Althouse: "It worries me that even now, kids who were not even born during Columbine High School are still making reference to Columbine."

May 30, 2018

"It worries me that even now, kids who were not even born during Columbine High School are still making reference to Columbine."

"I don’t want people to feel helpless and hopeless, but I think what those two did, what they wrote in their journal is: ‘We’ll never be forgotten’ and ‘We’ll be remembered forever.’ And I believe they’re fulfilling that."

Said Frank DeAngelis, who was the principal of Columbine High School at the time of the famous massacre, quoted in "For ‘Columbiners,’ School Shootings Have a Deadly Allure" (NYT).

46 comments:

Jupiter said...: Yeah, well, except, the number of school shootings has actually declined in the last couple decades. It's the amount of media hysteria promoting taking our guns away that has increased. Which is probably why Columbine is so well known.; 5/30/18, 3:39 PM
rhhardin said...: School shootings are social media.; 5/30/18, 3:39 PM
n.n said...: Elective abortion, abortion fields, and diversity, is a side-effect of some drugs and normalizing philosophies. In fact, assault scalpels, vacuums, and other weapons of social progress, are leading means to commit legal murder and elective abortion generally. Debasing human life to uphold the moral principle of stability has consequences and collateral damage.; 5/30/18, 3:46 PM
Mike Sylwester said...: Dylan Klebold's mother, Sue Klebold, has written a book titled A Mother's Reckoning. I have not read the book, but I saw an hour-long interview of her on BookTV. She is a very thoughtful and articulate person.; 5/30/18, 3:49 PM
Jim at said...: Columbine couldn't have happened.
The assault weapons ban was in place.; 5/30/18, 4:00 PM
Earnest Prole said...: Malcolm Gladwell explained this far more persuasively a couple of years ago in Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Catch On in the New Yorker. He was hassled by the Left for deviating from gun-control orthodoxy, but that shouldn’t bother too many people here.; 5/30/18, 4:00 PM
Loren W Laurent said...: What is interesting is that they are still referred to as school shooters.

What they were was failed bombers.

Their plan was two explode two propane bombs in the cafeteria at the busiest moment of the day, and destroy the building. Their goal was 400 dead, 500 dead — enough to beat Timothy McVeigh’s numbers.

They planted the bombs, but luckily the bombs did not go off.

They had not even planned on initially entering the school: they were to be situated outside by their cars, angled to shoot any survivors that made it out of the building.

They were not targeting jocks, or minorities, or the ‘popular’ kids: the leader Eric Harris hated ALL of humanity, and wanted to kill them all (his journal and tapes give more than sufficient support of this statement).

He was not a ‘Robin Hood’ making an action in defense of the weak and the bullied: he hated the weak, and he was a bully whenever he had the chance to act as such.

It’s amazing that close to twenty years later most of the ‘known’ things about the event are the incorrect stories from the first few days.

-LWL; 5/30/18, 4:05 PM
n.n said...: So, the elective abortionists of Columbine fame were neither left (authoritarian) nor right (individuals), but merely divergent, transhuman.; 5/30/18, 4:32 PM
Vance said...: Excellent post by Lazlo. I must commend him. Or Loren, as the case may be.; 5/30/18, 4:38 PM
fivewheels said...: Really, we should just pass a law that media outlets are not allowed to mention school shootings in the news, ever, thus cutting out copycatters and preventing any glorification of the shooters.

What about the First Amendment, you say? Oh, all of a sudden you're fastidious about the Constitution? You'll throw out the Second Amendment, but not the First?

That will never prevent all shootings, you say? But if it saves even one life, isn't it worth it? Isn't that what you always say?

Mass shooting gag rule. Support it or you're just killing children for fun, you monster.; 5/30/18, 4:56 PM
Jupiter said...: Earnest Prole said...
"Malcolm Gladwell explained this far more persuasively a couple of years ago in Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Catch On in the New Yorker."

Gladwell's theory is that people who might be reluctant to do something if no one was doing it become willing to do it because they see others doing it. This notion is based on someone else's theory of how riots occur. I don't think it really applies to events occurring months and hundreds of mile apart. In any case, the number of school shootings in the US is decreasing. It's the attention paid by the assholes in the media that is increasing.

Gladwell is mostly a bullshit artist, by the way. He finds an acorn once in a while.; 5/30/18, 4:57 PM
CWJ said...: EP and LWL set the stage. Well done both!; 5/30/18, 5:00 PM
MAJMike said...: I wasn't alive during World War II, but make references to it.; 5/30/18, 5:12 PM
The Godfather said...: What interests me about the reactions to "school shootings" (and other like events) is that everyone is prepared to sacrifice OTHER PEOPLE'S rights and interests, but not their own. If you aren't a gun owner, you're happy to deprive gun-owners of their rights. If you aren't crazy, you're happy to deprive the mentally ill of their civil liberties. If you're a "school resource officer" (supposedly an armed guard) you're happy to listen to the gunfire while you wait for back up.

