They weren't goths or loners.
The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver's Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren't in the "Trenchcoat Mafia," disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and "fags."
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A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information — including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors — indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.
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What's left, after peeling away a decade of myths, is perhaps more comforting than the "good kids harassed into retaliation" narrative — or perhaps not.
It's a portrait of Harris and Klebold as a sort of In Cold Blood criminal duo — a deeply disturbed, suicidal pair who over more than a year psyched each other up for an Oklahoma City-style terrorist bombing, an apolitical, over-the-top revenge fantasy against years of snubs, slights and cruelties, real and imagined.
Along the way, they saved money from after-school jobs, took Advanced Placement classes, assembled a small arsenal and fooled everyone — friends, parents, teachers, psychologists, cops and judges.
"These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation," psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. "These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems."
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At the time, Columbine became a kind of giant national Rorschach test. Observers saw its genesis in just about everything: lax parenting, lax gun laws, progressive schooling, repressive school culture, violent video games, antidepressant drugs and rock 'n' roll, for starters.
Many of the Columbine myths emerged before the shooting stopped, as rumors, misunderstandings and wishful thinking swirled in an echo chamber among witnesses, survivors, officials and the news media.
Police contributed to the mess by talking to reporters before they knew facts — a hastily called news conference by the Jefferson County sheriff that afternoon produced the first headline: "Twenty-five dead in Colorado."
A few inaccuracies took hours to clear up, but others took weeks or months — sometimes years — as authorities reluctantly set the record straight.
In the wake of Columbine, some people who were prominent at the time - Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay in particular - went on record blaming "liberalism" and the theory of evolution, respectively, for the events. While it might seem far better to pass over nonsense like this in silent derision, we should note that Gingrich, at least, is still appearing on television, still mouthing off. It might not be a bad idea on this tenth anniversary of these horrible events to ask him about his views in light of the information now available. While I doubt contrition would occur, it might be at least possible that he would admit the facts are far different from what we were given at the time.
What's most surprising about this detailed report is how unsurprising it all is. That one of the pair was a full-fledged psychopath, the other a clinically depressed youth, easily manipulated perhaps by his more flamboyant and intelligent partner makes far more sense than the whole "bullied-goths-and-gamers-getting-revenge" scenario. This latter fiction, created as much by a lack of facts and treating high school rumor and confession as having any merit at all, served only to confuse matters. The author of this summary is to be commended for putting in the public realm a wonderful summary of the reality behind the many myths of that very horrible day.
