People all over the globe are familiar with the Columbine High School Shooting that occurred on April 20, 1999. Although, while people are informed of what happened, many are still not able to comprehend why it occurred.
Understanding the reason students decide to kill their classmates can be difficult. We don’t always like to believe our teens are capable of such tragic acts, and yet all too often it happens right underneath our noses.
Over eleven years ago, I built my Columbine Research website Dylan Klebold as a resource for researchers to find accurate information on the investigation. Providing more than 35,000 pages of official reports published by the Jefferson County Police Department, the FBI as well as more than twenty-five other agencies, my website generated more than a million hits a month at its highest point. While some users came for information for school papers or projects they were assigned, others who identified with being bullied and outcast came for comfort and understanding.
In addition to my Columbine website, I also managed to obtain the old AOL screen name of Columbine gunman Eric Harris, and participated in deep discussions with all who messaged me including deceased school shooters Bastian Bosse (Gescheister School, Germany, 2006), Asa Coon (Success Tech Academy, 2007) and Kimveer Gill (Dawson College, Canada, 2006).
Having Columbine gunman Eric’s former screen name gave me unquestionable trust from everyone. Upset teenagers would sometimes share their plans for a school massacre and talk openly about their desire to kill their classmates. At first I didn’t get the huge responsibility that came with using Eric’s former screen name, but all that changed when one of the teens I was conversing with for a while told me that he had been planning a school massacre but our conversations caused him to call it off.
After thirteen years of communicating with tens of thousands of students who have experienced what it’s like to want to kill their classmates, I’ve written a book on the subject soon to be published. My book is titled Transcending Columbine and is expected to be published near the end of 2012.
Prior to the publication of this book, I am publishing smaller articles on some of the issues discussed in the book to give people a small taste of an issue that seems too big to understand.
Understanding Columbine
What are we really asking when we look at each other and ask, “what caused Columbine?” At first glance it seems as though we are asking an easy question, however, the answer is not that simple.
While I’m not publishing this article to explore the actual cause of Columbine, I would like to talk about the concept of cause and get to the root of what we’re really saying when we want to know, “why” a teenager kills his classmates.
Each time another school shooting happens, if the shooter survives the first question we ask him is, “why?” Generally the gunman will say he felt unloved, heavily outcast, and despised by his teachers and peers – and sometimes even his family. He’ll tell us that no one ever loved him and he saw no other way out. But those answers never satisfy us. We immediately relate those answers to our own lives and poo-poo every single one of them because we can’t relate to them. “No, those are excuses,” we say, “give me a better reason. Tell me why!”
The truth is that a high school student can give us 2,000 reasons for why he killed his peers, and we will never be content. Asking a gunman why he killed his peers is only ever going to produce what occurs to us as justifications and rationalization for their choices – and we know this – yet we continue to ask, rejecting every answer.
Well, what answer would be good enough? Is there really anything a teenager can tell us that would satisfy the question of why they shot up their school? I don’t think there is. And I say that because when we question a teen to tell us why he shot up his school, all he knows is what experiences led him to feeling like a massacre was the answer. And when we ask him why he shot up his school, we aren’t asking him to share his experiences – we want him to give us a response that will help us make sense of his actions. The catch-22 is that unless we’ve experienced wanting to kill our classmates, we can never make sense of his actions and we therefore reject everything he tells us.
While he’s sharing his experiences believing that’s what we’re asking him to do; we’re expecting him to make us comprehend something we never can. We’re having two different conversations, and in the end the teenager only feels frustrated and unheard. He’s answered our question in the only way he knows how – and instead of having his experiences heard, he’s told that nothing he says is a good enough answer. Yet his experiences were very real, so he doesn’t understand why we won’t accept his response. Clearly we’re not having the conversation we think we are with these gunmen.
What caused Columbine?
When we think about the “cause” of Columbine, it seems simple for many people in spite of a variety of differing. Some of us believe bullying caused Columbine while others believe a lack of God in the schools caused Columbine. Some people believe the police caused Columbine by not acting fast enough, and others believe the parents of the shooters caused Columbine by not paying enough attention to what their kids were up to. Some even believe that psychotropic drugs caused the massacre.
An objective individual can usually see how others could come to the above beliefs even if they don’t concur. For example, we know that bullied teenagers can identify with being bullied, and it’s easy to see how a bullied teenager can say bullying caused Columbine even if they, themselves, have never chosen to kill their classmates. To the bullied teenager, it makes sense that bullying caused Columbine.
What if there is a deeper, simpler truth to the cause of Columbine and school violence?
Any reasonable individual can agree that in spite of the circumstances in the lives of school shooters, each of them made the choice to bring a weapon to school and fire at their classmates. They may have been influenced but in the end the choice was theirs – and they chose to kill. This is perhaps the only certainty we have.
Attributing anything but the gunman’s choice as the cause of school violence only absolves the shooter from their accountability for their choice to kill their classmates. At the end of the day, the only cause for a school shooting is the gunman’s choice to shoot their peers at school.
If bullies are the cause of school shootings, then all people who gets bullied would shoot up their school. (They don’t).
If a lack of God in schools is the cause of school shootings, then all people who goes to public school would shoot up their school. (They don’t).
If easy access to firearms is the cause of school shootings, then all people who has access to a firearm would shoot up their school. (They don’t).
If medication is the cause of school shootings, then all people on psychiatric medication would shoot up their school. (They don’t).
The only reliable common factor among every school shooting that ever has been or ever will be is choice. And therein lie the problem – and also the solution.
Visit my website to download a free sample chapter of my book and discover a new perspective on school violence: Transcending Columbine