So it turns out that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t bullied, just psychotic. Now we can gather up all the blame that’s been spread out among the victims and society at large and deposit it firmly where it belongs: on the killers.
Will the well-funded anti-bullying industry, which has been profiting from Harris and Klebold’s murders for a decade now, edit their workbooks and return the money now?
I take two lessons from Columbine:
- When people believe that they have the right to take innocent lives at the end of a gun, other things they believe should not be relied upon.
- When the media gets a story horribly wrong, it will take years to correct it, if it is corrected at all.
I don’t have more than cursory knowledge of Columbine, but the mental illness angle jives with what they did. Same with the Binghamton killer. If I was a victim’s relative, I’d have some hard questions for the perp’s families. From what I know of both cases (again, just press accounts), all 3 of these perps were big on target practice. That sounds relatively tame, until you consider the cost: bullets ain’t cheap. Where were these high schoolers getting their money for the guns and ammo? How could Jiverly Wong shoot 10,000 practice rounds in a year, and his family “not know he owned guns?” He must have stunk of black powder fairly often.
From my vantage point, it always seems that human tragedy is caused by a number of people doing something incredibly stupid, and converging on the same place at the same time. These killers were aided and abetted by their families, neighbors, co-workers and others they came into contact with that would not speak up.