Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  Co-authors James McGee and Caren DeBernardo found that the family appears normal, although it is in reality “often quite dysfunctional.” Relations with siblings are “fractious beyond the typical parameters of sibling rivalry” (which seems to match Dylan, but not Eric.) There may be divorce, or friction between the boys—all are boys—and their parents, especially over control. “Fathers tend to be absent or minimally involved in parenting,” and discipline is “overly harsh and applied inconsistently.”

  School shooters differ from traditional cases of juvenile delinquency because the parents do not appear to mete out physical abuse or neglect, although shooters may feel they cannot turn to adults such as parents or teachers.

  Shooters rehearse through letters, diaries, and spoken remarks but generally stay out of major trouble until the shootings. They are intolerant of others, but prior crimes are small-scale, such as vandalism. Grades may be average, but the shooters are above average in intelligence.

  “The Classroom Avenger” clinical diagnosis is “atypical depression” and “mixed personality disorder with paranoid, antisocial, and narcissistic features.” They show their depression as sullen, irritable, secluded, and angry, but do not appear patently crazy.

  ∞

  There is not only a psychological profile of school shooters, but an environmental one—one which fits both Eric and Dylan. School shootings overwhelmingly occur in suburbs and small towns, which may be rich in sports, shopping malls, and BMWs, but poor in diversity and tolerance. Deviation from the white-bread norm is punished, and the high school campus is often the sole arbiter of adolescent status. A loser at school feels like a loser through and through. School shooters have no escape hatch, nowhere else to turn for self-esteem. Options outside of school offered by a big city are not found in small towns and suburbs: There is no Hollywood Boulevard for the punk rockers.

  The template for suburban school shootings may be the inner city youth violence epidemic from 1985 to 1995 that “seeped into pop culture,” as one study put it. Columbine, along with Littleton and the other school shooting locales, are the exact opposite of crime-infested, poverty-ridden high schools in Detroit and Watts. But thousands of Columbines across the country are tough in their own suburban and small town way. Status and cliques are as virulent as gang warfare, and the outcasts face stiff odds. After too many marginalizations, dating rejections, or bottles thrown at them, white, middle-class, disaffected youth may have hijacked the violent, inner-city solution.

  The towns of school shootings have different names but the same genetic makeup: Springfield, Oregon; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; Santee, California. They form a violent crescent through the South and West. Here, the spiritual forefathers of school shooters are Western gunslingers and Southern duels. Simply put, the psychologist Richard Nisbett notes, “The U.S. South, and Western regions of the United States initially settled by Southerners, are more violent than the rest of the country.”

  The South radiates a “culture of honor,” where any affront, disrespect, or sign of violence is to be avenged. The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, according to Nisbett, is “replete with accounts of feuds, duels, lynchings, and bushwhackings.” The region has a philosophy of self-reliance summed up by the proverb: “Every man is a sheriff in his own hearth.” It may easily be transferred to the Wild West, where law enforcement was sparse.

  The South became this way, Nisbett argues, because it was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble and landed gentry status” who coveted “knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.” After them, according to Nisbett, an even more influential wave of immigrants brought more violence—Scottish and Irish herders who were “tribal, pastoral and warlike.” Their livelihood depended on protecting their animals, which necessitated violence, or the threat of it. They eventually spread to the western frontier.

  Southerners and Westerners will not say they favor violent solutions, but do see it as more acceptable in light of defending their family, property, and honor, according to psychologist Dov Cohen, who has also studied violence in the regions.

  Nisbett contrasts that with the Northeastern United States, “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans. In their advanced agricultural economy, the most effective stance was one of quiet, cooperative citizenship.”

  That close-knit living continues today in the large cities of the Northeast, just as the sprawl of the South and West continues to promote the concept of self-defense. In the suburbs, everyone is a newcomer and ought to be regarded warily; they have no history to back them up. Public places are few and far between. Where there are sidewalks, they are desolate. Where people do live together, it is a kingdom of private residences, tract home next to tract home, with cars as fiefdoms on wheels. It is an area fertile for keeping to yourself and taking the law into your own hands. A boy still becomes a man with a gun. And in the suburb and small town, the gun is the great equalizer against overwhelming unpopularity.

  In the South of the 1930s, Nisbett indicates that it was “impossible” to obtain a murder conviction if someone killed after being insulted. “Until the 1970s, Texas law held that there was no crime if a man killed his wife’s lover caught in flagrante delicto,” he adds.

  Southern and Western lawmakers “vote for more hawkish foreign policies, and self-defense laws that are more lenient in allowing people to use violence in defending themselves and their property,” according to Cohen. In one study, Southern and Western employers were “more likely than Northern employers to give warm responses to job applicants who had killed someone in a bar fight, and newspaper reporters of the South and West were more likely than their Northern counterparts to treat stories of honor-related violence with sympathy and understanding for the perpetrator.” In another study, “Southerners who are insulted believe their masculine reputation has been damaged,” and respond more aggressively than Northerners.

  White Southerners are more likely to agree that spanking is a proper disciplinary tool when compared to Northerners and Midwesterners. They are also more likely to expect a fight among children who have been bullied.

