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What, after twenty years, can we say Columbine really means? Columbine is the most significant event in the last years of the twentieth century. I realized this in 2005, and decided to write a book about it from the killer’s perspective. The reasons why Columbine is so significant I’ll get to later, but at the time I began researching, the invariable responses I received when I told anyone I was writing about Columbine was either why was I writing about something so morbid and terrible, or why was I writing about something that wouldn’t be relevant in ten years. The first question is subject to the same counter-responses we give any stupid question, which I respect your intelligence too much to give examples of. As for the second, hardly anyone would ask that, anymore – not after Virginia Tech, after Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after so many others and after the morbid and terrible feeling that amounts to almost a certainty that there will be many, many more to come.
There had been other school shooting before Columbine, yet for some reason Columbine has reached an iconic status that no other shooting, despite a higher death toll, or more disturbing targets – has not. Part of the reason is that Columbine itself is the origin of these shootings. Another is that Columbine has been represented in film and documentaries. Yet still another is that Columbine occurred at a time when America was prosperous, generally happy, content, and looking optimistically forward to new Millennium; until however Columbine forced virtually everyone too look at themselves in one way or another that, at that time and now – for anyone who actually thinks about Columbine – continue to define us in relation to everyone else.
But before I discuss why Columbine is significant, I’d like to address a few things I’ve kept silent about for quite a while: namely, how we can stop school shootings? I’ve been silent, frankly, because I held a long resentment about answering that question, for reasons I won’t go into here; and secondly, because my answers aren’t at all optimistic or warm-hearted and can’t be conveyed in any roundabout way other than blunt, cold, hard reality. Because my ultimate conclusion is that school shootings cannot be stopped, and will only increase in brutality and ruthlessness in time. The prevailing tendency of my thought is pessimistic, but also grounded in reality and what I’ve come to know of human nature, both before Columbine was meaningful to me merely as an abstract cultural event, and later, when it took on a personal significance.
I don’t think gun control will have any positive effect, and might even cause worse, unforeseen events if legislated specifically with school shootings in mind. I can guarantee you my disinterest in this matter; I have, so to speak, no “dog in this fight”. The debate tends to focus on the “gun” part of that noun phrase, which is the less complicated although more rhetorically entertaining thing to discuss. What guns should we ban? Should we ban massive gun clips? Are AR-15s really more “deadly” than shotguns (which were used in Columbine) and pistols (which were used in Virginia Tech)? These are all technical and highly contextual questions fit only for experts in ballistics and military strategy that are shamelessly touted to us, the public and potential school-shooter victim, as questions we are capable of making our minds up over in the course of our 40-80 hour work week. I think they’re quite silly, ultimately, because they take our attention away from the act and onto the means of carrying out that act, but also because by focusing on guns, we tend to forget that whole vastly more complicated question of “control”.
Whether state control of firearms is good or bad, control itself is merely an illusion. A brief and superficial glance at history will show how effective our feeble and often misguided attempts at control have been and amounted to in the long run. Often, we don’t really understand what it is we want to control; we mistake a part of the thing for the whole of it; we seek to control school shootings by controlling guns before we adequately know what a school shooting is – in terms of its motivations, its causes, its perpetrators. And our mechanics of control are fallible, open to corruption, hard to enforce, and always subject to contingencies that are hard to predict. Even if we are able to prevent or restrict access to “assault rifles”, which is such a blatant redundancy I think sometimes the people who clamor for gun control know about as much about the English language as they do guns -- will that amount to much in terms of a person who is clever, highly motivated and resourceful, who has already committed suicide by committing himself to the act, and will find other ways to carry it out? We will have only eliminated a means, and a quite specific and easily replaceable means, when we haven’t considered what is the goal, what do these shooters really want? We think we have that easily answered with concepts like “fame” or “revenge” or the handy “evil” that we, both Left and Right, use to describe anything we really don’t understand. School shooters are smart; they learn from each other; each one seeks to be more memorable, and thus more destructive than the last. If we ban guns, even all guns, school shooters will merely become school bombers, school poisoners, or any of a thousand other horrible things as surely as they would have become school shooters otherwise unless we sit down as adults and ask, hard and long and uncomfortably, why they want to be school shooters.
But this question can’t be answered.
