Why Did Columbine Happen?
Of ideology, psychopathy, and our habit of never taking American teenagers seriously.
If you’re interested in hearing about my last post on the fall of the Ethiopian Empire, as well as the Orwell review, check out my discussion with Will Jarvis on the Narratives Podcast.
Content Warning: This post contains excerpts from the Columbine killers’ personal journals.
The problem with ascribing a cause or bundle of causes to any extreme social behavior is that the contributing factors we might wish to label ‘causes’ are inevitably found in a great many cases where the extreme behavior never manifested. Taking sexual promiscuity as an example (not whatsoever as a value judgment or moral equivalence to any kind of crime)—I have heard it attributed to strict parenting, lax parenting, early exposure to sexual content and information, late exposure to same, oppressive religiosity, amoral godlessness, and on and on and on, despite the plain fact that a large portion of those at the receiving end of all of those listed do not end up becoming sexually promiscuous.
It’s not particularly insightful to point out that few kinds of pathology have singular causes, but in the case of Columbine, finding any factor or group of factors that could be said to have any satisfying explanatory power or pragmatic predictive value for preventing future school shootings struck me as particularly knotty and difficult. Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters states the basic problem concisely:
…I have long since given up hoping for a single puzzle piece that will drop into place and finally reveal why Dylan and Eric did what they did. I wish the vectors propelling the boys toward catastrophe had been unambiguous. I am also wary of the many pat explanations that sprang up in the wake of the tragedy. Did school culture and bullying “cause” Columbine? Violent video games? Negligent parenting? The paramilitarization of American popular culture? These are pieces in the greater puzzle, to be sure. But none of them, even in a combination amplifying their individual effects, has ever been enough for me to explain away the kind of hatred and violence the boys displayed.
The disturbing Tumblr fandom and this subreddit with 37,000(!) members further speak, albeit in different ways, to the unfortunate power of the ‘puzzle’ that is Columbine, and many other instances of dramatic, violent, and widely publicized departures from ‘normal’ criminal behavior. I think most can agree that crimes ranging from pickpocketing to armed robbery and even aggravated manslaughter exist on a fairly easily understood spectrum of ‘normal’ behavior, in that the average person, without much thought, can deduce a motive, and understand how they too might be driven to that sort of action.
Columbine and other events of its type (which I guess I would characterize as murder-suicides without clear political motives) do not, at least at first look, appear to exist on that spectrum. Not only do most people fail to understand the motives and empathize with the killers, but entire books are often written on the subject, books written by careful experts and eyewitnesses, who themselves offer only tentative explanations and even then disagree with one another, if not on the what’s and how’s, then at least on the whys. Unfortunately, the whys are what most people, including myself, are reading for.
So Why Did Columbine Happen? It depends on who you ask.
If you ask Dave Cullen, author of the NYT bestseller Columbine, you’ll hear that bullying played no role and that the two killers weren’t outcasts, but a dyad formed between a clinical depressive and a psychopath, who potentialized each other’s rage and were mainly driven by the complete lack of human empathy on the part of EH (I’ll be using the initials of the two killers as much as possible) Cullen even goes so far as to state that we’re in a sense lucky that EH hatched his plot when young and dumb, because if he’d reached adulthood, he might’ve managed to kill a lot more people.
If you ask Jeff Kass, author of the much less popular and yet more comprehensive and even-handed Columbine: A True Crime Story, you’ll hear much in the way of information, but little that amounts to a coherent explanation of motive. Kass touches on everything from the individualist wild west culture of old to the very ordinary genealogies of both killers. Most interesting for me was his gentle pushing back on Cullen’s, and the FBI’s narrative about EH being a psychopath and DK a depressive and mostly a follower. But more on that later.
