Reflection on Columbine by Dave Cullen

               This is a really well-written book written in the “true crime” style of In Cold Blood. It details the massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado. The author does an excellent job weaving together the stories of the perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and first responders to cover the most important events before, after, and during the massacre.

               Before the Columbine massacre, school shootings had already happened several times. What was different about Columbine’s tragedy is that it went on long enough for news cameras and the media to arrive, as people could watch the events unfold in real time on CNN. Another important difference is that it wasn’t a hostage crisis. While it was treated as one, with many living people in the building with the shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had no interest in hostages- they were killing for fun, indiscriminately. That would have changed the police response, but they didn’t know until after. In a hostage crisis, it is advised to set up a perimeter and wait outside. In a mass shooting, police should enter as soon as possible. While SWAT teams would not enter the building until four hours after the standoff began at 3:15, the killers had already committed suicide at 12:08, costing precious time for those survivors who were shot.

               One misconception I had was that the shooting was two nerds who targeted jocks, but that wasn’t so. In fact, Eric and Dylan had many friends and could hardly be called nerds. Rather, that was a media myth created after the fact, along with many others. So why did they do it? Eric and Dylan could be classified as a “dyad: murderous pairs who feed off each other.” Prominent examples include Bonnie and Clyde and the Beltway snipers. In Eric and Dylan’s case, it was a psychopath (Eric) and a depressed person (Dylan). Pairs like this are never mirror images, usually one follows the other while subtly egging him on, as Dylan followed Eric. Both had superiority complexes, but Eric was much more violent. Dylan hardly shot his gun at all during the half-hour they spent on the rampage.

               Something huge that I had no idea about was the extent of the cover-up after the tragedy of the fact that there were active warrants out for Eric’s arrest that the police had ignored. Eric and Dylan had been committing petty crimes and managed to get out of a diversion program and go free, but when Eric was reported to the police for extremely violent and threatening posts on his website, they failed to report that to the DA. In the summer after Columbine, the police destroyed all the relevant files but were caught years later for it, though no one went to jail.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Over 80% of psychopaths are male and almost 100% of school shooters are male.
• Originally, the plan was to explode several bombs inside the school and their town, but Eric had not wired them correctly and they failed, leading to the decision to just go in shooting.
• Colorado closed the gun show loophole (how the boys got the guns) after the shooting but the federal government failed to do so.