That is a hard truth we’re going to have to swallow. The reason it can’t be answered is that Columbine has become art. I don’t mean art in an aesthetic, high-culture sense such as the paintings of Pollack or the novels of Henry James. I mean art in its basic sense: that Columbine, unlike virtually every school shooting, is open to interpretation. People see different things in Columbine and react differently because the context of Columbine affects each of us differently. Anyone would readily admit that Sandy Hook was horrible, but get them talking about Columbine and all sorts of under-the-surface resentments float to the surface: bullying, sexual selection, counter-culture, music, video games – an untold sundry of connotations that, depending on whom you’re talking to, will take over the discussion of murder and death and automatically remove Columbine to a social-political conversation that, I submit, is Columbine’s mythological status.
Case in point: if you talk to a lot of jocks or former-jocks or preppies or sorority girls, as I have, their general opinion about Columbine is that everyone gets picked on in high school, but they did not resort to shooting up the school. This is really nothing more than an empty attempt to regain emotional and psychological power when confronted with an uncomfortable fact. It tries to deprive the shooters of their power and revert it back onto those who caused it: the bullies. It’s saying, in quite rhetorically couched terms, that WE drove the shooters to do this, it was OUR power to harm them that gave them the power to hurt US, which they would not have had had not we bullied them to begin with. It’s a pathetic begging-the-question circular-logic argument that I just bet you’ll encounter if you ask any privileged college student, with any slight feeling that they might have been shot in Columbine, why school shootings happen.
The question is: why do they think they would have been shot?
The short answer is that they see themselves in Columbine in a way that makes them feel guilty, when it shouldn’t. The mythos of Columbine, which still persists despite constant debunking, is that Eric and Dylan sought out oppressors and murdered them accordingly. This feeds into a long history of the-nerd-takes-revenge stories we’ve all heard, and unfortunately have been projected onto Columbine. People feel guilty quite a lot, and when someone who feels particularly guilty about being attractive or popular or wealthy sees Columbine as an act of revenge from those who are ugly and rejected and bullied, then that guilt will become unsustainable and result in a projection of guilt on ugly, bullied people whom privileged people think want to kill them because they are popular, attractive, etc.… The guilt projected, of course, is guilty beforehand of wanting, if not already plotting, to commit a mass murder of which they - i.e, the attractive, wealthy, etc.... -- are a prime target. And thus, in one of those perverse things about human nature, people who feel guilty for treating other people badly or maybe, most often really, of simply thinking that they treat people badly, because they have an unfair advantage, are attractive, are wealthy --- as if that was bad to begin with, and you see how contextualized and weird and hyper-complicated all this gets -- well, they actually begin to treat people badly because they assume the less privileged people hate them, want to take sawed-off shotguns to their face, blow them up, etc. … and want to stop that by reporting them, or making up stories, or saying they stalked them, or many other things just to protect themselves, which in no small part probably explains, and I can speak from personal experience here, a lot of reported "planned" school shootings and probably also a lot of overreaction, that are in their own way contributing to the evil legacy of Columbine and ruining lives here and there of more people than I can count but that I can't go to sleep without thinking of, who -- despite the many categories of white or black or gay or atheist or whatever -- I will always have the deepest sympathy.
But that is only how some people see Columbine. There are many, probably innumerable, other interpretations – and all of them dangerous. Dangerous because we will never understand why Eric and Dylan did what they did. We can say Eric was a psychopath, which he probably was, and Dylan followed him to mass murder simply because they wanted to be seen on TV. But that is only an interpretation, and quite a specific one that perhaps puts too much cynicism and naivete at the same time on the controversy. The blunt fact is that we will never escape interpreting Columbine. It means too many things to too many people, who either condemn it, or struggle with it, or powerfully believe that it was a good thing and should be repeated. If you think I am exaggerating this last point, bear in mind that every school shooter post-Columbine has been influenced by it, and just a cursory search on Youtube will result in many “inspiring” hero-worship videos of Eric and Dylan shooting their classmates, not to mention God knows what in forums and discussion groups. But what each of these hero-worshipers sees is quite different; there is no profile of a school shooter, and because Columbine has become this malleable myth than can seemingly accommodate everyone who wants to murder their classmates, right down to two girls in the 21st century as far removed as you could imagine anyone being sympathetic to Columbine would be, proves that Columbine has transcended being a mere “school shooting”. It resonates too deeply, brings up too much turmoil, to be merely an act of violence. It is a myth made reality, because that is what a myth is: we may know what we believe isn’t true, that our memories of high school are fallible, but we tell ourselves our stories, and Columbine is a story that is a nightmare or a lament or a war song, depending on whom you talk to.
