Columbine

by Dave Cullen

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

You can’t really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.

“Perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge, if it could happen in a place like Littleton.”

Investigators didn’t expect to charge them, but the public did.

Everyone assumed the Columbine massacre was a conspiracy, including the cops.

With every passing week, more of the community would grumble that it was time to move on. The survivors had other ideas.

These kids had been raised in a western mentality, they argued: real men fend for themselves; tears are for weaklings; therapy is a joke.

Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings. It had not really been intended as a shooting at all.

many of the survivors had entered the early stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many had not. It wasn’t a matter of how close they had been to witnessing or experiencing the violence. Length and severity of exposure increased their odds of mental health trouble down the road, but long-term responses were highly varied, depending on each individual.

The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.

There’s no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High.

His unusual rapport with the kids also created a blind spot.

Personal affinities also obscured the problem.

unaware that his natural inclination toward happy, energetic students created a blind spot for the outsiders.

Wednesday evening they watched a grotesque portrait of their school on television. It was a charitable picture at first, but it grew steadily more sinister as the week wore on. The media grew fond of the adjective “toxic.” Apparently, Columbine was a horrible place.

Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America. A few students were happy to see some ugly truths about their high school exposed. Most were appalled. The media version was a gross caricature of how they saw it, and of what they thought they had described.

data was gathered in those first few days, while students were naive, before any developed an agenda.

The young boy had extraordinary gifts that allowed him to see a world his peers couldn’t even imagine—exactly how Eric was coming to view himself,

Eric argued—gifted misfits could be taught what was right and wrong, what was acceptable to society. “Love and care is the only way,” he said.

Good and evil, love and hate—always wrestling, never resolving. Pick your side, it’s up to you—but you better pray it picks you back.

Evangelicals faced a profound moral dilemma: respect for others’ beliefs versus an obligation to stand up for Jesus as the only way, every day.

“Something is wrong in this country when a child can grab a gun so easily and shoot a bullet into the middle of a child’s face,”