Brooks Brown, an estranged friend of the killers, author of No Easy Answers, and the one student they told to leave school premises before the shooting began, paints a picture of Columbine as brutally hierarchical, with an ‘upper-class’ of jocks who mercilessly tormented the killers and other low-status kids of their ilk. He tells that students, before the shooting, would sometimes say ‘it was just a matter of time’ before it happened there. He’s completely unambiguous on this point: Columbine was a horrible, horrible place in which to be low status, and EH and DK were about as low status as you could get. The shooting, then, can be fairly summed up as an act of revenge against everyone at school, because they were all enablers and beneficiaries of a system that kept EH and DK at the bottom.
Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the shooters, sees the ‘cause’ as a failure of early intervention. Her son DK was clinically depressed and had been for years before the shooting took place. To her, bullying, violent media, and the availability of guns all played a role, but it’s the community's failure to recognize serious mental illness that should be blamed above all.
And what about the killers themselves? They both left journals in which they wrote periodically and discussed their personal philosophies, day-to-day emotional states, as well as their attitude towards and planning of the killings, which they referred to as ‘NBK’ after the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. EH is the more explicit and coherent of the two. There’s one passage where he talks directly to us, posterity, and describes his state of mind:
someones bound to say "what were they thinking?" when we go NBK or when we were planning it, so this is what I am thinking. "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that, so I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom like FH or FS or demons, so It's either me or them
Which doesn’t tell us much about his self-reported motives, though it’s notable that he expects to struggle against feelings of sympathy for others. None of the texts I read adequately address these points of evidence against EH being a psychopath. They take it as a given that he was a psychopath because he committed this crime, and label anything that might cast doubt on that narrative as the preformative manipulations of a typical psychopath.
In one of his last entries (assuming nothing is being withheld from the public) he talks about what kind of change in circumstances might still prevent him from going through with it:
If people would give me more compliments all of this might still be avoidable... but probably not. Whatever I do people make fun of me, and sometimes directly to my face. I'll get revenge soon enough. fuckers shouldn't have ripped on me so much huh! HA! then again its human nature to do what you did... so I guess I am also attacking the human race. I cant take it, Its not right... true... correct... perfect. I fucking hate the human equation…you know what maybe I just need to get laid. maybe that'll just change some shit around.
The very last entry, just two weeks before the shooting, goes on in a similar vein:
I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no don't fucking say, "well thats your fault" because it isnt, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no. no no no dont let the weird looking Eric KID come along, ohh fucking nooo.
Excerpting from these journals is a very tricky business. Any one entry taken alone appears to explain a lot, but in reality is more likely to mislead than cast a light on the author’s main motivations. In the above three EH sounds like an angry, mostly non-political social reject who wants to take revenge on those people in particular that rejected him. But that wasn’t the case at all. EH and DK intended to blow up the school so that as many people as possible would die, and even once they realized they’d have to enter the building and shoot, they made no effort to target those they hated, outside of yelling ‘jocks stand up’ as they began their massacre in the library.
Now take, on the other hand, this entry from EH…
fuck mercy fuck justic fuck morals fuck civilized fuck rules fuck laws... DIE manmade words...people think they apply to everything when they dont/cant. theres no such thing as True Good or True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature, chemistry, and math. deal with it. but since dealing with it seems impossible for mankind, since we have to slap warning labels on nature, then... you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay, just go the fuck away!!!!
Or this one:
I just love Hobbes and Nietzche. Well tomorrow I'll be ordering 9 more 10 round clips for my carbine. I'm gonna be so fucking loaded in about a month. the big things we need to figure now is the time bombs for the commons and how we will get them in and leave then there to go off, without any fucking Jews finding them. I wonder if anyone will write a book on me. sure is a ton of symbolism, double meanings, themes, appearance vs reality shit going on here. oh well, it better be fuckin good if it is writtin.
…and it becomes clear that EH is at once a misanthropic social reject of the variety it’s now popular to call ‘incel’, the petty idealogue of a nihilistic, two-man death cult, and a fame-seeker who wonders at one point if Spielberg or Tarantino would be better suited to direct a film about his and DK’s exploits. At the time of writing, he was seventeen years old. But was he a psychopath? And why should that matter? Why is EH being a psychopath or not anything more than a bit of true crime trivia on a tragic but over-sensationalized and even romanticized murder-suicide that happened over twenty years ago?