And if you are supporter of the free press, you oppose banning news reports of school (and other mass) shootings even though each incident seems to encourage the next one.

The fact is that school shootings are still black swan events. They are very rare, although they get tremendous news coverage. Yes, there are steps that can be taken to improve school security, but there is nothing that we can do as a practical matter that will prevent the occasional mass killing, if not by "assault weapons" then by revolvers and shotguns, and if not by guns then by bombs, poisons, or something the wackos haven't thought of yet.; 5/30/18, 5:19 PM
Yancey Ward said...: What will stop this is a string of shooters getting quickly dropped before their body count reaches three. You see this happen 4 or 5 times in a row, and suddenly the school shootings will stop.; 5/30/18, 5:29 PM
rhhardin said...: The mention school shootings because there's ratings in it, and there's ratings in it because of women.; 5/30/18, 5:36 PM
rhhardin said...: Women are more pro-entertainment than pro-children.; 5/30/18, 5:37 PM
gadfly said...: Malcolm Gladwell's book: "Thresholds of Violence - How school shootings catch on."

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

[...]

Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model [socialogist Mark] Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him were grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.; 5/30/18, 5:40 PM
Freeman Hunt said...: I'm trying to remember if there was a similar news event, referenced but not experienced, for kids when I was one.; 5/30/18, 5:47 PM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: Kids these days. They have all the shootings they could ever want, but they glom on to their parents' shooting! When I was a kid, I wouldn't have been caught dead listening to Perry Como or giving a shit about the Boston Strangler or the "In Cold Blood" killers.

I bet they're also listening to Marilyn Manson and watching Natural Born Killers and Full Metal Jacket. Pathetic!; 5/30/18, 5:58 PM
William said...: There's apparently no way of writing about a school suicide without encouraging some kid somewhere to think "hey, what a great idea". Ditto with school shootings. I think coverage of these events should be de minimis. They are for school suicides, but, sadly, school shootings are an excellent way of attacking NRA types so coverage is at the max..........I don't know if it's possible to cover any evil person without in some way glamorizing that person. I'm sure a lot of new-Nazis are attracted to the movement not because of any affinity to its socialist, progressive ideology but simply because it is evil.; 5/30/18, 6:03 PM
wildswan said...: Notice The main photo on Drudge - Weinstein with the subheading:
THE RECKONING.

Maybe the way to deter school shooters is to make them realize there will be a reckoning. Like have a webcam on a website focusing on a blank concrete wall 24/7. Sometimes it pans over to the toilet. Sometimes a hand is shown carrying a tray of unappetising food. Not moldy - just limp lettuce, limp orange slices, warm milk, mystery meat, wonder bread, jello. Some more wall. Some dark wall. TV endlessly on outside and sound coming in. Sometimes someone says "this is not a hotel."; 5/30/18, 6:27 PM
Michael K said...: Really, we should just pass a law that media outlets are not allowed to mention school shootings in the news, ever, thus cutting out copycatters and preventing any glorification of the shooters.

If I thought it was possible, I would be for it. It's not.

Gladwell's theory is that people who might be reluctant to do something if no one was doing it become willing to do it because they see others doing it

I kind of agree with this.

Also, you've got a lot of disaffected boys out there who are being told they are worthless.

I also think sex supercharges relationships at this age. It makes the emotional state jump an order of magnitude.

I don't know if that mother in Texas was telling the truth that her daughter rejected the shooter.Kids are living in a toxic atmosphere sometimes.

I think it was happened to Martha Moxley when Michael Skakel killed her.

Some of it might be blowback from the war on boys.

The only thing we really have any control of is to reduce these massive high schools with 2,000 kids to human size and to limit access to a few doors with metal detectors.; 5/30/18, 6:44 PM
Matt Sablan said...: There needs to be a balance between the pseudo-glorification of the Boston bomber and Columbine shooters and the complete memory holing of the assassination attempt on Republicans at their baseball practice.; 5/30/18, 6:47 PM
Anonymous said...: I second Yancey's opinion. If the bleeding dead bodies of "school shooters" were displayed as frequently and as prominently as the other coverage there would be a rapid loss of the mystique. Even so we would still get the occasional self-sacrificing nut. The real answer: protect schools as we do airports. Also, if the principals of these schools were treated as badly as they should be for allowing children in their care to be killed we would have a lot more principals willing to take active security measures.; 5/30/18, 6:51 PM
Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...: Columbine broke new ground for gun lovers everywhere.; 5/30/18, 6:58 PM
n.n said...: Columbine saw the progress of the Pro-Choice religious/moral orientation and abortionist outlook.; 5/30/18, 7:19 PM
Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...: Columbine saw the progress of the Pro-Choice religious/moral orientation and abortionist outlook.

