Columbine

by Dave Cullen

Trying to understand Eric from the information available was like reading every fifth page of a novel and concluding that none of it made sense.

“By definition, PTSD is a triad of change for the worse, lasting at least a month, occurring anytime after a genuine trauma,” wrote PTSD pioneer Dr. Frank Ochberg. “The triad of disabling responses is: 1) recurring intrusive recollections; 2) emotional numbing and a constriction of life activity; and 3) a physiological shift in the fear threshold, affecting sleep, concentration, and sense of security.”

He also released more evidence, including a video that drew a lot of

The measure would pass by a two-to-one margin. The gun-show loophole was closed in Colorado. It was defeated in Congress. No significant national gun-control legislation was enacted in response to Columbine.

Patrick Ireland limped to the podium to give the valedictory address.

He had spent the year thinking about what had gotten him across the library floor. At first he assumed hope—not quite; it was trust. “When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me,” he said. “That’s what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

It wasn’t really much about Columbine, and the title featured a minor myth—that Eric and Dylan went bowling on April 20—but it included a dramatic scene where Moore and a victim went to Kmart and asked to return the bullets still inside the guy. The stunt and/or publicity around it shamed Kmart into discontinuing ammunition sales nationwide.

Moore asked Manson what he would say to the killers, if he had a chance to talk to them: “I wouldn’t say a single word to them,” he said. “I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.”

He settled on a compromise. The transcripts would be sealed at the national archives for twenty years. The truth would come out in 2027, twenty-eight years after the massacre.

So what should adults look for? First and foremost, advance confessions: 81 percent of shooters had confided their intentions. More than half told at least two people. Most threats are idle, though; the key is specificity. Vague, implied, and implausible threats are low-risk. The danger skyrockets when threats are direct and specific, identify a motive, and indicate work performed to carry it out. Melodramatic outbursts do not increase the risk.

A subtler form of leakage is preoccupation with death, destruction, and violence.

A graphic mutilation story might be an early warning sign—or a vivid imagination. Add malice, brutality, and an unrepent...

Don’t overreact to a single story or drawing,...

The key was repetition leading to obsession.

The FBI compiled a specific list of warning signs, including symptoms of both psychopathy and depression: manipulation, intolerance, superiority, narcissism, alienation, rigidity, lethargy, dehumanization of others, and externalizing blame. It was a daunting list—that’s a small excerpt. Few teachers were going to master it.

The FBI added one final caution: a kid matching most of its warning signs was more likely to be suffering from depression or mental illness than planning an attack. Most kids matching the criteria needed help, not incarceration.

In 2003, it released “The Active Shooter Protocol.” The gist was simple: If the shooter seems active, storm the building. Move toward the sound of gunfire. Disregard even victims. There is one objective: Neutralize the shooters. Stop them or kill them.

If the killer is holed up in a classroom, holding kids but not firing, responders may need to stop there and use traditional hostage techniques. Storming the classroom could provoke the gunman. But if the shooter is firing, even just periodically, move in.

In a series of shootings over the next decade, including the worst disaster, at Virginia Tech, cops or guards rushed in, stopped shooters, and saved lives.

The lawsuit on behalf of Dave Sanders outlived all the others, but his widow chose not to take part. She was not angry at the police, or the school, or the parents. She was angry at her situation. She was lonely.

They were partially performance—for the public, for the cops, and for each other. Dylan, in particular, was working his heart out to show Eric how invested he was. To laymen, Dylan appeared dominant. He was louder, brasher, and had much more personality. Eric preferred directing. He was often behind the lens. But he was always in charge. Fuselier saw Dylan gave himself away with his eyes. He would shout like a madman, then glance at his partner for approval. How was that? The Basement Tapes were a fusion of invented characters with the real killers. But the characters the killers chose were revealing, too.

Eric made at least three attempts to recruit Chris Morris, though Chris did not grasp that at the time. Some of the overtures came in the form of “jokes.”

“Wouldn’t it be fun to kill all the jocks?” he asked in bowling class. Why stop there, why not blow up the whole school? How hard would it be, really? Chris assumed Eric was joking, but still. Come on, Eric said. They could put bombs on the power generators—that ought to take out the school. Chris had enough. He turned to talk to someone else.

