Columbine
I haven't read many books that shook me as much as Dave Cullen's "Columbine," the new and definitive account of the Columbine High School school massacre on April 20, 1999. The bare details of the massacre: 12 Columbine students and one teacher were murdered by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then killed themselves. Many other students were wounded, some permanently. We can only be thankful that Harris was an incompetent bomb maker, because most of the big bombs he intended to cause mass carnage never exploded.
As a journalist, I can tell you that Cullen did a magnificent job. He spent nine years researching this book, and it all shows. The book took that long to write in part because of the years-long cover-up by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office of critical documents in the case that was finally ended by Colorado's tough freedom of information law. Why the cover-up? In short, because they could have prevented the massacre but didn't. It's all there in the book.
Cullen dispels numerous myths about Columbine. Harris and Klebold were not outcasts at the high school. They had friends, dated, and Klebold even went to the prom the weekend before the massacre. There was no "Trench Coat Mafia" of murderous Goths. The massacre grew out of Eric Harris' murderous revenge fantasies against the entire world, not out of a desire to target "jocks" and "rich kids."
Harris, Cullen says, was a classic psychopath. He felt no emotion other than glee when he killed, and felt absolutely no remorse. He also had another classic psychopathic trait, the ability to lie convincingly. Dylan Klebold was a weak follower, depressed and suicidal. He went along with Harris primarily as a means to kill himself. The reader leaves the book with a certain amount of sympathy for Klebold's parents, who tried hard to straighten him out, but none for Mr. and Mrs. Harris. Mr. Harris, a miliary martinet, applied harsh discipline to Eric but also tried to try to protect him from school officials and police after the many precursor incidents to the massacre.
Evangelical Christians don't come off particularly well in the book. Cullen convincingly disproves the myth that student Cassie Bernall was asked by Klebold if she believed in God and shot to death in the school library after she said "Yes." The story was first told by one of the other students in the library; turned out he had Cassie confused with another girl, Valerie Schnurr, who was wounded but survived. Two other students in the library said there was no exchange of words between Cassie and Klebold other than him saying "Peekaboo" when he looked under the table, saw Bernall, and fired his shotgun without further comment by either.
Bernall became an evangelical saint, while Schnurr, also an evangelical, was snubbed as a wanabee when she tried to tell her own story. Bernall's parents refused to believe the story wasn't true, and her mother went forward with publication of a book immortalizing her daughter even after a meeting with police at which the facts were laid on the table.
Another evangelical girl, Robyn Anderson, who briefly dated Klebold, acted as a straw buyer to get the shotguns and rifle Harris wanted for the massacre. He and Klebold had tried to buy them a gun show in Denver in December 1998 but were turned away because they were 17. Anderson, who was 18, went back to purchase the shotguns, one of which was used to murder Cassie Bernall. Harris told her they wanted them to go hunting. Anderson broke no law in turning over the long-barrel weapons to the boys, who promptly sawed off the shotgun barrels, a felony under federal law.
Colorado has since closed the "gun show loophole" that allows purchases of firearms at gun shows without background checks, in part because of testimony by Anderson that a background check might have deterred her from making the straw purchase. The National Rifle Association, as usual, prevented a Federal law being passed. A semi-automatic handgun used in the slayings was sold to Harris by a man who was a friend of someone Harris worked with at a pizzeria. Supplying a handgun to a minor was a crime, and both men served brief prison sentences.
This book is full of revelations. It will be in print for years to come, and I urge everyone to read it. Some of the passages will move you to anger, others to tears. "Columbine" is a monumental work of non-fiction writing.
P.S. - This book could not have been written if Columbine had occurred in Pennsylvania, because the state's weak Open Records Act, even the new and improved version that took effect this year, has a near-total exemption for law enforcement records. Had it occurred in Pennsylvania, we would still be as much in the dark about why the shootings occurred as we are about the Amish school shootings in Lancaster County in 2006. Did local police have warnings that killer was about to go on a rampage? We'll never know.