Everything We've Heard About Columbine is Wrong?

wtpooh writes "There ia a story over at Salon magazine about the continuing investigation into the Columbine killings. Pretty much everything we've been told by the media about the killers is wrong: They were probably not gay, they were not anti-jock, anti-god, or anti-black, and they were certainly not part of the Trench Coat Mafia, which was almost nonexistent at the time of the shooting. Essentially, the confused memories of the eyewitnesses and the overzealous reporting of the media fed off each other, turning rumors into facts." Considering the number of Slashdot pixels that have already been devoted to the Columbine massacre, this story is well worth a look. Quite an interesting perspective, not only on the massacre, but on the way the news media covered it. Updates: a story at apbnews.com refutes much of the Salon story above; Salon runs excerpts from Harris's diary.

Comments

Media

[CormacJ]

I've seen this happen a lot as reporters come under pressure from thier editors to get something that none of the other papers have. In this instance rumour and conjecture equates fact and gets published, which is then referred to by other articles and so on.

You can see instances of this in the reporting of the Olymic bombing and several other occasions where there are lots of intrest but limited facts to print.

The days of investigative reporters like Woodward and Bernstien have long since passed. These days reports seem to want to reformat a press release and publish.

Trenchcoat Mafia

[LizardKing]

I had the pleasure of working in the States for a month, just after the Columbine shootings. This would have been great, except for the fact that I have long black hair and wear black clothes - yup, I'm a goth, and have been for ten years.

The downside to this was that every day I had passers by crossing the road to avoid me, and verbal abuse from jerks in muscle cars or pickups. Even some of the people where I was working were a little bit aprehensive about talking to me ...

Meanwhile on CNN and other stations, much was being made of the alleged musical and fashion tastes of the Columbine gunmen. I decided to read up on the incident, and was struck by the fact that the killers looked nothing like goths, didn't appear to like what Americans consider to be goth bands, and nor did their friends (the so called `Trenchcoat Mafia').

I started to watch the TV shows, and was struck by the warped logic displayed by many of the commentators. While the actions of the killers was indefensible, the arguments being put forward as to why they acted the way they did was disturbing. Clean cut, rent a quote, god fearing teens were stating that the killers and their friends were outcasts. The conclusion that was drawn was that anyone that looked different or didn't listen to pop music was a potential menace to society.

At no point did anyone ask whether the avaliablility of guns was a factor. The fact is that most teens have felt like killing someone on the spur of the moment, but the availability of such effective means to do it is the key. I'm sure there are as many messed up kids (and adults) in the UK as there are in the US, but incidents like Columbine simply cannot happen with such alarming regularity because access to firearms is so limited.

So, please don't attack a music scene or fashion that you don't like or don't understand. Look further and ask whether it's time to stop the dubious right to bear arms. This isn't the wild west anymore, there aren't any bears, Indians or bandits waiting to ambush your wagon train. Guns simply don't have a place in a modern society.


Chris Wareham

Re:Trenchcoat Mafia

[Anonymous Coward]

They may have cut rape rates (I've seen no proof of that), but at what cost? How many RAPE VICTIMS are getting killed with their own weapons? How many percent of the police officers that are killed are killed with their own weapon? How many families have seen members die because someone else in the family mistook them for an intruder?

The point isn't just outlawing guns, but making guns harder to get. Yes, there will always be someone that manage to get guns, but realisticly: Do you really believe that a hardened criminal with a gun will be more dangerous than thousands of citizens that can't handle it properly?

Countries like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Great Britain, etc. have strict gun laws. Even the police normally doesn't carry guns in these countries. Guns aren't that hard to come by - in Norway for instance, there are hundreds of thousands of AG-3's in private homes - yet there are few gun related crimes.

Also, there are few other violent crimes as well. Maybe because the criminals know they're not likely to meet someone armed with a gun, and thus don't need to protect themselves with one, and at the same time know they risc a lot tougher sentencing if they commit a crime using a weapon than without?

