Columbine Massacre On April 20, 1999, in the small, suburban town of Littleton, Colorado, two high-school seniors, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, enacted an all-out assault on Columbine High School during the middle of the school day. The boys' plan was to kill hundreds of their peers. With guns, knives, and a multitude of bombs, the two boys walked the hallways and killed. When the day was done, twelve students, one teacher, and the two murderers were dead. The haunting question remains: why did they do it?
The Boys: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris Klebold and Harris were both intelligent, came from solid homes with two parents, and had older brothers who were three years their senior. In elementary school, Klebold and Harris had both played in sports such as baseball and soccer. Both enjoyed working with computers. When the two boys entered high school, they found it difficult to fit into any of the cliques.* As is too common in high school, the boys found themselves frequently picked on by athletes and other students. However, Klebold and Harris seemed to spend their time doing normal teenager activities. They worked together in a local pizza parlor, liked to play Doom (a computer game) in the afternoons, and worried about finding a date to the prom. For all outward appearances, the boys looked like normal teenagers. Looking back, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris obviously weren't your average teenagers.
Preparations According to journals, notes, and videos that Klebold and Harris left to be discovered, Klebold had been thinking of committing suicide as early as 1997 and they both had begun thinking about a large massacre as early as April 1998 - a full year before the actual event. By then, the two had already run into some trouble. On January 30, 1998, Klebold and Harris were arrested for breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris were angry teenagers. They were not only angry at athletes that made fun of them, or Christians, or blacks, as some people have reported; they basically hated everyone except for a handful of people. On the front page of Harris's journal, he wrote: "I hate the f***ing world." Harris also wrote that he hates racists, martial arts experts, and people who brag about their cars. Both Klebold and Harris were serious about acting out on this hate. As early as spring 1998, they wrote about killing and retaliation in each other's yearbooks, including an image of a man standing with a gun, surrounded by dead bodies, with the caption, "The only reason your [sic] still alive is because someone has decided to let you live."2
Klebold and Harris used the Internet to find recipes for pipe bombs and other explosives. They amassed an arsenal, which eventually included guns, knives, and 99 explosive devices. Because of the large number of bombs and explosives thrown by the gunmen, the SWAT and police could not immediately enter the building to evacuate the remaining students and faculty that were hiding inside. Some had to wait hours to be rescued. Klebold and Harris wanted to kill as many people as possible, ....
Who Is to Blame? It is hard to pinpoint one trigger that started these two boys on a murderous rampage. They worked hard to fool all those around them for over a year. Surprisingly, about a month before the event, the Klebold family took a four-day road trip to the University of Arizona, where Dylan had been accepted for the following year. During the trip, the Klebold's didn't notice anything strange or unusual about Dylan. Counselors and others also didn't notice anything unusual. Looking back, there were telltale hints and clues that something was seriously wrong. Videotapes, journals, guns and bombs in their rooms would have been easily found if the parents had looked. Harris had made a website with hateful epithets that could have been followed up on.The Columbine Massacre changed the way society looked at children and at schools.
Violence was no longer just an after-school, inner-city activity. It could happen anywhere.