To answer those questions, let’s pause a moment to consider what at first appears to be a distinct and separate subject: middle eastern terrorism. If two seventeen-year-olds planted bombs around a school in Afghanistan and they then failed to go off, and then the two entered the school and killed twelve people before ending their own lives, how would we think about their motives? And let’s assume they weren’t formal members of ISIL or a similar group, but rather doing it independently. Then imagine we found their journals, which praised radical Islamic leaders and terrorist acts similar to their own. Would we have any trouble characterizing those people as terrorists? Even if they wrote about being bullied by their peers? I daresay they’d still be terrorists in the eyes of just about everyone. The assumption would be that out of all the bullied high schoolers in Afghanistan, these two were driven towards radical violence by indoctrination into an ideology that explicitly ennobles and encourages that violence, and plays upon the humiliation and alienation of young people all across the region.
It wouldn’t matter that the indoctrination was voluntary and self-directed, or that the two never had a moment of direct contact with the ideologues who produced the propaganda. They would be considered terrorists for the ISIL cause because if you’re a young person in the middle east, people believe you’re a terrorist if you say that’s what you are.
That is not to say that this is because of racial perceptions of motive and terroristic credibility. If DK and EH had declared themselves Muslim in their journals and said that their action was in the name of such-and-such group, I think most would characterize them as terrorists with clear ideological aim. The problem is that DK and EH’s ideology hadn’t, prior to them, inspired much violence. But what was that ideology? And isn’t it overly generous to call the scrawling of a couple of Colorado teens an ‘ideology’? Weren’t they just angry teens with serious mental health issues?
Yes…but that doesn’t preclude their being ideologically motivated terrorists. Especially when it’s widely accepted that alienated teenagers are fodder for many terrorist groups, all across the world.
There is no doubt that DK’s depression, and EH’s psychopathic traits, as well as their humiliation at the hands of their peers, laid the foundation, much as it does in the middle east, for the acceptance of an extreme ideology, but the idea that those themselves are what drove them over the edge, and that EH’s intense interest in Hobbes, Nietzche, and the extermination policies of The Third Reich, and DK’s in glamorous, Hollywood depictions of self-righteous killers, were merely incidental to some pre-existing desire of the shooters to commit mass murder, is, I believe, ridiculous.
There’s probably no explanation for school shootings less fashionable than the one that blames DOOM, Marilyn Manson, and violent films for what happened. And the straw-man of that argument is so easily argued against, laughed at, and labeled uncool, that I think it’s helped spawn a now near-universal belief that nothing in western media doesn’t have the power to push people towards antisocial behavior. And further, that only deliberately manufactured state propaganda has the power to compel people to extreme action. Anyone that claims rap music which explicitly describes how awesome taking drugs is might encourage young people to take drugs is laughed out of the building, generally.
Now only transcendentally uncool conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro even dare tread that ground. And that’s fine. I think broad-brushstroke dismissals of any given genre, film, or game are probably at best unproductive and at worst aspirationally authoritarian. But when the two shooters in question dressed up as a character (the most obvious example is the white outfit with suspenders in the trailer) from their favorite violent movie, and wore ideological slogans on their shirts(I couldn’t find quality photos, but this is an approximation from a film inspired by Columbine), and wrote of loving Hobbes and Nietzche ‘so fucking much’ can we maybe, just maybe, start to wonder if media and the world of ideas played some role in what the Columbine killers did? That perhaps western teenagers, like those elsewhere in the world, are capable of understanding and assimilating dangerous ideas that when (depending on the idea) are either misunderstood or taken very seriously and acted upon, will sometimes lead to mass murder.
But I was asking why EH’s psychopathy matters. At first, I thought his being psychopathic would defeat my argument entirely, but as I read more, I became unsure even of that. Because if some or even a few more than zero bullied psychopaths sought to revenge themselves on their peers, there would be many, many, many more mass shootings than there are, and they probably wouldn’t have taken until the late 90s to rise to prevalence.