Good point! More gun murders will really help do anything about abortion. Because you know, the two things have anything to do with each other. Maybe next you'll be arming the fetuses. Why not? You believe you should have access to her womb anyway so why not violate it so as to arm the fetus? The other thing is this speeds up the natural progression of the phenomenon where right-wing easy gun access leads to toddlers playing with guns that they then accidentally shoot their parents with. Just let the fetus play with the gun you want to provide it and maybe she can kill her mother before she even gets born or aborted!

Right-wingers. It's like someone took an egg beater to their brains.; 5/30/18, 7:26 PM
gilbar said...: Blogger Freeman Hunt said...
I'm trying to remember if there was a similar news event, referenced but not experienced, for kids when I was one. 5/30/18, 5:47 PM

I don't know how old you were, but I Don't Like Mondays was from back in the mid '70's; 5/30/18, 7:38 PM
n.n said...: Elective abortion is the premeditated termination of a wholly innocent human life who is disarmed and does not have a voice to protest her sentence.

The problem with guns, assault scalpels, etc., is that they end up in the hands of elective abortionists, criminal elements, and self-abortionists. A regulatory regime does not address the reality of their use, but normalization does manufacture a perception. Fortunately, they are more often used in self-defense, for medical care, and to increase opportunity cost to would-be abortionists and other criminals, than to commit elective abortion, and that is a human right and a conservation of principles and principals.; 5/30/18, 7:41 PM
n.n said...: If it's for the children, then psychotropic drugs that are known to cause side-effects, including breaks from reality, should be regulated, and the debasement and denial of human life that accompanies normalization under the Pro-Choice quasi-religious philosophy should be mitigated.

Rights and responsibilities, not rites and avoidance.; 5/30/18, 7:46 PM
mikee said...: I, for one, wish the anti-gun leftists would latch onto something more amenable to rational discussion and serious problem solving than the issue of school shooters.
But mentioning anything about, let alone investigating, gun crime in the south side of Chicago or inner city Baltimore is for some reason racist. So since we are forced to fight against anti-gun leftists on the basis of school shootings, here's two cents' worth.

Kick kids who misbehave out of school and into brief vocational training or the street. Keeping them around the kids who want to learn does nobody any good.; 5/30/18, 7:55 PM
Kevin said...: “If I thought it was possible, I would be for it. It's not.”

You lack imagination. Call it Assault News and label it Hate Reporting.; 5/30/18, 8:13 PM
wholelottasplainin said...: "But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
*********************

I had a chemistry set. I managed to grow up w/o becoming a school shooter, as did millions of others.

What's changed is the mentality of the kids, who could give a good goddamn about chemistry or any other academic subject, but instead wear out their thumbs on Xbox controllers or texting trash on their iphones.

They've become grown-up empty vessels, pitiful husks of the human beings they should have been taught to be. Their parents and teachers let them.; 5/30/18, 8:15 PM
Kevin said...: Does Ambien cause school shootings?; 5/30/18, 8:17 PM
n.n said...: Does Ambien cause school shootings?

Ambien may not, but it is a known side-effect of psychotropic drugs.

They need to investigate the link between denying individual dignity (e.g. diversity), debasing human life (e.g. selective-child), and the progress of transhuman, trans-social incidents.; 5/30/18, 8:39 PM
D 2 said...: Michael Ks note in passing about 2000 kids in one school is interesting. Would smaller school populations - while not offerring as wide an experience perhaps - also allow for those who may be more "prone" to consider such actions not be able to "hide" their murderous thoughts from detection?

"Hiding in the numbers" type argument., rather than "hiding in the shadows"

Some articles on this topic suggest that certain individuals were perhaps known before the event, but nothing was done. I am not looking to dispute that possibility. But I am ignorant as to whether there is a possible correlation between shootings and school sizes. A 500 person grade ... Some people can stay blurry, perhaps, to those they walk beside in the halls; 5/30/18, 8:42 PM
narciso said...: Why has law enforcement not learned the lesson after 19 years, in broward they seem to have particularly obtuse.; 5/30/18, 8:55 PM
Loren W Laurent said...: Dave Cullen wrote the definitive book on Columbine.

This is an excerpt of a piece he wrote in 2009, relating to the lessons learned:

"And the final practical lesson of Columbine is a revolution in police response tactics. Cops followed the old book at Columbine: surround the building, set up a perimeter, contain the damage. That approach has been replaced by the “active shooter protocol.” Optimally, it calls for a four-person team to advance in a diamond-shaped wedge. (If there isn’t time to gather four officers, a single officer should charge in alone.) They’re trained to move toward the sound of gunfire and neutralize the shooter. Their goal is to stop him at all costs. They will walk past a dying child if they have to, just to prevent the shooter from killing more. The active protocol has proved successful at numerous shootings during the past decade. At Virginia Tech alone, it probably saved dozens of lives."