Of course, this isn't the only answer, but the argument about having guns for protection simply doesn't hold: If you're unarmed in a society where everyone has guns, sure, it might be wise to have one yourself. But a society with few guns would be safer yet. Sure, someone WILL get in a situation where having a gun could have saved them. But a lot fewer will get in a situation where they die because someone else have a gun.

It's comparable to people criticizing seat belts because you can get killed by them. Yes, it's true, in some cases you can. But you're more likely to get killed without them. The same holds true for restrictive gun laws (provided they're enforced properly): There may be cases where someone would save their life without those laws, but there's more cases where having them will save people.

Of course there's other issues too. One of problems in the US is a society that seems to worship violence, and with high poverty rates, high unemployment in many areas, and in many ways lack of tolerance. Couple that with huge amounts of guns, and you have a recipe for disaster. That's not something gun control laws can fix. Gun control laws have to be part of a package, and that package must at the very least also include making guns hard to get for EVERYONE.

Re:Trenchcoat Mafia

[theonetruekeebler]

They may have cut rape rates (I've seen no proof of that), but at what cost? How many RAPE VICTIMS are getting killed with their own weapons?

That is an extremely sloppy question, because it completely ignores a necessary predicate question: How many women are not raped because they presented an armed defense against a potential rapist? And how many of those rapes would have escalated to rape-murders?

Also, you seem to imply that just because you have not seen proof, it does not exist. Here are some statistics for you:

• Of the 2.5 million [gun-armed] self-defense cases, as many as 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. (Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):185.)
• Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606). (Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.)
• "[O]nly 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high." (George F. Will, "Are We a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15/11/93):93. )

As you can see from that 2.5 million number, you don't have to kill someone, or even shoot at them, to use a gun for self-defense.

Do you really believe that a hardened criminal with a gun will be more dangerous than thousands of citizens that can't handle it properly?

Yes. I emphatically believe this, because of the simple matter of intent. A hardened criminal has a willingness to do harm which turns a gun into an amplifier of their own violence. The citizen in your rhetorical question does not have that. The fact of a hardened criminal with a baseball bat does not imply that since only MLB players are qualified to "properly" handle them, that only they should be permitted to own them.

As for "proper" handling, as a geek, I believe that any person owning any piece of equipment has an obligation to themselves, to the equipment, and to their fellow human beings to know how to operate it properly. This is true for computers, and for cars; it is true for any tool and doubly true for weapons.

A society with few guns would be safer yet.

And a real Easter Bunny would make Easter ever so much more magical. What's your point? A society with no whiskey would have fewer drunken wife-beaters. Why don't we ban whiskey? Oh wait--we tried that. A brief look through a good history book will show you that not only did Prohibition fail miserably, it also aggravated many of the problems it was intended to prevent. I still think you're better off banning wife-beating and drunk driving than whiskey. If you continue to insist that we ban whiskey since it is unnecessary and that the costs wife-beating and drunk driving far outweigh any purported benefit of whiskey, I will go ahead and call you a destroyer of freedoms, and be safe in doing so.

It's comparable to people criticizing seat belts because you can get killed by them. Yes, it's true, in some cases you can. But you're more likely to get killed without them. The same holds true for restrictive gun laws (provided they're enforced properly)

No, the same holds true for guns. Laws upon laws upon laws is a pointless and stupid solution to real problems. Do you know that that kid in Covington, Georgia, was charged with breaking twenty-two laws that could put him in jail for around two hundred years? I can't imagine he woke up that morning and thought, "Gee, if I breaking twenty-three laws, I wouldn't do this, but since it's only twenty-two, I think I'll go for it."

Breaking a law is as easy as deciding the odds and consequences of getting caught outweigh the desire to do the act. The next time you find yourself doing 65 in a 55 zone, ask yourself about how effective laws really are when they stand in your way. The problem, much of it, is that we have replaced morality, and the desire to do the right thing, with laws, and the desire to get away with whatever you can. But that's a rant for another time.

