{"id":4347,"date":"2010-04-19T10:39:58","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T16:39:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamingwithchildren.com\/?p=4347"},"modified":"2010-04-19T10:39:58","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T16:39:58","slug":"columbine-420","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/19\/columbine-420\/","title":{"rendered":"Columbine & 4\/20"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Today is the anniversary of the day the Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold intended to perform the Columbine massacre. It was supposed to happen on the 19th of April. I never realized that, it had to do with a SNAFU over a friend providing ammunition (an 18-year old friend who could buy ammo at KMart). I’d always bought into the mythology that they were commemorating Hitler’s Birthday, on the 20th. Columbine figures BIGTIME in the history of GamerDad. I was a CNet freelance reporter and my job was to chronicle how the media was blaming video games for something that obviously had nothing to do with video games. I’ve written about it almost yearly since then, and it turns out I never really understood it until now. I just finished a devastating book called Columbine and it’s now out in paperback. I DO NOT recommend it, it will break your heart. The book is Columbine, and the author is Dave Cullin. It is the definitive study.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

First of all the book relies on the evidence of thousands of police interviews, a psychological profile from the FBI’s top psychologist and from Eric and Dylan’s own journals. These two boys were bullies, they weren’t victims. Eric was a Pyschopath, and unfeeling person who wanted to be famous and most of all, wanted power over all the people he hated. He hated everyone. Everyone in the world. Dylan hated himself and saw Eric’s insane plan as a way to commit suicide in a hateful way. These kids were influenced by pop culture certainly, but it only fed their pre-existing interests. Which were misanthropic at best, pyschotic at worst.<\/p>\n

I expected to write a lot more. But the book simply shut me up. It’s compelling reading but it will break your heart and make you realize that some horrible things have no rhyme or reason. Eric Harris is unique among his kind of mental illness in that he extensively journalled his madness. It’s all there. His lack of empathy. His knowledge of how the world would react. His desire to be remembered. It’s tempting to deny him that last one, but he should be remembered.<\/p>\n

Because he’s nothing like us.<\/p>\n

There was no trigger. He just planned bigger than most crazy people. He just charmed everyone he met, including police who had noted his escalation from pranks to petty theft. They missed the pipe bombs and ammo. \u00a0The most chilling aspect is how he failed. He had bombs planted in the cafeteria, including one in each of their cars designed to go off roughly when and where he figured triage would be set up. The plan was to detonate two bombs in the cafeteria at lunch time. Killing hundreds and causing the library above to collapse, killing more. Dylan and Eric took up firing positions at the exits, they would shoot the fleeing students. They planned suicide or “death by cop” and the body total was supposed to be thousands. They wanted to outdo Oklahoma City – they only killed 13. Luckily, only 13. The smaller number is because they had to walk into the school and start randomly killing. Thousands of kids escaped and a few more wouldn’t have died. Within 20 minutes the school was surrounded by police and SWAT from as far away as Denver. There were hundreds, but SWAT wasn’t allowed in for 3 horrible hours. Eric and Dylan committed suicide about 40 minutes in. But the police, deafened by the fire alarm, treated this as a hostage situation. They thought the kids still inside, hiding and dying, were hostages and that storming the place would result in more deaths. It was a terrible mistake.<\/p>\n

One result of Columbine, in fact, is that the procedure with an active shooter is now to attack. Pass by and secure rooms, and as quickly as possible, neutralize the shooters. This scenario is familiar to players of many realistic shooters such as Rainbow Six and SWAT. Those games let you play the heroes, a satisfying thing after reading a book like this, I assure you.<\/p>\n

My point here is that this could happen anywhere and at any time, but it doesn’t. Despite violence in movies, TV, video games, and more, it doesn’t happen. The odds of dying in a school shooting – and this includes revenge or passion killing and not just massacres – is over a million to one. If society is so bad, why are there fewer deaths like this than ever before. Even that scary couple years at the end of the 90’s produced fewer killers and deaths than regular murder and violence (from young people) in every decade prior? The apex was actually the 30’s, but that’s more due to the Depression and theft gone awry than anything else.<\/p>\n

In 1999, I was assigned to cover the media reaction and I found – even from President Clinton – a scary need to blame. Blame the poor parents of these monsters, they didn’t know. The boys hid things too well. Blame the media, blame the lack of metal detectors, blame, blame, blame. The only plausible blame is the easy access to powerful guns due to the “gun show loophole” which allowed an 18-year old casual girlfriend of Dylan to walk into the convention center with their money and walk out with two shotguns, a couple TEK-9’s and a few handguns – without even leaving her name.<\/p>\n

But even that isn’t why it happened, it only contributed to the ease they had in the killing. The WHY is because they were crazy. Crazy and maladjusted. There are more of those kinds of people than we think, but most don’t think this big. They don’t think Paducah or Jonesborough big, or Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Oklahoma City that Amish shooting or the shootings throughout Europe (places that control media violence excessively).<\/p>\n

It just happened. Blaming guns obscures the fact that they wanted to do it and the pipe bombs were made from household items. (Note: I believe in gun control and the second ammendment. I disagree with the NRA only in that they are absolutist. Zero gun control is insane.)<\/p>\n

As I said, GamerDad began with that assignment. I simply wanted to point out that video games had little to do with it, aside from the fact that Eric and Dylan were typical computer owning males in the nineties and they liked playing Doom. There, they liked playing Doom. Just like me. Just like most of you. I realized that misunderstanding media violence lets the killers off easy, blames the innocent just trying to have a good time, and worst of all, points well meaning professionals as off target as blaming Goth culture did.<\/p>\n

99.99% of the time Doom is just Doom, a trenchcoat is just a trenchcoat, and a psycho killer is just a psycho killer. And that’s the scariest thing of all.<\/p>\n

Today a moment of silence for the victims, wounded, parents, teachers, town and even the killer’s unfortunate parents. Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary and tomorrow I’d prefer to talk about another reason 4\/20 means so much to me and GamerDad.com. \u00a0It is the anniversary of my first child’s, my daughter’s, birthday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the anniversary of the day the Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold intended to perform the Columbine massacre. It was supposed to happen on the 19th of April. I never realized that, it had to do with a SNAFU over a friend providing ammunition (an 18-year old friend who could buy ammo at KMart). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}