Far from being insignificant, or easily explained, Columbine is dangerous well after the fact because of what it can mean to certain people at certain times, who feel various things few of us will understand. The motives for Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook and Parkland might remain obscure, but all these shooters saw something of themselves in Columbine that we also see ourselves in, whether as victims or as saviors—and all equally dangerous. We see something “more” to Columbine because Columbine is a reflection of our high-school lives, which defines us more than we want to admit, and that we resent that we don’t want to admit, which also affects how we deal with things like rejection and bullying – which goes on well into the adult world – and sex and money and class and culture. This is what I saw, those long-assed innocent years before I was incarcerated, and that it’s taken me over ten years to say.
While the danger of some bullied or about-to-snap kid who looks at Columbine and sees a way out, a way to “fame”, or just simple revenge might be great, there is also the danger that we will only look at Columbine superficially, and not understand ourselves in the process. That we will send many a misunderstood rebel or intellectual or artist off to prison or a mental institution because, well -- I'll say it, if no one else will -- our high-school prejudices think they might want to kill us because of who we were in high school or have become since. This might all seem very abstract and general because I'm not getting into specifics, for which I have legal reasons not to, but trust me: this is all very real and very scary and affects you in more ways than you know.
Thus Columbine is double-edged sword of trying to stop school shootings while also not infringing on civil rights, or making America a police state, or confiscating guns – all of which are just as frightening as any shooting.
Therefore, I humbly submit, after great thought and suffering on the matter, we will never begin to stop school shootings until we understand what Columbine means, and continues to mean, and not just to the people who would commit their own shooting, but how and why we feel the way we do about them. This is a tall order, I know, and that’s why I’m pessimistic. I don’t think America will ever reach that level of maturity, and in fact, given our divisive culture and resentment against each other based on so many stupid, silly, forgettable things like gender and race and sex and sexuality, I don’t think we, as nation, will ever look at each other honesty or answer these questions about ourselves honestly enough to fix our problems, or even care that they are problems.
And so these shootings will go on, and on.
And, as I said in 2007, and write now and will write again –
I told you so.
This essay is dedicated to Dr. Dick Allison, who came to see me in my darkest hour and gave me a light that still survives. It is only through the bravery against suffering that you have taught me, old friend, that I was able to write this.
What, after twenty years, can we say Columbine really means? Columbine is the most significant event in the last years of the twentieth century. I realized this in 2005, and decided to write a book about it from the killer’s perspective. The reasons why Columbine is so significant I’ll get to later, but at the time I began researching, the invariable responses I received when I told anyone I was writing about Columbine was either why was I writing about something so morbid and terrible, or why was I writing about something that wouldn’t be relevant in ten years. The first question is subject to the same counter-responses we give any stupid question, which I respect your intelligence too much to give examples of. As for the second, hardly anyone would ask that, anymore – not after Virginia Tech, after Sandy Hook, after Parkland, after so many others and after the morbid and terrible feeling that amounts to almost a certainty that there will be many, many more to come.
There had been other school shooting before Columbine, yet for some reason Columbine has reached an iconic status that no other shooting, despite a higher death toll, or more disturbing targets – has not. Part of the reason is that Columbine itself is the origin of these shootings. Another is that Columbine has been represented in film and documentaries. Yet still another is that Columbine occurred at a time when America was prosperous, generally happy, content, and looking optimistically forward to new Millennium; until however Columbine forced virtually everyone too look at themselves in one way or another that, at that time and now – for anyone who actually thinks about Columbine – continue to define us in relation to everyone else.
But before I discuss why Columbine is significant, I’d like to address a few things I’ve kept silent about for quite a while: namely, how we can stop school shootings? I’ve been silent, frankly, because I held a long resentment about answering that question, for reasons I won’t go into here; and secondly, because my answers aren’t at all optimistic or warm-hearted and can’t be conveyed in any roundabout way other than blunt, cold, hard reality. Because my ultimate conclusion is that school shootings cannot be stopped, and will only increase in brutality and ruthlessness in time. The prevailing tendency of my thought is pessimistic, but also grounded in reality and what I’ve come to know of human nature, both before Columbine was meaningful to me merely as an abstract cultural event, and later, when it took on a personal significance.