  In situations involving hoodlums, student disturbances, and big city riots, white Southern males were “more likely to advocate violence” to stop such violence, Nisbett reported. Those who do not respond to a violent affront by fighting, or shooting back, are “not much of a man.”

  Other studies show that those in the South and West watch more violent television, have more violent magazine subscriptions, have more hunting licenses per capita, and the regions have higher rates of execution. The culture of honor may push more people to carry and use weapons, according to Nisbett. And there is a circle of violence. Since people in these regions are more likely to be on the lookout for violence, they are more likely to find it.

  The culture of honor is more clearly transmitted in “strong, cohesive” communities, according to Cohen. Thus, the more close-knit the community, the more efficiently its values are handed down.

  But suburbs and small towns hit by school shootings may have the worst of both worlds: They often experience change with an influx of new residents—the classic small town that suddenly becomes a big-city suburb, or the suburb that balloons in size. This creates an unstable populace that mixes with a lingering culture of honor.

  Yet a school shooting may also catapult communities into maturity and discipline. After facing the biggest crisis of their lives, they may emerge with a gravitas that includes better relations among residents, less bullying, and fewer walls between cliques. It is as if they must have their own, municipal civil wars before they can come together.

  ∞

  Eric and Dylan were uncharacteristically successful school shooters. Not because they killed so many others, but because they killed themselves. School shooters often crave suicide; they mention it in their writings, or ask to be killed once captured.


  Not surprisingly, given where school shootings dominate, suicide rates in the South and West are above average. The Center for Disease Control has calculated the “crude rate” of suicide from

  1999 – 2005 based on population for the nation’s four regions.

  The rates, adjusted for age, are as follows:

  Northeast: 7.75

  Midwest: 10.51

  South: 11.64

  West: 12.20

  Teens, who make up the legions of school shooters, are especially susceptible to suicide. They are more unstable, fail to comprehend the finality of their actions, and are more likely to be influenced by other suicides and take part in copycat incidents.

  ∞

  Whether or not bullying caused Columbine was taken up by the governor’s Columbine Review Commission. Regina Huerter, who then ran the Denver District Attorney’s juvenile diversion program, wrote a report for the commission which she acknowledged was not scientific, but contained “input from a broad cross-section” of twenty-eight adults and fifteen current or past students during the fall of 2000, over a year after the shootings. “What is not in doubt is that bullying occurred at Columbine, that in some instances the school administration reacted appropriately, and in other instances the school administration’s reaction is unclear or altogether unknown,” she concluded in “The Culture of Columbine.”

  Huerter tried to address whether Columbine had an overarching jock culture that smothered the rest of the students. “I’m not sure I would agree,” she wrote. While the football team had a winning season, she did not find an “abundance” of “go football” type posters. “I thought maybe this was because the school was trying to downplay the ‘jock’ image,” Huerter added. “After talking with several people, I found this was not the case. In fact, posters are limited and pep rallies or assemblies are only held if the team wins. I had heard that the winning forensics team, band and theater were not put in the spotlight. While I believe there is a strong emphasis on sports, after reading three editions of ‘Rebeline’ the school’s bulletin, all types of successes were noted.”

  After Huerter’s presentation before the commission, eight Columbine teachers testified that bullying was not part of the school culture, and that the school did not tolerate such behavior. Sixteen more teachers showed up to support their colleagues, and 107 signed a letter backing the speakers. Principal Frank DeAngelis testified before the commission that he did not hear of or observe rampant bullying. “If it was occurring,” DeAngelis said, “it was not being reported.”

  But people told Huerter that Eric and Dylan were “loners and often the brunt of ridicule and bullying.” It was reported to be shoving, pushing, and name-calling, especially “faggot,” although more specifics were lacking.

  Yet the bullied could also be bullies. Dylan and especially Eric “were often identified as rude and mean,” Huerter notes.

  ∞

  In recent years, suburban teen shooters may have influenced a new realm of killers. Native American Jeff Weise killed nine—seven at his school and two in a home—before killing himself on a Red Lake, Minnesota Indian reservation in 2005. Red Lake was the opposite of the white, somewhat wealthy Columbine. So was Weise himself. But the unpopular sixteen-year-old learned the same style of revenge from Columbine, down to wearing a trench coat and identifying with Nazis. Part of Red Lake falls in Beltrami County, the county with the highest rate of suicide for those under thirty-five in Minnesota.

  In 2006, it appears two adults adopted the school shooter manifesto. In Bailey, Colorado, located in a county adjacent Columbine, Duane Morrison, 53, sexually molested female students after sneaking into Platte Canyon High School. He eventually killed one girl and then himself. Morrison’s final letter penned the day before his rampage indicates that his father physically abused by him. (Oddly, he says that as a boy, he found a safe haven at school, the same place he turned into a crime scene.) Morrison also shared Dylan’s depressive state, noting, “I’m tired of living, and for the last fifteen years or so I’m tired of living in pain. Constant pain.”

  Just days later, thirty-two-year-old Charles Carl Roberts IV attacked an Amish school house in Pennsylvania and killed five girls. He then killed himself.

