Interesting. I've long thought that they were random psychos that just happened to get a hold of firearms and cause some havoc. I thought this was interesting, too (I'm not sure if you saw this link in the article):
What most people know about the massacre is what they learned in the first few days after it occurred. The basic narrative of Columbine—the story that Americans absorbed—was based on fragmentary and incorrect information from the first hours after the shooting. The story was that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, a pair of lonely, outcast Goths, tore through the school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud between athletes and the Trenchcoat Mafia. After years of bullying, the pair finally snapped and turned on their tormenters with automatic weapons and pipe bombs. They arrived at the school with a hit list of victims, including despised minorities, Christians, and athletes. In fact, this tale was mostly a myth, as were other supposed "facts" about Columbine involving Marilyn Manson, the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, and a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into New York City.
Here is the straight story on seven of the central myths:
1. Targeting jocks, blacks, and Christians: There were no targets. Harris and Klebold just wanted body count, and they didn't care who died. They expected their bombs to do most of the killing, murdering everyone in the cafeteria, irrespective of clique or social standing. When the bombs failed, they shot indiscriminately, firing into open crowds and under tables without bothering to see who their victims were. They taunted jocks briefly in the library, but they taunted virtually everyone else there, too.
2. The Trench Coat Mafia: A small group of Columbine students did dub themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, and they did have a feud with a band of jocks in 1999. But it was never a formal gang or club, and most of the members graduated nearly a year before the massacre. Harris and Klebold were never closely affiliated with the group and did not appear in the 1998 yearbook picture identifying the members. The TCM had little to do with Harris and Klebold and nothing to do with the massacre. The killers wore long coats in order to hide their weapons.
3. The Hit List: Eric Harris did create an enemies list, with a wide and sometimes comical assortment of personalities—students who pissed him off, girls who refused his dates, Tiger Woods. There's no indication that these were ever intended as targets. No one on the list was killed.
4. Christian Martyr Cassie Bernall: One of the killers allegedly asked student Cassie Bernall if she believed in God, then killed her when she said yes. Bernall became a revered figure among evangelical Christians. In fact, one of the killers posed the question to another girl, Valeen Schnurr, after she had already been shot. They had a short exchange, he reloaded, got distracted, and she crawled away to safety.
5. Marilyn Manson: Klebold and Harris hated Marilyn Manson. On his Web site, Harris said he loved, "Good, fast, hard, strong, pounding TECHNO!! Such as KMFDM, PRODIGY, ORBITAL, RAMMSTEIN, and such."
6. Escape to New York: Harris' journal does contain a passage about hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City, but that appears to have been an early fantasy. He settled on a more practical scheme long before he and Klebold actually staged their massacre. By the time of the attack, they fully expected to die at the high school. They refer to their death routinely and explicitly in their writings and in their videos.
7. Outcasts: Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that Harris and Klebold were rejected outcasts. They were not captains of the football team, but they were far more accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung out with a tight circle of close friends and partied regularly on the weekend with a wider crowd.
Definitely interesting, particularly if you pair it up with today's editorial piece on Salon.com, which basically reinforces the accepted ideas/myths about Columbine.
It's all about the bullying that the poor psychopaths suffered from. BS. They were nuts, plain and simple. The fact that Harris was planning ways to kill random people tells me that he was a sociopath, not an outcast.
I never heard much about the families; where were they, did they beat (the "boys") them mercilessly, ignore them, afraid of them?
These two didn't just sprout out of the ground and if the families bare no responsibility for the "boys" actions; how could they not see their troubles?
The families have kept a very low profile since the shootings. As far as Klebold is concerned, there is good reason to wonder how he got so depressed and suicidal, and were there any indicators along the way? Could he have been helped? Was it his family? Was it something else?
As for Harris, who knows what makes a person that way? Sociopaths are a class unto themselves; it's hard to know what makes them tick or what makes them, period. I'm not suprised that, for the most part, he was able to slip under the radar. Sociopaths can be very manipulative and are good at convincing others to help them or to get them out of trouble. The bits in his journal describing how amused he was that he convinced the people whose van he broke into that he was sorry etc is a good example of how his mind worked. He wasn't sorry, he manipulated people around him and got pleasure out of manipulating them. He had no remorse and no compassion.
Depression & suicidal thoughts are not uncommon for a teenager. A thought just crossed my mind. I remember wondering if-his name slips me now-the bastard, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City; if he was suicidal and couldn't pull it off himself. I mean they caught him only because he was driving down the highway 100 mph. without a license plate.
