Myths and Legends

Today, 10 years later, is a book about the shootings at Columbine
even necessary? Surely, around-the-clock media
coverage of the
attack and the reverse deification of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
(Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho evoked their names like a St.
Christopher of the School Shooter in videos before his gruesome
rampage) ensures that
everyone remembers what happened just over a
decade ago.

Or not.

“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench
Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down
jocks to settle a long-running feud,” Dave Cullen writes in the middle
of Columbine, his comprehensive, 400-page account of the
Colorado high-school shootings. “Almost none of that happened.” The
most surprising thing about Columbine is how many pages Cullen
devotes to amending the popular misconceptions that followed the
shootings.

Cullen has earned the (admittedly, not heavily contested) title of
world’s preeminent Columbine expert. He arrived at the school around
noon on April 20, 1999, about 40 minutes after Harris and Klebold began
their attack, and he has done thousands of hours of interviews with
families and survivors of the shootings in the decade since.

Cullen patiently clears the record of popular myths, tracking their
birth and development, like the early claim that Harris and Klebold
were gay. Cullen traces that story to a television news interview with
a Columbine student:

“‘They’re freaks,’ said an angry sophomore from the soccer team.
‘Nobody really liked them, just ’cause they—’ he paused, then
plunged ahead. ‘The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make
fun of them.'”

Neither of the shooters was gay—Klebold entertained an
elaborate fantasy romance with a female classmate and Harris was an
exceedingly confident ladies’ man—but the comment was adopted as
salacious fact and repeated ad nauseam almost immediately afterward.
Anti-gay activists, to this day, repeat the lie in their homophobic
tirades. More myths about the shooting fall away under Cullen’s
scrutiny: Both boys were fairly popular. The trench coats that they
wore were to conceal the weapons, not to make a statement (and neither
of the boys identified as goths). The assault wasn’t planned for April
20 to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday, as urban legends have it.
Instead, the shooting was supposed to fall on April 19, as a tribute to
Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing.

In fact, Cullen reports, “The boys were going to double or triple
McVeigh’s record.” The original plan for what they referred to as
“Judgment Day” or “NBK” (for “Natural Born Killers”) was much more
elaborate than what played out: Harris and Klebold stuffed duffel bags
with bombs and shrapnel to go off in the cafeteria, to potentially kill
hundreds, and would follow that with a shooting spree to kill the
survivors. The boys planted bombs in their cars to blow up forty-five
minutes after the assault, to kill media and first-responders who would
have started moving into the crime scene. The bombs were placed, but
they didn’t detonate because they were improperly assembled.

After studying their journals, Cullen determined that Harris was the
driving force behind Columbine. Harris’s journal, which he named “The
Book of God,” at first resembles nothing more than the writing of an
angry, melodramatic teenager: “[School] is societies way of turning all
the young people into good little robots.” But later, in journals and
on his website, Harris listed people he wanted to kill, considering
himself an agent of “Natural SELECTION!!!!!!!!!!!” Klebold wrote almost
entirely about unrequited love and suicide, and Cullen suggests that he
nearly blew the whistle on the plan several times.

Cullen also undertakes the precarious task of debunking the legend
of Cassie Bernall, the evangelical Christian girl who was murdered by
Harris supposedly because she believed in God. An account of Bernall’s
story, published under the title She Said Yes, made both
Christian and mainstream best-seller lists. Bernall became an icon, a
call to action for the burgeoning evangelical movement that, in a few
months, would buoy George W. Bush to victory over John McCain in the
Republican primaries. Cullen finds two eyewitnesses who have always
discounted that story: “She [saw] Eric walk up with the shotgun in his
right hand, slap Cassie’s tabletop twice with his left, and say,
‘Peekaboo.’… Cassie looked desperate, holding her hands up against
the sides of her face. Eric poked the shotgun under and fired. Not a
word.”

Only the first third of the book is devoted to recounting the
attacks. The bulk of Columbine describes the community’s
struggle to heal in the aftermath, under ridiculously intense media
scrutiny and a serious increase in violent crime: “The new year began,
and it got worse,” Cullen writes. “A young boy was found dead in a
Dumpster a few blocks from Columbine High. On Valentine’s Day, two
students were shot dead in a Subway shop two blocks from the school.
The star of the basketball team committed suicide.” That story is told
simultaneously with chapters of Harris and Klebold’s preparations for
the shooting. These braided narratives, going forward and backward in
time, reflect the good and the bad of suburban life: A community comes
back together even as two young men plan to destroy it.

From the demonization of gays to the persecution complex of
evangelicals to the fear that a mass murderer might be hiding inside
every trench coat (eerily prescient of the post-9/11 fear that a
terrorist might be skulking behind every Muslim beard), the story
America told itself about Columbine revealed more about the country
than about the shooters. With rational thought and rigorous
journalism—and an investigation of how the media egregiously

misinterpreted the truth—Cullen shows us why we need to be
eternally vigilant. Not against something as simple and childish as a
shadowy gunman; instead, we need to take care that the stories that we
tell ourselves are honest and meaningful. It’s a lesson we need to
learn again and again.