  In 2007, another adult became a school shooter. Cho Seung-Hui, twenty-three, superseded Columbine in numbers when he killed thirty-two, then himself, at Virginia Tech University. It is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and came four days before the eight-year anniversary of Columbine, April 16.

  Columbine retains a deeper national resonance because it solidified in the minds of the public as the first modern-day mass shooting. It was directed at a more vulnerable high school population and carried out by two high-schoolers. It played out for hours on live television. And because Virginia Tech victims were from across the country, and across the world, the grief was not as focused on a single locale.

  Yet Virginia Tech has similarities to Columbine and other school shootings. The school is located in small-town Blacksburg, where the ghosts of the South—honor and violence—still roam. The grassy, central quad area that became ground zero for mourning and memorials after the Virginia Tech shootings had long been named for the use of force—Drillfield, where the school’s corps of cadets still marches.

  ∞

  If anyone might stop school shooters, it is school shooters themselves. Deconstructing them might diminish their appeal and any aura of power. Publishing photos of the dead—the bloody bodies of Eric and Dylan—might be a deterrent, or, as one study put it, “To the extent that there is a copycat thread connecting the recent school shootings, this presents the possibility that it could run its course, as the infamy of being just one more suicidal loser dims.”

  The Klebolds:

  Searching and Dueling

  In the few days before Columbine, Tom Klebold thought Dylan’s attitude had been “good” and he was “very communicative.” Nothing seemed amiss. If there was a problem, Tom thought, Dylan would say something.

  Tom did think Dylan’s voice was “tight’” the Friday before the shootings and made a “mental note” to talk to Dylan about it. Tom also told police he “may have even mentioned his concern to his pastor.” But Tom never had that chance to talk with Dylan before the shootings, and it does not appear the Klebolds had a pastor when Columbine struck.

  On the morning of Columbine, Tom and Sue didn’t see Dylan leave for school but thought it was weird the way he closed the door and said “bye,” like he was in a bad mood. It was 5:30 a.m.

  Sue was going to ask him what was wrong when he got home from school. But around noon, Tom got a call from Nate Dykeman. Dykeman had left school for lunch just as the shootings started, at around 11:20 a.m. When he tried to get back in, the intersections were blocked. He asked classmate Jen Harmon what was going on. She said two kids in trench coats were shooting up the school. Dykeman didn’t want to believe it, but thought it might be Eric and Dylan. He went home and called Tom, who worked out of his home and was unaware of the shootings.

  “Oh my God!” he said, after Dykeman told him.

  Tom checked to see if Dylan’s trench coat was in the house. It was not. He turned on the television and called four people: his wife, Dylan’s older brother, the woman who rented the pool house, and a family lawyer. Judy Brown, meanwhile, decided to head over. Also en route was Lakewood police officer Rollie Inskeep, one of the thousand-plus officers and others who assisted Jefferson County with the Columbine investigation. Inskeep arrived around 1:15 p.m. and met up with three SWAT officers from the city of Sheridan police department. The Klebolds weren’t really surprised and were “pretty level,” Inskeep says. “They were kind of flat-liners, it was hard to read them.” Maybe they were in shock, he figures.

  Everyone was asked to leave the home and police swept through to check for anyone who was hiding. When they were inside the home, Inskeep kept the Klebolds in one ro
om that appeared to be a study. The home was a cut above average, Inskeep thought, but not extravagant. The Klebolds plugged him for more details on the shootings, but he was out of police radio range. When he tried to get information via radio, he found that the television was putting it out faster. So they watched the reality show they were part of unfold on television.

  Tom agreed to speak with Inskeep, “with the knowledge of his attorney,” and provided a brief record of Dylan’s life, starting with his son’s date of birth and car—the black 1982 BMW. Tom noted that he himself opposed guns, and so did Dylan. The house only contained a BB gun, Tom said, originally a gift to Dylan when he was about ten years old.

  Sue told Inskeep she had not noticed anything unusual about Dylan and in fact he was “extremely happy because he had just recently been accepted at the college of his first choice, which was the University of Arizona in Tucson.” Although Dylan was “not a mainstream type kid,” he was not unhappy, Sue said. But he did play computer games and that bothered her. When Inskeep asked about family dynamics, Sue said Dylan and his brother “were beginning to develop a good relationship.”

  In his report, Inskeep noted some intriguing comments by Sue Klebold: “When asked about guns or explosives, she stated that Dylan has always been fascinated by explosives and guns. She stated that Dylan wore combat-looking boots and that he liked the look that he had established.”

  The rest of the world now knew Dylan was fascinated with guns and explosives. Yet it was news that his mom seemed aware of that fascination before Columbine. But as in Dylan’s diversion file, Sue was quick to change her mind if anything she said seemed culpable.

  “She then recanted her previous statement and stated that Dylan did not really talk about explosives and guns but he just likes to have the look of the trench coat and boots,” Inskeep wrote.

  After speaking with Sue, Inskeep spoke with their attorney, Gary Lozow. “Gary indicated that the family would be willing to remain cooperative with us and assist us.” Tom also indicated “he would be willing to respond to the high school in an attempt to talk Dylan out of the school if in fact he was involved.”