Still you have to blame our culture too. The culture of violence, the availability of the information to build these weapons, the inspiration etc. Humanity has a dark side (or maybe just us males) but the culture is sympathetic to it.
Depression and suicidal thoughts aren't uncommon; what Dylan Klebold did is uncommon. There may have been preciptating events or complicating factors, signs or signals. Who can say, we're just looking back trying to make sense of it.
I think you also need to consider the unique synergy of the two. If Harris was really a psychopath, and Klebold an angry depressive, then you have a bad cycle of anger, violence and psychopathic manipulation. Klebold could have turned out as ordinarily dysfunctional as any kid. He could have been fine. It would have taken work, but he could have changed. Hell, angry, depressive, and having a potential for violence-- that was me at the same age. But my friends were fairly sane, my family caring, my life good. Klebold's touchstone and sounding board may have well been a psychopath, which would not bode well for his future.
If the psychologists are right, then Harris was already well on the way to some pretty nasty shit. He was wired wrong in ways we can't begin to understand. And he was good at hiding. A natural predator, a compulsive liar, a ruthless monster. And charismatic enough to drag someone else with him with fantasies of power and glory.
There was an important convergence in the lives of Harris and Klebold, and society did play its part-- but I think these boys were going someplace bad no matter what.
I think that if Klebold had a better support system, and best bud that wasn't a psychopath, he *could* have been helped. His troubles weren't all that unique.
Sociopaths, on the other hand, like Harris are hard to work with. Anyone with a personality disorder (which is what a sociopath is classified as) is difficult to deal with. Most don't experience any growth or change in their personality unless they happen to make it to their late 40s--which is pretty uncommon because many end up dead (either by someone else or by suicide, drug overdose, poor health).
If the report on Harris is accurate, that boy was not on anything close to a good path. Sounds like he very well could have been on the highway to serial violent crime no matter what. His behavior and diary information sounds surprisingly like what I have read about serial killers' early writing. I think he was lost a long time ago. I wonder sometimes what is wrong with people like this-- is it chemical, neurological, developmental? Did such people always exist among us, or is this an outgrowth of our modern world?
The thought of people with personality disorders of this sort always being around, however, is pretty fascinating. Is this an aberration, a sort of behavioral cancer, or is this somehow an adaptation that once provided a valid evolutionary strategy in humans but which has since become a negative trait?
I know there are no answers, but it still fascinates me in a sick sort of way.
I know there are no answers, but it still fascinates me in a sick sort of way.
It is interesting. Personality disorders make me wonder about a lot of different things--how it may be a survival mechanism that goes haywire, that it may be how humans were to begin with, that maybe if some soiopaths were treated with some drugs they could learn to feel....
I used to be really fascinated with serial killers. Read a lot of books about them. I was curious about what went wrong that made them so insane.
Then I started working with sex offendors and vicitms of abuse, and couldn't stand reading about serial killers anymore. Made me too angry.
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What most people know about the massacre is what they learned in the first few days after it occurred. The basic narrative of Columbine—the story that Americans absorbed—was based on fragmentary and incorrect information from the first hours after the shooting. The story was that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, a pair of lonely, outcast Goths, tore through the school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud between athletes and the Trenchcoat Mafia. After years of bullying, the pair finally snapped and turned on their tormenters with automatic weapons and pipe bombs. They arrived at the school with a hit list of victims, including despised minorities, Christians, and athletes. In fact, this tale was mostly a myth, as were other supposed "facts" about Columbine involving Marilyn Manson, the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, and a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into New York City.
Here is the straight story on seven of the central myths:
1. Targeting jocks, blacks, and Christians: There were no targets. Harris and Klebold just wanted body count, and they didn't care who died. They expected their bombs to do most of the killing, murdering everyone in the cafeteria, irrespective of clique or social standing. When the bombs failed, they shot indiscriminately, firing into open crowds and under tables without bothering to see who their victims were. They taunted jocks briefly in the library, but they taunted virtually everyone else there, too.
2. The Trench Coat Mafia: A small group of Columbine students did dub themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, and they did have a feud with a band of jocks in 1999. But it was never a formal gang or club, and most of the members graduated nearly a year before the massacre. Harris and Klebold were never closely affiliated with the group and did not appear in the 1998 yearbook picture identifying the members. The TCM had little to do with Harris and Klebold and nothing to do with the massacre. The killers wore long coats in order to hide their weapons.