--

Re:Trenchcoat Mafia

[jsm2]

the US stayed into the far-west mentality

Yeah, and the Brits have the Empire mentality, the Germans have the after-war mentality, the Africans have the slavery mentality, the Australians have the convict mentality, the Swedes have the Viking mentality, the Irish have the most-oppressed-people-ever mentality and the French have God knows what kind of mentality.

Every nation has its own hang-ups, and I think it's a bit poor for we Euros and Anglos to talk about the "Wild West Mentality" as if it were some sort of disease or, worse, some sort of moral failing. It's how Americans are, and Europe has had cause to be grateful for that Wild West mentality on several occasions. They have to solve their own problems in their own society, and suggesting that they copy a society as amazingly homogeneous as Sweden (or Switzerland, for that matter), is just wrong.

This isn't a flame -- I actually agree with your statement:

Obviously this type of mentality doesn't fit in a modern society where people have to cooperate and trust each others to keep things going smoothly

which is as good sense as I've read on this issue. But the "far-west" tag seems to me like an unanalysed assumption.

jsm

Hey Katz, I told you so!

[pingouin]

We made much ado about this stuff, missing out on the sheer cussedness of the assailants. They weren't firing the first salvos of some Geek Revolution; it wasn't some White Power Trip; it wasn't fill-in-the-blank with your own little pet advocacy topic. Even Pat Robertson tried to hype Cassie Bernall into Great Christian Martyr status. We all overreacted: me, you, the media, school administrators, my cat, and even Linus and Elvis.

Harris and Klebold were simply illustrating a truism uttered by H. Rap Brown back in the 1960s: "Violence is as American as Cherry Pie." (Katz, you're old enough to remember that one). Violence (literal, threatened, or figurative) is the all-purpose "solution" to problems, whether a non-compliant kid, a non-compliant foreign country, a non-compliant workforce, or whatever.

If it takes a village to raise a child, then Americans (and I myself am occasionally one) are the village idiots who helped raise Harris and Klebold.

Have a nice day.

--

your imasges make me want to kill ...

[cthonious]

(Found on a bathroom wall somewhere in the U.S.A.)

You've taken over my mind. You've raped my thoughts with your image viruses then sold me fake cures for your own disease. Your words and pictures scream orders at me like angry prison wardens. When I cover my ears, your voices echo in my head. I hate you. When I see your billboards, your talk shows, your rock concerts and your factories, when I see the work of your twisted libidos, I want to kill you. I want to set fires, plant bombs, derail trains. I want to smash your buildings and tear at your bodies until the skin of my hands is worn to the bone. I am filled with a rage that burns my eyes.

I don't want to feel this way. You have done this to me. These feelings are the fruits of your multi-billion dollar sowing. And I am not alone. There are others like me out here. Every suicide, every madman, every man and woman who gets a gun and just starts shooting -- these are your illegitimate children. They don't all know what they are doing. All they know is hate for the invisible walls which you have raised around them, hate for the narrow path you have tried to make them walk. And the innocent pay in blood for your negligence.

Remember this: My mind is big. The more you try to push me down and make me small, the greater the pressure inside me becomes. The greater the pressure, the greater the chance of an explosion. There was once a time when I felt love, but now I feel only hate and anger, and fear at what I might do. And you can tell me to "BE HAPPY," but I know that you really mean "BE QUIET". Believe me, I want to be happy. You stand in my way.

Sound trite? Maybe.

No, I'm not a whacko and I didn't write this. However, I just thought I'd throw that out for a different perspective. I found that at abrupt.org. I think there is quite of bit of insight into our system and the twisted minds it produces there. take a look.

Our cultural maliase runs very deep. Guns are not the problem, nor is TV violence, nor is jocks or high school cliques. These things have been going on since civilization began.

