worst public shooting of any sort in American history save for a Civil War battle.

The original plan that Eric and Dylan had hatched for April 20th was to detonate a propane bomb (a bomb made out of a propane tank you would use for your outdoor grill) in a residential area about a mile away from the school. This would throw off the cops while the two committed mass murder inside of the school. Once in the school, propane bombs would be set near the columns of the cafeteria. If they had detonated properly the blast would have been enough to collapse the columns, causing the library to fall onto the cafeteria killing hundreds of people in one fell swoop. From here, Eric and Dylan were going to go to their cars in the parking lot. Their cars were parked strategically so that they would be able to shoot at any people running out of the exit they were closest to. (They had put enough thought into how they parked that they would have been able to shoot their automatic weapons in a back-and-forth motion without fear of hitting one another; their positions mirrored a tactical military position.) After they picked off enough kids running towards them (and once the police, paramedics, and media started to flock to the high school en masse) their final step was to drive their cars—containing a few more propane tank bombs—towards the gathering mob of press and police and paramedics, killing as many people as possible before blowing up their cars.

Instead, the bombs in the cafeteria never exploded (even after Eric shot at them later on) and the two boys essentially ad-libbed most of the shooting.

Reading Dave Cullen’s Columbine 11 years after the shooting I found myself not only re-remembering things that I had forgotten about the shooting (aspects of the original plan, that Cassie Bernall was never asked about her Christianity by Eric Harris before he killed her), but I was also reminded of how fundamentally inept the media is when it comes to stories like this. The immediate national coverage of the story was any (or all) of the following:

“This killing was the result of bullying.” “This was the result of a couple of outcasts lashing out against jocks.” “Music played a role in shaping their aggression.” “Marilyn Manson is to blame.” “Is the Goth subculture rising? Why are they so angry and violent?” “They called themselves ‘the trench coat mafia.’” “Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were insane.”

And herein lies the reason why Columbine is such a good and interesting read: because there is a good chance that your memories of the shooting is half-filled (or at least quarter-filled) with things that were later ruled out, or were never adequately explained in the first place. And the biggest thing that the media misreported (and what we misinterpret in general) was that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were somehow inherently crazy, or insane with rage.

Cullen delves into psychopathy and profiling with such ease and such great and succinct detail that you begin to see the real picture unfold before your eyes, and that picture is that Eric Harris was a psychopath and Dylan Klebold was a depressive. Harris had a supremely inflated God complex, Klebold was mostly a good kid but when he got angry he would intensely snap for a short amount of time. The two fed off of each perfectly.

Revisiting the psychopathy angle, to many people the fragment “Eric Harris was a psychopath” from a previous sentence usually equates to thoughts of insanity. Again, Cullen does a terrific job explaining what a psychopath is.

“Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it.

“To a psychopath, both motives make sense. ‘Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling,’ wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority on psychopaths. ‘They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.’

“Eric saw humans as chemical compounds with an inflated sense of their own worth. ‘its just all nature, chemistry, and math,’ he [Harris] wrote. ‘you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay.’”

The end of the book also goes into some detail about how the Columbine attacks forced local, state, and federal agencies to change not only their attitudes towards profiling kids (don’t single out the outcasts, and killers of this nature rarely come from broken homes) but to completely overhaul how they handle these situations.

When the Columbine attacks had begun, the local authorities and the FBI had no updated schematic of the school, had no access to anyone who could disarm the fire alarm, and stuck to the plan of solidifying the perimeter. Consequently, the FBI and S.W.A.T. teams were entering from the wrong side of the building and were trying to work in an environment in which the fire alarms were going off for hours, the floors were flooded from the sprinklers running for hours, and were so overly cautious that they did not reach the library until almost 4 hours after Harris and Klebold had committed suicide. Nowadays, there is no “protecting the perimeter.” If there’s a shooter, the police (or the FBI or S.W.A.T.) immediately hone in and try to take him out, even if it means walking over wounded or dying civilians. (It is believed that this practice of mass convergence prevented countless other lives from being lost when the Virginia Tech shooter opened fire on campus a few years ago.)

While the subject matter is certainly not cheery and some of the details eye-opening^[1] Columbine is worth your time. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a couple of years and it is unbiased and objective look into one of the most tragic days in recent American history.

Finally, if you are interested in Cullen’s previous writing about Columbine I highly recommend reading the seminal article he wrote for the 5th anniversary of the shooting on Slate titled “The Depressive and The Psychopath.”

[1] As in some of Eric Harris’s writing and journals that were found afterwards that suggest that if Eric had lived longer he would have surely grown up to be a serial murderer and/or rapist. One of the journal entries found referenced a future desire to trick girls into sleeping with him so that he could later kill them.