It’s estimated that just under 1% of the population is psychopathic. There are 15.1 million high schoolers in America. That’s 151,000 psychopaths. And they all can’t be popular, so let’s be conservative and say 10% are low in the status hierarchy at their schools. So that’s 15,100 humiliated high school psychopaths. In 2021, there were only 168 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 36 deaths and 99 injuries. All of this extremely rough number crunching is only to emphasize the point that the ‘EH was a psychopath’ has little explanatory or predictive power. Essentially the problem is that even if Cullen and the FBI are correct, and EH was a psychopath, that does little to explain why Columbine occurred.
If psychopathic EH was, then the diagnosis is too loose and all-encompassing to have any explanatory power. But that aside, the FBI’s position seems mostly justified by Columbine itself, rather than EH’s personal history. This is someone that appears to experience remorse, regret, and breaks down in tears while alone in his car and thinking of what he’s going to do. From a transcript of the video diaries the killers left behind:
Eric says he can’t decide “if we should do it before or after prom.” At the end of this section of the tape Harris says he wishes he could have re-visited Michigan and “old friends.” He falls silent then and appears to start crying, wiping a tear from the left side of his face. He shuts the camera off.
And later he goes on to apologize to old friends and his parents, and even state explicitly that he wished he didn’t have guilt about what he was to do:
My parents are the best fucking parents I have ever known. My dad is great. I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn’t have any remorse, but I do. This is going to tear them apart. They will never forget it. [He then addresses his parents directly, if briefly] There is nothing you guys could have done to prevent any of this. There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and Vodka [Klebold’s nickname]. Our actions are a two man war against everyone else.
As for the evidence in favor of EH’s psychopathy, the FBI’s Agent Fuselier states that he was finally ‘convinced’ by the discrepancy between a letter the boy wrote to his Diversion Program counselor, and what he wrote in his journals. He also characterizes EH as a masterful deceiver, in the way he kept his parents, diversion counselors, and psychiatrist in the dark about who he really was.
I find this unconvincing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t take a psychopath or even a particularly skillful manipulator to deceive parents, counselors, and even psychiatrists. The latter three are adults who don’t know you, and didn’t know you prior to treatment, and the former are strongly incentivized to see only the best in their children, and to gloss over the ugly characteristics of their child’s personality. And the more terrifying the aspect of the child, the more incentivized they are to ignore it. In fact, in EH’s father’s notebook, there is evidence of just that. On several occasions where EH commits relatively serious crimes, such as throwing ice on a friend’s car in rage, hacking into school computers, and even breaking into a parked car, EH’s father writes personal notes that suggest stern disappointment, but also a definite siding with his misunderstood, and unfairly treated son.
Secondly, if EH was a masterful manipulator, why did he fail in his attempts to make friends, date girls, and otherwise rise on the status ladder at his high school? Though he did go on some dates, they usually fizzled out and the girls reported feeling that he was weird, and made them uncomfortable. Hardly the track record of a cold-blooded puppeteer of his fellow man, and more that of an awkward teen with just enough guile to put on a good face for his parents and the poorly trained (no one who worked with EH in the diversion program was a licensed psychologist) bureaucrats who likely found nothing more rewarding than moving a well-spoken, shy kid through the pipeline. If you read EH’s writings from the diversion program, they’re stilted and cliche, as if the lines were lifted from a stock example of such a letter. They suggest no particular flair for manipulation, or of a perverse relishing in the distance between his words and his actual beliefs. He’s just going through the motions necessary to please a diversion counselor, and clearly, it’s not too difficult.
What’s more frustrating about Fuselier’s confident diagnosis, is that he cites no evidence from EH’s life prior to Columbine. The depositions of EH’s parents, set to be released to the public in 2027 may reveal something, but as it stands not one of the people EH came in contact with before his time at Columbine have reported anything resembling Psychopathic behavior.