I believe the causes run much deeper; our obsession with amusement is a great part of it. If you understand that everything (from the drug wars to the daily news to our political campaigns) is being presented to us in the form of entertainment, I think you will see at least the beginning of the problem. Would ritalin have "cured" these kids? Maybe, but ritalin is the problem. Armed guards in schools is ludicrous - one is reminded (sorry) of all the ad hoc patches and crap that makes up our least favorite OS. At some point one needs to start over.

If you want to understand our deep cutural sickness you need to read. I'm suggesting a few books and I'll leave it at that:

• Nieztsche: The Portable Nietzsche (an honest reading of Nietzsche is, I think, key to our illness)
• Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind
• Niel Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
  

Re:your imasges make me want to kill ...

[Amphigory]

A book to add to your list: the Bible.

That's right. The Bible. The 20th century is not the first time somebody has cried out against injustice and materialism. It's not the first time that people have needed a message that was jarringly non-materialistic. This attitude is present in the Old Testament as well... You just have to learn to look at it within the context of a document that was written in 1000BC.

What never ceases to amaze me is the way people (read: the Christian Right) warp the Bible in support of our societies crass commercialism and knee-jerk conservatism. Jesus was the original radical, which means that God is too!!! Never forget it.

I will go ahead and forego my +1 and save the moderators the trouble, since anything that doesn't endorse pseudo-scientific rationalism is doomed to a -1 around here.

Statistics

[Awel]

Granted, no statistic is really reliable, it would be nice to see some sort of numbers comparing crime in the US to crime in a place such as the UK...but more specifically a certain city in the UK that scales well to a city in the US. Anybody have any data, or know a good source for solid statistical data?


Okaaaaay..

From the Home Office Statistical Publications website, I can get the 1998 British Crime Survey, which tells me that in the UK in 1997 there were 714,000 wounding assaults (more than trivial injury). Only 25% of violent crime is committed by people previously unknown to the victim. The Statistics of Deaths Reported to Coroners: England and Wales 1998 tells us that 142 deaths were given a verdict of `unlawful homicide` in 1997 (note this doesn`t include Scotland); this works out as 2.4 murders per 1,000,000 head of population (see below).

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has a summary of firearm-related crimes, wherein we are told that: "Victimizations involving a firearm represented 23% of the 2.9 million violent crimes of rape and sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault" and that it is "estimated that 68% of the 18,209 murders in 1997 were committed with firearms." This works out as 67.9 murders per 1,000,000 people, or 46.2 murders with firearms per 1,000,000 people.

The population of the US is 268 million, with 29 people per square kilometre. The population of the UK is 59 million, with 243 people per square kilometre. (Source: World Bank country data.)

I`m afraid I don`t have time to go looking up specific cities though.

Separate issues

[fable2112]

Whether or not the kids at Columbine actually went over the edge specifically due to mistreatment by their peers, Katz and the Hellmouth series still did a lot of good.

Kids who are different take abuse from their peers far too often. Yes, I mean ABUSE, not "just teasing." Five guys coming up to me and threatening to steal my bike and hit me on the head because I was the only one on the block wearing a bicycle helmet is not "just teasing." Death threats at 3 AM are not "just teasing." One of the five black kids in my high school returning to his locker to find it broken into with most of the contents damaged and racist graffiti everywhere is not "just teasing." Being sexaully assaulted (or threatened with same), telling the administration, having them NOT BELIEVE you because the guy "is just a flirt," and having the guy find out you told on him and follow you around threatening to kill you for the next three weeks ... that goes beyond mere teasing or flirting.

And even the "milder" things add up after a while. Try being the kid that people don't want to sit with until test day, when they copy your paper. Try having a teacher who SEES this go on and does NOTHING about it. Try being out sick and returning to school and hearing that all the girls in your class think you were out because you were having an abortion, when you've never even had sex! And all the teachers looked the other way ....

I don't CARE if peer harassment was the "root cause" of Columbine or not. It's about damn time that people realized what really goes on in schools if you aren't one of the golden kids. I'm still sorry that a mass murder had to take place for this conversation to begin, but it is LONG overdue.