3. The Hit List: Eric Harris did create an enemies list, with a wide and sometimes comical assortment of personalities—students who pissed him off, girls who refused his dates, Tiger Woods. There's no indication that these were ever intended as targets. No one on the list was killed.
4. Christian Martyr Cassie Bernall: One of the killers allegedly asked student Cassie Bernall if she believed in God, then killed her when she said yes. Bernall became a revered figure among evangelical Christians. In fact, one of the killers posed the question to another girl, Valeen Schnurr, after she had already been shot. They had a short exchange, he reloaded, got distracted, and she crawled away to safety.
5. Marilyn Manson: Klebold and Harris hated Marilyn Manson. On his Web site, Harris said he loved, "Good, fast, hard, strong, pounding TECHNO!! Such as KMFDM, PRODIGY, ORBITAL, RAMMSTEIN, and such."
6. Escape to New York: Harris' journal does contain a passage about hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City, but that appears to have been an early fantasy. He settled on a more practical scheme long before he and Klebold actually staged their massacre. By the time of the attack, they fully expected to die at the high school. They refer to their death routinely and explicitly in their writings and in their videos.
7. Outcasts: Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that Harris and Klebold were rejected outcasts. They were not captains of the football team, but they were far more accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung out with a tight circle of close friends and partied regularly on the weekend with a wider crowd.
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These two didn't just sprout out of the ground and if the families bare no responsibility for the "boys" actions; how could they not see their troubles?
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As for Harris, who knows what makes a person that way? Sociopaths are a class unto themselves; it's hard to know what makes them tick or what makes them, period. I'm not suprised that, for the most part, he was able to slip under the radar. Sociopaths can be very manipulative and are good at convincing others to help them or to get them out of trouble. The bits in his journal describing how amused he was that he convinced the people whose van he broke into that he was sorry etc is a good example of how his mind worked. He wasn't sorry, he manipulated people around him and got pleasure out of manipulating them. He had no remorse and no compassion.
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A thought just crossed my mind. I remember wondering if-his name slips me now-the bastard, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City; if he was suicidal and couldn't pull it off himself. I mean they caught him only because he was driving down the highway 100 mph. without a license plate.
Still you have to blame our culture too. The culture of violence, the availability of the information to build these weapons, the inspiration etc. Humanity has a dark side (or maybe just us males) but the culture is sympathetic to it.
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I think you also need to consider the unique synergy of the two. If Harris was really a psychopath, and Klebold an angry depressive, then you have a bad cycle of anger, violence and psychopathic manipulation. Klebold could have turned out as ordinarily dysfunctional as any kid. He could have been fine. It would have taken work, but he could have changed. Hell, angry, depressive, and having a potential for violence-- that was me at the same age. But my friends were fairly sane, my family caring, my life good. Klebold's touchstone and sounding board may have well been a psychopath, which would not bode well for his future.
If the psychologists are right, then Harris was already well on the way to some pretty nasty shit. He was wired wrong in ways we can't begin to understand. And he was good at hiding. A natural predator, a compulsive liar, a ruthless monster. And charismatic enough to drag someone else with him with fantasies of power and glory.
There was an important convergence in the lives of Harris and Klebold, and society did play its part-- but I think these boys were going someplace bad no matter what.
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Sociopaths, on the other hand, like Harris are hard to work with. Anyone with a personality disorder (which is what a sociopath is classified as) is difficult to deal with. Most don't experience any growth or change in their personality unless they happen to make it to their late 40s--which is pretty uncommon because many end up dead (either by someone else or by suicide, drug overdose, poor health).
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He was a fucking maniac.
I think people like him have existed for a long time and I don't think it's just part of modern society.
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The thought of people with personality disorders of this sort always being around, however, is pretty fascinating. Is this an aberration, a sort of behavioral cancer, or is this somehow an adaptation that once provided a valid evolutionary strategy in humans but which has since become a negative trait?
I know there are no answers, but it still fascinates me in a sick sort of way.
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It is interesting. Personality disorders make me wonder about a lot of different things--how it may be a survival mechanism that goes haywire, that it may be how humans were to begin with, that maybe if some soiopaths were treated with some drugs they could learn to feel....
I used to be really fascinated with serial killers. Read a lot of books about them. I was curious about what went wrong that made them so insane.
Then I started working with sex offendors and vicitms of abuse, and couldn't stand reading about serial killers anymore. Made me too angry.