I harp on this diagnosis because if it were true, and EH didn’t experience empathy or remorse, and it was true, as Dave Cullen says in Columbine that:
His brain was never scanned, but it probably would have shown activity unrecognizable as human to most neurologists.
Then there seems to be little need for investigations into the process that turned EH into a fairly normal young person into a killer because the process was primarily an inevitable physiological process playing itself out. Ideology is almost an irrelevance to a psychopath, for whom no righteous cause or inversion of consensus morality is necessary in order to overcome the natural aversion to killing. Not to mention the fact that the psychopathy diagnosis in part frees bullies, administration, and those involved in the intervention from responsibility.
What a strange thing it is to consider Nazi Germany in light of psychopathy; it stands to reason that little over 1% of the people committing atrocities were psychopaths (though likely even higher because those types would be attracted to the most violent tasks) and yet they committed them anyway. Normal people. But say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos, one carefully developed, maintained, and disseminated by serious, middle-aged ideologues with at least adequate knowledge of German history and philosophy at their fingertips. We seem to think, that it takes something as formidable as this to constitute an ideology powerful enough to make somewhat normal people do horrifically violent and cruel things.
Yet it’s clear from the history of Americans joining ISIS that young people are perfectly capable of radicalizing themselves in relative isolation, and that while depression, alienation, and other longstanding mental health conditions are enough to make one open to a murderous ideology, it is the ideology itself that finally compels one to travel across the world to kill people. Again, this is nothing new. But I’ve yet to see anyone bring up this model when talking about the mass shootings committed by mostly white, middle-class Americans. Americans who despite writing things like:
Society may not realize what is happening but I have; you go to school, to get used to studying and learning how youre "supposed to" so that drains or filters out a little bit of human nature. but thats after your parents taught you whats right and wrong even though you may think differently, you still must to have more of your human nature blown out of your ass. society trys to make everyone act the same by burying all human nature and instincts. Thats what school, laws, jobs, and parents do If they realize it or not and them, the few who stick to their natural instincts are casted out as psychos or lunatics or strangers or just plain different. crazy, strange, weird, wild, these words are not bad or degrading.. if humans were let to live how we would naturaly it would be chaos and anarchy and the human race wouldnt probably last that long, but hey guess what, thats how its supposed to be!!!!! -EH
Which rests in the uncanny valley between normal teenage misanthropy and the kind of serious, militant misanthropy that the average ISIS member likely feels towards the western world. EH feels it towards not just the western world, but civilized society in general(he writes in an entry that he would like to see all humans exterminated except for isolated Amazonian tribes). This doesn’t preclude the fact that he is a moody, edgelord teenager. Angry, ideologically unscrupulous, grandiose, and somewhat pathetic 15-21-year-olds make up a significant portion of those who join violent movements in the middle east and elsewhere (it’s also worth pointing out that the bulk of Foreign ISIS fighters don’t come from the poorest countries and groups) I didn’t quite understand this, and how the line between edgy school shooter and professional terrorist basically doesn’t exist, until watching the astounding 2018 documentary Path of Blood. It’s almost entirely composed of recovered home videos of al-Quaeda members cut together to trace the general outline of their lives as terrorists, specifically following a few cells engaged in terrorist activities in Saudi Arabia.
So, what are the cell members like?
Basically, they act as young people do everywhere. They’re often self-conscious and unsure of themselves, posing with their AK-47s like they’ve seen people do in media, asking if they look cool, and obviously hoping they look more badass than they probably feel. At one point a young male terrorist tells his friend to “keep the bandana, your hair looks amazing.”
They also tease each other for not knowing their own ideology well enough, and chant like frat boys to get fired up before missions. The Nazi high command they are not—just a few minutes of viewing the footage and it’s clear these are angry young people whom an ideology that they have a very limited grasp of has pushed towards vicious attacks on a world order they perceive to be deeply unjust—some of them seem to barely grasp the meanings even of the simple slogans they constantly recite.