Yeah. It's wrong all right.

[Amphigory]

Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were on psychotropic drugs -- that is anti-depressant therapy. In one of their cases, it was Luvox. According to the autopsy, he was taking it as directed in normal doses.

This drug has been known to cause mania and psychosis in clinical trials!!! Don't take my word for it: read the product insert.

Guys -- these kids were drugged into doing this by liberal education and its refusal to deal with Kids who don't match the norm. Make no mistake about it.

So: don't blame the parents. Don't blame the other students. Blame the schools, the NEA, the APA, the drug companies, and the doctors that pass this stuff out like it's candy.

Why do they pass it out like this? Simple: the drug companies advertise these "vanity drugs" extremely heavily. I used to work in the medical field, fixing systems for doctors. I would regularly see these gorgeous women come in as drug company reps. They would cook lunch for the staff, chit-chat with the doctor, and leave all kinds of name-branded junk for him to use.

Don't believe me? Go in a doctor's office sometime and see what kind of pen he's using. 50/50 chance it says Zoloft or Luvox on the side.

The net result: the doctor, when presented with a Kid with behaviour problems (too much sugar and too little discipline) says "Let's just try this and see if it works". Doctors are human too, and "a beautiful woman told him that it would help this, so it must be true," right?

*sigh* This makes me MAD.

Pissed off...

[Hard_Code]

What? The media has it all wrong /again/? They've merely been pushed the self-created exaggerated, sensationalized conclusion? NO!?

What? These kids where really PEOPLE? Couldn't be! They must have been evil satanic GOTHS. Or immoral godless GAYS. Never real PEOPLE! If they were real people, we'd have to acknowledge that there were real reasons, perhaps caused by other people around, that they may actually have done these things. You mean they're not racists? Not anti-Christian? You mean that stupid so-called martyr I've been hearing so damn much about from every news magazine and foaming preacher is really NOT a martyr, but just another random death? No way!

You mean that everything the media has piped into my soggy little brain is false...that these were just two very frustrated, screwed up teens, outcasts of outcasts, that did a /botched/ job!? And that immediately afterwards, every uptight principal in the US decided it was cause to violate the civil rights of American citizens by denying them public services because they wore a certain type of clothing that in actuality had nothing to do with the perpetrators anyway? Couldn't be!

--

This was just an occasion for every selfish stupid special interest to displace the "fault" on to their favorite evil, and push their cause...nobody gave a damn about the real PEOPLE involved. They were too damn busy licking their wounds and feeling sorry for themselves by making out as if their enemy was some big evil unaviodable thing. Well wake up! Black clothing and satan don't cause people to do this! It's everybody's responsibility to see that no human gets in a state that they want to do something like this.

Here's an article

[Amphigory]

It's not just me saying this. See http://www.breggin.com/luvox.html.

Just thought I'd throw in some more documentation. For God's sake, get your kids off of this stuff.

Re:Humbling? Then the reactions....

[Paul Johnson]

of everybody were right?
Has everyone forgotten the treatment that every 'different' person got after those killings?

Of course not. The Geek Crackdown was completely unjustified. My point was not that the other subcultures were right, it was that we were as wrong as they were. But most importantly, we all got it wrong for the same reason: the Columbine Massacre is a mirror.

There is a childrens story in which a mirror is brought into a village which has never seen one before. Everyone thinks it is a portrait and gives their opinion of the subject, not realising that they are in fact talking about themselves. That is exactly what happened here.

Paul.

Shut up!