I don’t think gun control will have any positive effect, and might even cause worse, unforeseen events if legislated specifically with school shootings in mind. I can guarantee you my disinterest in this matter; I have, so to speak, no “dog in this fight”. The debate tends to focus on the “gun” part of that noun phrase, which is the less complicated although more rhetorically entertaining thing to discuss. What guns should we ban? Should we ban massive gun clips? Are AR-15s really more “deadly” than shotguns (which were used in Columbine) and pistols (which were used in Virginia Tech)? These are all technical and highly contextual questions fit only for experts in ballistics and military strategy that are shamelessly touted to us, the public and potential school-shooter victim, as questions we are capable of making our minds up over in the course of our 40-80 hour work week. I think they’re quite silly, ultimately, because they take our attention away from the act and onto the means of carrying out that act, but also because by focusing on guns, we tend to forget that whole vastly more complicated question of “control”.
Whether state control of firearms is good or bad, control itself is merely an illusion. A brief and superficial glance at history will show how effective our feeble and often misguided attempts at control have been and amounted to in the long run. Often, we don’t really understand what it is we want to control; we mistake a part of the thing for the whole of it; we seek to control school shootings by controlling guns before we adequately know what a school shooting is – in terms of its motivations, its causes, its perpetrators. And our mechanics of control are fallible, open to corruption, hard to enforce, and always subject to contingencies that are hard to predict. Even if we are able to prevent or restrict access to “assault rifles”, which is such a blatant redundancy I think sometimes the people who clamor for gun control know about as much about the English language as they do guns -- will that amount to much in terms of a person who is clever, highly motivated and resourceful, who has already committed suicide by committing himself to the act, and will find other ways to carry it out? We will have only eliminated a means, and a quite specific and easily replaceable means, when we haven’t considered what is the goal, what do these shooters really want? We think we have that easily answered with concepts like “fame” or “revenge” or the handy “evil” that we, both Left and Right, use to describe anything we really don’t understand. School shooters are smart; they learn from each other; each one seeks to be more memorable, and thus more destructive than the last. If we ban guns, even all guns, school shooters will merely become school bombers, school poisoners, or any of a thousand other horrible things as surely as they would have become school shooters otherwise unless we sit down as adults and ask, hard and long and uncomfortably, why they want to be school shooters.
But this question can’t be answered.
That is a hard truth we’re going to have to swallow. The reason it can’t be answered is that Columbine has become art. I don’t mean art in an aesthetic, high-culture sense such as the paintings of Pollack or the novels of Henry James. I mean art in its basic sense: that Columbine, unlike virtually every school shooting, is open to interpretation. People see different things in Columbine and react differently because the context of Columbine affects each of us differently. Anyone would readily admit that Sandy Hook was horrible, but get them talking about Columbine and all sorts of under-the-surface resentments float to the surface: bullying, sexual selection, counter-culture, music, video games – an untold sundry of connotations that, depending on whom you’re talking to, will take over the discussion of murder and death and automatically remove Columbine to a social-political conversation that, I submit, is Columbine’s mythological status.
Case in point: if you talk to a lot of jocks or former-jocks or preppies or sorority girls, as I have, their general opinion about Columbine is that everyone gets picked on in high school, but they did not resort to shooting up the school. This is really nothing more than an empty attempt to regain emotional and psychological power when confronted with an uncomfortable fact. It tries to deprive the shooters of their power and revert it back onto those who caused it: the bullies. It’s saying, in quite rhetorically couched terms, that WE drove the shooters to do this, it was OUR power to harm them that gave them the power to hurt US, which they would not have had had not we bullied them to begin with. It’s a pathetic begging-the-question circular-logic argument that I just bet you’ll encounter if you ask any privileged college student, with any slight feeling that they might have been shot in Columbine, why school shootings happen.
The question is: why do they think they would have been shot?
The short answer is that they see themselves in Columbine in a way that makes them feel guilty, when it shouldn’t. The mythos of Columbine, which still persists despite constant debunking, is that Eric and Dylan sought out oppressors and murdered them accordingly. This feeds into a long history of the-nerd-takes-revenge stories we’ve all heard, and unfortunately have been projected onto Columbine. People feel guilty quite a lot, and when someone who feels particularly guilty about being attractive or popular or wealthy sees Columbine as an act of revenge from those who are ugly and rejected and bullied, then that guilt will become unsustainable and result in a projection of guilt on ugly, bullied people whom privileged people think want to kill them because they are popular, attractive, etc.… The guilt projected, of course, is guilty beforehand of wanting, if not already plotting, to commit a mass murder of which they - i.e, the attractive, wealthy, etc.... -- are a prime target. And thus, in one of those perverse things about human nature, people who feel guilty for treating other people badly or maybe, most often really, of simply thinking that they treat people badly, because they have an unfair advantage, are attractive, are wealthy --- as if that was bad to begin with, and you see how contextualized and weird and hyper-complicated all this gets -- well, they actually begin to treat people badly because they assume the less privileged people hate them, want to take sawed-off shotguns to their face, blow them up, etc. … and want to stop that by reporting them, or making up stories, or saying they stalked them, or many other things just to protect themselves, which in no small part probably explains, and I can speak from personal experience here, a lot of reported "planned" school shootings and probably also a lot of overreaction, that are in their own way contributing to the evil legacy of Columbine and ruining lives here and there of more people than I can count but that I can't go to sleep without thinking of, who -- despite the many categories of white or black or gay or atheist or whatever -- I will always have the deepest sympathy.