They delight in catchphrases like “I bring you slaughter”, going so far as to even paint them on their cars. They preen and adjust their red head scarfs like cosplayers, well aware they are on video, that this will be their ‘big break’ as terrorists.
This is not to say that the Columbine massacre should be treated as an attack by a legitimate terrorist cell with clear and relatively achievable poltiical aims. EH and DK’s ideology was one of extermination, that saw the human race as an irredeemable bunch of status-obsessed drones—I expect a good part of the two boy’s self-hatred came from the fact they were just like those they hated. They bullied, judged, and seldom seemed to show strong compassion for the weak. However, they were not insane and knew two teenagers from Columbine could not hope to make a dent in the world’s population. So they set about creating the most grandiose plan they might actually stand to achieve: the blowing up of their school and everyone in it. After reading the many books about Columbine, and the thousands of pages of documents released by relevant law enforcement agencies, I have come to the conclusion that these two boys underwent a process of radicalization similar to that of the young terrorist fighters in Path of Blood. I understand the process as running along these lines:
A series of past humiliations build upon one another to create a state of hypersensitivity in the person, wherein the smallest slight is perceived as part of a larger web of humiliation.
From these humiliations comes resentment, and a subsequent belief is born in the person, that the order that enabled these humiliations to occur is irredeemable and deserving of destruction.
Exposure to an ideology that serves to ‘explain’ the state of humiliation, condemn the world order, and offer some form of solution occurs. This can be ready-made or handed down from a formal organization for propaganda, or patchworked from multiple sources by an amateur idealogue with little connection or even a clear understanding of the actual sources of the ideology.
Role models that exemplify said ideology are sought and emulated to a greater and greater degree. This will affect the manner of dress, speech, etc. These role model-imitator relationships may take place parasocially.
The role models are emulated, and the ideology actuated in steadily more serious infractions against the hated world order. A social unit of some form and scale reinforces the acceptability of said infractions and insulates participants from the social consequences (I feel I have to inject here that DK and EH planned ‘missions’ in the months leading up to the shooting, wherein they vandalized houses, set off small bombs, and even shot young trick-or-treaters with BB guns).
A capacity for violence is both developed and taken stock of by the participants, and plans begin to take shape in response to the level of that capacity, the precise nature of the violent ideology, and the historical precedents for large scale violence in a given culture (Both EH and DK enjoyed seemed to enjoy the missions tremendously, pulled most off without a hitch, and later sought inspiration from the OKC bombing of the early 90s, as well as other acts of American domestic terrorism).
An act of revenge against the world order takes place, critically one that both ennobles the killers (according to their own standards) destroys a power base of the order they despise and has a chance of tipping the scales of the world towards the further imitation of their own acts and ideology.
Rough though it may be, this is the most satisfying model I can think of given the body of evidence provided not only by witnesses and investigators but the killers themselves. In researching this essay, it occurred to me that this model might point to a deeper point—that all forms of violence which target innocents are something like selective psychopathy borne of ideological radicalization of humiliated and exceptionally status-obsessed members of a given society, whom through incremental exposure become comfortable committing extreme acts of violence. Because if there is anything chilling about Columbine, it is the security footage of two apparently typical American teenagers strolling through the halls of their high school, laughing, joking, and killing people who never hurt them, and whom they hardly knew, as if it were the most natural, comfortable thing in the world.
Very good essay, imo. I read it a few nights ago but didn't have the time to comment then.
Do you have any thoughts toward a further definition of the ideology you mention?
It seems like it's been awhile since I've read any of your posts. I'm glad to have read another – thanks!
[Or maybe I'm confusing you with another blog that might have been named 'whimsy'? I just checked your other posts and realized I almost certainly started following this blog after your ACX book review entry.]
I'd imagine something similar to what you've outlined explains other, far more common, 'mass shootings', e.g. 'drive by' shootings of funerals. They seem easier to understand as 'gang violence', but the indiscriminate targeting of innocents (e.g. the people attending the funeral that aren't affiliated with a gang, or not directly anyways) seems to me more like what you're describing.