[flamingdog]

Frankly, I'm getting sick of hearing about this. I didn't even bother reading the article. Why does there have to be a clearly defined reason everything happens? Why can't people just accept that sometimes things happen that we don't expect? This whole ordeal sickens me. It sickens me that kids would do things like that. It sickens me how much the media feeds off of them, and probably go home and pray that someone else will go on a murderous rampage. It sickens me how much people are willing to accept stereotypes and how the media propogates them. In the end of last school year and the beginning of this new one, I've been through so much hell because of the way the media just keeps feeding everyone this garbage. I listen to "satanic" music, I have a demented sense of humor, I'm a non-conformist, I am disruptive and rude to people who deserve it. Its never gotten me into serious trouble before. Now my parents think I'm a satanist, as do my teachers. My fellow students are afraid Im going to kill them. And I've been offered therapy more times than I can count this year. All this because I'm just a bit different. Imagine how bad the goths and such are getting it right now?


I hope I never see another one of these damned "why kids kill" or "this is what really happened" articles or anything even remotely related to them ever again.

---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"

Re:Reactions to Katz's articles

[Anonymous Coward]

The reaction weren't to the distorted, incorrect version of events, but to what followed: Outcasts everywhere being treated like potential killers for no good reason. This article even strengthens the power of those responses... It shows that not only did the media generalize, but they started a witchhunt on groups of people who didn't even belong to the same subcultures as the killers.

In fact, I'd go so far as saying that this article in many ways validate much of Katz' articles on it, and the responses he got.

The article also strengthen my belief that this is an issue with the way outsiders are treated. Just take a look at the descriptions on how lots of the "myths" about Columbine started. For instance how the rumours that the killers were gay started: One member of the Trench Coat Mafia from two years back, which they had little to do with, was apparently gay. And that marked the entire group, and outsiders like Harris and Klebold as gay for no reason.

In an environment like that, where even remote association with someone that is treated as an outcast marks you as an outcast too, it is no surprise that some kids go crazy and kill... I'm just surprised it doesn't happen more often.

The Mirror of Columbine.

[Paul Johnson]

This is fascinating. The human brain is the best machine ever created for spotting patterns in noisy data. The downside of this is that if you hand it random noise it finds its own patterns. Columbine is a classic example.

What we saw after Columbine turns out to have been the high-speed creation of a collection of Urban Legends. What seems to happen is that the same story gets filtered through a series of minds as it is transmitted from one person to the next. Each mind forgets some "irrelevant" details and infers some new "facts", because that is how memory works (a number of psychology experiments show how easy it is to induce people to remember things that never were, especially details). In other words you are dealing with an iterated function in a kind of "story space". What comes out of this process is not the original data but a kind of attractor in this space. It is what people feel is the "right" story to have happened.

So, what kinds of stories come out: Well we get a bunch of them, reflecting the concerns of different groups.

• The Christian Right get a new Martyr.
• Middle America gets a tale about the dangers of [X], for various values of X. Gays, D&D games, violent video games, goths.
• Slashdotters get a tale about the Revenge of the Geeks. This last one is the most interesting. We all thought that we were so clever, spotting the real cause of the Columbine Massacre, while all the Media, Middle Americans and Christian Right had missed it. But exactly the same group dynamic was at work. The Christian Right saw teenagers driven to evil by bad music, bad films and bad games. Meanwhile we (yes, that includes me) saw teenagers driven to madness by the social exclusion and everyday violence we suffered at school. The Christian Right argued for more restrictions on films and games, while we argued for more restrictions on jocks and teachers.

  This is pretty humbling. Every so often something comes up to remind us that we are not so superior after all.

  Paul.

Humbling? Then the reactions....

[Bothari]

of everybody were right?
Has everyone forgotten the treatment that every 'different' person got after those killings?
Has everyone forgotten the schoolkids which were beaten, arrested, interrogated and barred from school because they were 'just thos trenchcoat-mafia murderers'?
Now it seems there was even less reason for this treatment. This wasn't a revenge of the geeks , but the geeks were still acused and *very* victimised about this whole thing. If anything there is more reason to scream out loud 'Innocent until proven guilty' as well as pointing out to people how much of their prejudices they were following.

No, I can't spell!
-"Run to that wall until I tell you to stop"
(tagadum,tagadum,tagadum .... *CRUNCH*)
-"stop...."