When news of Eric’s crack about killing the jocks was reported, many took it as confirmation of the target motive. Eric was a much wilier recruiter than that. He always played to the audience in front of him. He nearly always gauged their desires correctly. Suggesting the jocks didn’t mean he wanted to single them out, it indicated he thought the idea would appeal to Chris.

Eric got the final two boxes of ammo from Mark Manes, and said he might go shooting tomorrow.

In the ten years after Columbine, more than eighty school shootings took place in the United States.

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

Wayne and Kathy accepted that Eric was a psychopath. Where that came from, they didn’t know. But he fooled them, utterly.

Val Schnurr is the girl who actually professed her faith in the library. Cassie’s mistaken martyrdom provoked vicious attacks on Val. In the midst of her recovery and her grief over Lauren, she was accused of lying relentlessly. “I was so mad at Craig. His screwup caused a lot of negativity to me. It’s hurtful when you’re telling the truth and someone calls you a liar. At my own church pastors ran around telling the Cassie story. I felt they were part of this contingent that was calling me a liar.”

Craig did apologize, Val said. She is grateful.

She understands why many people need to know why so badly. She respects Brian Rohrbough for fighting for the evidence. But “Brian wouldn’t be on the stand. We would be on the stand.”

Here’s the big thing, Val says: “After ten years, I can look at myself in the mirror and not see the scars.”

Victoria Leigh Soto, the teacher at Newtown, who died protecting her first graders in 2012. Chris Mintz, the former infantry soldier shot three times trying to save classmates at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in 2015. He lived.

realized later that I was grieving for Dylan, too. What a sweet, loving kid. Most of his life. That shocked me, but I didn’t grasp how it tormented me. Lost boy, we could have saved him. I see now that I always felt that way, even when I hated him—I just didn’t know.

This book came out nine years and eleven months later. As the “aftershocks” began, I made several brief stints back onto the story. Then a very long slog trying to make sense of the killers.

Pre-Columbine, school shootings were relatively small, simple affairs, short on theatrics: a gun, ammo, a handful of victims. Workplace shootings followed a similar script: lashing out impetuously and gunning down whomever appeared. The dead were not the target—the venue and its inhabitants were. Workers shot up their workplaces; kids shot up their schools.

But terrorists were following a performance model. In chapter 44, I marveled that Mark Juergensmeyer encapsulated terrorism in two words: “performance violence.”

“A onetime episode of meanness or violence could be bad in the moment, but it was the repetition and the power imbalance that were most often associated with lasting, scarring impact.”

There are three classes of evidence to test the theory: the attack design, execution, and the killers’ own explanations. Jock bullies should have been prominent in all. Zero for three.

There’s another pernicious myth: that Eric and Dylan succeeded.

We should not stop reporting these, we should rethink how. Diminish the killer. We must name and show him, but how do we justify the endless repetition?

Anderson Cooper has been running that experiment successfully since 2012. Each attack, his show does brief updates on the killers, then most of the hour on victims. They avoid naming or showing the killer. It’s been remarkably easy, and remains CNN’s highest-rated show.

Eric named his shotgun: Arlene was the heroine from the Doom books Eric enjoyed. He scratched the word into her barrel and referred to her by name in writings and on video.

Millon, Simonsen, Davis, and Birket-Smith created the ten subcategories to sort out very different types of psychopaths, but they are not designed to be mutually exclusive; nor are they necessarily the drivers of behavior. Eric exhibited symptoms consistent with malevolent and tyrannical personalities, and Dr. Fuselier concurred that Eric appeared to be a cross between those two.

The Secret Service studied every targeted attack at schools from December 1974 to May 2000. There had been forty-one attackers in thirty-seven incidents.

The loner myth was perhaps the single biggest misconception. Some of the attackers were loners; two-thirds were not.

“Nonviolent people do not ‘snap’ or decide on the spur of the moment to meet a problem by using violence,” the FBI report said. Planning ranged from a day or two in advance to over a year.

Only an eighth were fond of violent video games.

Loss came in different forms: 66 percent had suffered a drop in status; 51 percent had experienced an external loss, which included the death of a loved one but was more commonly being dumped by a girlfriend. The key was that the attacker perceived it as significant and felt his status drop.

There were at least two outsiders in the know 59 percent of the time. Someone had suspected the attack 93 percent of the time.