Busting Columbine Myths

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School. And like any horrible, large-scale media circus, the Columbine shootings are surrounded by a lot of bullshit. Information was flung at all the news outlets covering the event live so quickly and so haphazardly that speculation, mistakes, and outright lies were reported as fact and have stuck in the popular consciousness ever since. As Greg Toppo at USA Today reports, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't goths, they weren't bullied, they weren't members of the so-called "Trenchcoat Mafia", they didn't target black people or Christians, and they weren't loners. It's now clear that the narrative of lonely, outcast kids seeking revenge against their oppressors is probably the biggest myth of all. As you might expect from mass murderers, they weren't normal teenagers pushed too far, but were actually psychopaths with mental problems far beyond and unrelated to everyday teen angst. If only they'd been normal teen social pariahs, they might have favored bad, tortured poetry over bullets. Read Toppo's article here.