Columbine, Dave Cullen
While waiting for a library book to arrive, I picked Columbine as a quick book to work through. It has been on my radar for several years. After working through some of the early chapters, I found that I wasn’t loving the prose, so I tried to get through it pretty quickly so that I could at least get the factual content out of it.
This book functions well as a corrective to some of the erroneous information that has circulated since Columbine. Most notably, Harris and Klebold were not bullied, nor part of the Trench Coat Mafia; and the well-traveled story of Cassie Bernall’s martyrdom is false. Why these falsehoods have spread in the decades since Columbine is also a big part of the book (besides the mechanical description of the attack, which wasn’t particularly novel for me). The Jefferson County Sheriff seems to have been a real blowhard, and he appeared to be conducting media interviews off the top of his head, with scant preparation; that led to a lot of unfounded rumors becoming established in the press.
The evangelical community also really glommed onto the attack. Both evangelical leaders who used the attacks to target vulnerable students for conversion (this really bugged me) and the emotionally-wounded parents who coped with their children’s deaths by propagating stories of martyrdom or becoming stridently anti-abortion reacted to the mass murder in ways that I would consider to be wrong. The parents are somewhat more forgivable–I don’t know how I’d react to losing my kid in that way–but other people were clearly being hurt by their actions, and you can understand without condoning their actions. But the pastors were clearly predatory. The book’s afterword points out that levels of church attendance eventually fell back to their normal levels after Columbine, which makes me hope that at least not too many people dramatically changed their philosophy of living to incorporate the idea of “Satan living within their community.”
Columbine shows that people will approach any event, even mass murder, with an agenda. Media, cops, politicians, parents, priests: no one came at the murders as a tabula rasa. Their inherent motivations and prejudices inflected their actions, and those actions bounced off everyone within the event horizon of the event and caused even more chaos. We still feel that chaos today. And as new killers and communities are inspired by the Columbine shooters, their actions redound unto us still, and forever.
In the closing pages of Columbine, author Dave Cullen mentions that interviews with Harris’s and Klebold’s parents were sealed in the National Archive until 2027. I won’t be setting a timer or anything to see what what mentioned, and it seems likely that the parents weren’t entirely forthcoming (Wayne Harris especially). But we’ll see if there are any new insights in four years.