But that is only how some people see Columbine. There are many, probably innumerable, other interpretations – and all of them dangerous. Dangerous because we will never understand why Eric and Dylan did what they did. We can say Eric was a psychopath, which he probably was, and Dylan followed him to mass murder simply because they wanted to be seen on TV. But that is only an interpretation, and quite a specific one that perhaps puts too much cynicism and naivete at the same time on the controversy. The blunt fact is that we will never escape interpreting Columbine. It means too many things to too many people, who either condemn it, or struggle with it, or powerfully believe that it was a good thing and should be repeated. If you think I am exaggerating this last point, bear in mind that every school shooter post-Columbine has been influenced by it, and just a cursory search on Youtube will result in many “inspiring” hero-worship videos of Eric and Dylan shooting their classmates, not to mention God knows what in forums and discussion groups. But what each of these hero-worshipers sees is quite different; there is no profile of a school shooter, and because Columbine has become this malleable myth than can seemingly accommodate everyone who wants to murder their classmates, right down to two girls in the 21st century as far removed as you could imagine anyone being sympathetic to Columbine would be, proves that Columbine has transcended being a mere “school shooting”. It resonates too deeply, brings up too much turmoil, to be merely an act of violence. It is a myth made reality, because that is what a myth is: we may know what we believe isn’t true, that our memories of high school are fallible, but we tell ourselves our stories, and Columbine is a story that is a nightmare or a lament or a war song, depending on whom you talk to.
Far from being insignificant, or easily explained, Columbine is dangerous well after the fact because of what it can mean to certain people at certain times, who feel various things few of us will understand. The motives for Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook and Parkland might remain obscure, but all these shooters saw something of themselves in Columbine that we also see ourselves in, whether as victims or as saviors—and all equally dangerous. We see something “more” to Columbine because Columbine is a reflection of our high-school lives, which defines us more than we want to admit, and that we resent that we don’t want to admit, which also affects how we deal with things like rejection and bullying – which goes on well into the adult world – and sex and money and class and culture. This is what I saw, those long-assed innocent years before I was incarcerated, and that it’s taken me over ten years to say.
While the danger of some bullied or about-to-snap kid who looks at Columbine and sees a way out, a way to “fame”, or just simple revenge might be great, there is also the danger that we will only look at Columbine superficially, and not understand ourselves in the process. That we will send many a misunderstood rebel or intellectual or artist off to prison or a mental institution because, well -- I'll say it, if no one else will -- our high-school prejudices think they might want to kill us because of who we were in high school or have become since. This might all seem very abstract and general because I'm not getting into specifics, for which I have legal reasons not to, but trust me: this is all very real and very scary and affects you in more ways than you know.
Thus Columbine is double-edged sword of trying to stop school shootings while also not infringing on civil rights, or making America a police state, or confiscating guns – all of which are just as frightening as any shooting.
Therefore, I humbly submit, after great thought and suffering on the matter, we will never begin to stop school shootings until we understand what Columbine means, and continues to mean, and not just to the people who would commit their own shooting, but how and why we feel the way we do about them. This is a tall order, I know, and that’s why I’m pessimistic. I don’t think America will ever reach that level of maturity, and in fact, given our divisive culture and resentment against each other based on so many stupid, silly, forgettable things like gender and race and sex and sexuality, I don’t think we, as nation, will ever look at each other honesty or answer these questions about ourselves honestly enough to fix our problems, or even care that they are problems.
And so these shootings will go on, and on.
And, as I said in 2007, and write now and will write again –
I told you so.
This essay is dedicated to Dr. Dick Allison, who came to see me in my darkest hour and gave me a light that still survives. It is only through the bravery against suffering that you have taught me, old friend, that I was able to write this.