Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine shooting. In terms of dollar-value damages and lives lost, it’s hardly the biggest national tragedy of my lifetime. But it’s done more to shape my consciousness than any war or explosion or plane crash.
Like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Columbine’s two perpetrators, I was an angry and miserable teenager. That I was angry and miserable did not cause me to empathize with them, as some deluded souls certainly did, nor did it burden me with any more antipathy than I felt for mass murderers who weren’t close to my age (and, to a far lesser extent, my then-mindset). What their shooting spree did do was illuminate for me where being angry and miserable could take me. I saw their culminating acts of rage and rejection and I saw that I wanted absolutely no part of it whatsoever. It wasn’t enough to make me stop being angry and miserable – that would come later, when graduating high school was within reach – but it was enough for me to stop becoming more angry and more miserable. When tensions got to a certain point, the senselessness and barbarism of that Colorado bloodbath acted, consciously or not, as a powerful check.
I read a column recently which pointed to Columbine as kind of a cultural Rorschach test. Those who don’t like guns will blame guns for the tragedy; those who don’t like violent video games will identify them as the culprit and so on. There are, of course, varying degrees of truth and distortion inherent to all this-finger pointing as well as plenty of blame to go around. What interests me most presently, however, is the need to issue this much blame at all.
There is, I think, a tendency toward disassociation concerning the Harrises and Klebolds of the world. No one wants to see themselves as linked, even on a biological level, to people they despise, so they simply stop seeing them as people at all. Epithets like “animal” and “monster” are applied freely despite the reality that Harris and Klebold (like Hitler and Stalin before them) could not have been anything but human.
The next step in this dissociative process is to look for the breaks – in what way were these freaks’ lives unlike mine? Herein the blamers have a field day. What were the parents like? What kind of media (music, movies, games, etc.) were the perpetrators exposed to? Did they say their prayers and eat their damn vegetables? In other words, what were the exact circumstances that led to this tragic undertaking so that we can isolate them and prevent it from happening again?
This, of course, is an exercise in futility. Just as there is no such thing as a school shooter gene, there is no such thing as a mold from which all school shooters are sprung. There are similarities between shooters to be certain, as well as certain behaviors which may be legitimately construed as warning signs. But consider also the vast differences between the perpetrators. Andrew Kehoe was a school board member enraged by property taxes. Patrick Purdy and Jeff Weise were adherents to extremist political ideologies. Brenda Ann Spencer was female and claimed to have no good reason at all.
It is unlikely that any policy prescription will ever be a curative. Crack down on guns and they’ll build bombs. Cast pre-emptive suspicion on kids who wear black trench coats and you may succeed in allowing jeans-n-T-shirt wearing perpetrators to fly under the radar (to say nothing of unfairly hassling trench coat-wearers who lack any nefarious intent). Ban bullying and hurtful speech and your future terrorists will learn to smile politely.
Though Columbine has gathered a sort of cachet as the definitive school shooting, it is hardly the first incident of its kind. And while it is contextualized as a tragedy from which we all can/should/must learn, many other shootings have followed in its wake. I have every reason to believe more school shootings will happen, as they have been happening. I also have every reason to believe a number of people will scratch their heads and ask “how could this have happened?” and begin the cause-seeking anew. The real lesson of Columbine or any Columbine-like occurrence is that there is no neatly laid-out moralistic conclusion that we all are supposed to arrive at (especially if arriving at said conclusion ignores other conclusions that may happen to be right or useful). If people still feel so helplessly compelled to “do something!” in the aftermath of tragedy, I would say a good dose of common sense and historical perspective never hurt anyone.