Broward authorities must have missed the memo.

-LWL; 5/30/18, 9:39 PM
Michael K said...: Michael Ks note in passing about 2000 kids in one school is interesting.

We had a discussion of this at Ricochet last week.

I think there are three factors.

One, the number of kids exposed if there is a shooter is much less.

Access is easier to control.

And, maybe there is something about these huge high schools that brings out the pathology of certain types.; 5/30/18, 10:10 PM
Yancey Ward said...: There was an important lesson demonstrated in this thread- which of you noticed it like I did?; 5/31/18, 1:31 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: "Michael Ks note in passing about 2000 kids in one school is interesting. Would smaller school populations - while not offerring as wide an experience perhaps - also allow for those who may be more "prone" to consider such actions not be able to "hide" their murderous thoughts from detection?"

I grew up in the same school district as Columbine (JCPS) and graduated 50 years ago this year. My high school had about 1500 students, and won the state title in football, basketball, and track that year in the top league. Columbine is one of the newer HSs in JCPS, and has roughly twice as many students. It plays football at the most competitive level, in the top league, in the state, while my old HS has dropped into the second level. Twice the size means that it can compete at a higher level league in school sports. Is it worth it? I don't think so. In Columbine's case, the administration apparently turned a blind eye to bullying by the football players, who were known to bounce low status males, like the two shooters, against lockers as they passed in the halls. My kid could have gone to Columbine, because they had the IB program (and a neighbor boy went there, and thence to Princeton). They otherwise would have gone to the JCPS HS to the west. Instead, we sent our kid to a private school a couple miles due north of Columbine, with a class size of maybe 80. There was effectively no bullying, male or female. Zero tolerance. Kid was bullied for maybe a month in 3rd grade, and after it was discovered, the kids were separated for the rest of LS (K-5), both the bully and bullied were counseled, and the bully, despite being black, was watched like a hawk, until they left after LS. And instead of the kids playing sports in HS being treated like gods, there was mandatory athletics through into HS, a lot of sports teams, so probably better than half the class lettered in one sport or another. Of course, they didn't play in the same league as Columbine, or my old HS, but so what? Very likely, a higher percentage had sports scholarships in college. (And roughly a 98% college graduation rate after 5 years).

I see little advantage to most of the students to these HSs, with huge class sizes (1k or so). The only advantages seem to be competing at a higher level in athletics, and a bigger empire for the administration. On the flip side, the students mostly become nothing more than faceless numbers to the staff. The area around Columbine is white majority mostly upper middle class, with some real money, living in what we would have called mansions when I was growing up. So, the big problems there are bullying and party drugs. But comparable sized HSs in less affluent, minority majority, areas often have far worse bullying, much worse drug problems, and often horrendous discipline and violence problems. All for a more competitive football team and higher pay for the administrators.; 5/31/18, 4:07 AM
gilbar said...: mikee said: "Kick kids who misbehave out of school and into brief vocational training or the street. Keeping them around the kids who want to learn does nobody any good"

yes, it Does do somebody good.
Schools are paid for each student.
Kick them on the street, and no one gets any money.
Send them to a Vocational school, and then That school gets the money.

If you're an administrator of a high school...
The more students you have; the more money comes in.
The more money comes in; the higher your salary will be.

I think that the correlation between school size and administrator pay will answer most questions here.
Hell, the correlation between bureaucracy size and administrator pay will most questions.; 5/31/18, 4:18 AM
gilbar said...: Bruce wakes up earlier than me, and says it much better. :); 5/31/18, 4:25 AM
Known Unknown said...: Simple way to end school shootings?

End compulsory public education.; 5/31/18, 7:13 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: “Bruce wakes up earlier than me, and says it much better. :)”

It is called first and second sleep. I got through law school, going on 30 years ago, by studying during my awake time between my two sleeps. My partner keeps telling me to get on a normal sleep schedule, and I tell her that I have done just fine this way for half my lifetime. So, I wake up for a couple hours, comment on blogs, etc, then go back to sleep for several more hours.

Supposedly, this two sleep system was far more common in Colonial times. Entire families would wake up after their first sleep, and go socialize with the neighbors, then return home and all go back to sleep. My guess it is an adaption to living in parts of the world where darkness can extend to better than half the day in the winter. We are probably evolved, thanks to our African roots, to a more equal night and day cycle. In any case, artificial lighting is probably why this two sleep lifestyle seems to have mostly, maybe, died out.; 5/31/18, 12:09 PM