- School shootings have
become as American as baseball
and apple pie.
They're part of our national identity.
On our passports with this
eagle and this waving wheat
there should also be a
white teenager with a gun.
Most of us couldn't accurately
say how many victims
there have been in the last five years
or how many mass shootings
at schools or churches
or movie theaters.
We lost count a while ago.
But this weariness, this
burnout of our empathy
wasn't yet the case on April 20th, 1999
at Columbine High School.
The day you could call
the first mass shooting
of the digital age.
I was a freshman in
high school at the time
and a bit of a goth myself
so, yes, I paid attention.
And with the wall-to-wall
media coverage lasting weeks,
to this day I still retain
so much about the events
of that day.
Two teenagers, Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold,
were mercilessly teased
and bullied in high school.
Teased for liking Marilyn Manson
and wearing black trench coats.
They were rejected by the jocks,
they were rejected by girls,
they took out their anger
in violent video games
which led to a real-life
plan to get as many guns
as they could and shoot
as many fellow students
as they could.
That narrative of Columbine
has become the origin story,
the genesis of this modern
day religion of angry,
disenfranchised men.
But as it turns out, little
of that story is true.
In fact, the only part of what
I said that was strictly true
is there is solid
evidence the two young men
did sometimes listen to Marilyn Manson,
even though he wasn't their favorite.
There is so much about
Columbine that I, and maybe you,
had completely wrong, which
given how much influence
Columbine has had in the last 20 years,
is downright dangerous.
Peter Langman is a psychologist
who has been tracking
and documenting school
shootings for years.
He's found that Columbine has influenced
more than 30 violent
attacks and shootings.
When you chart it, Columbine's
influence splits off
and mutates in all directions
like an evil spider.
The Virginia Tech shooter,
the Santa Fe shooter,
the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary
who killed 20 first graders
used to post on forums
about Columbine high school
and filled his Tumblr
with photos of the Columbine victims
and played a first person shooter game
called Super Columbine Massacre RPG.
Here's this story about Columbine
that has so much cultural power
and has caused so much destruction
and it's not even correct.
Let's start in a maybe silly
but still important place.
Everyone knows the two shooters
were in the Trench Coat Mafia.
They wore trench coats, makeup, berets,
their tastes were dark, borderline gothic.
They were into witchcraft.
There were rumors they were gay.
And this outsider fashion
and sexuality is part of why
they were so bullied.
Now it's not that the truth
here is more complicated,
it's just wrong.
There was a group at Columbine High School
calling themselves the Trench Coat Mafia
but the two shooters
were not a part of it.
But if you search major newspapers
from the day following the
shooting, The New York Times,
The BBC, they all clearly
identify and link the shooters
as being part of the Trench Coat Mafia,
this group of trench coat wearing loners.
But the students the papers interviewed,
and even the students
the police interviewed,
were constantly confusing
the shooters for other
different students at Columbine.
It's not that there weren't kids like this
at Columbine High School,
students in the Trench Coat Mafia,
they were just not Dylan and Eric.
The story quickly became
that because they were these outsiders,
Dylan and Eric went in
looking to kill the jocks
that taunted and bullied them,
and the shallow girls that rejected them.
Adding to that, they were
probably white supremacists
so they were going to
kill minorities as well.
But, in fact, they had no targets.
Yes, before killing people,
they taunted and attacked their victims
for what made them different.
But it was seemingly entirely at random.
Quite a few of the victims had
never even met their killers.
As it turns out, the
teenagers, especially Eric,
were great with the ladies,
good at school, liked sports,
had friends in diverse racial groups,
and perhaps most importantly,
had a solid group of friends.
It seems like I'm trying
to make these two people
look better.
I'm not.
They're mass murderers, so we're clear,
but they became the poster
boys for goth loner,
unlucky with the ladies, racist revenge
and the evidence shows
that was inaccurate.
Future school shooters saw themselves here
deeply, personally, where
they shouldn't have.
In fact, there's evidence
that Dylan and Eric
were much bigger bullies than they were
victims of bullying.
They frequently picked on people
in an attempt to start fights.
They even singled out certain students
for long-term harassment,
some of which was reported
to school administration.
But perhaps the biggest myth
was that this was a mass shooting.
Obviously it was, I'm not doing
some Alex Jones weirdness,
but Columbine wasn't intended
to be a shooting at all.
It was intended to be a bombing.
The two killers planted
bombs outside the school
to distract law enforcement
and bombs in their cars
to blow up TV news trucks
and rescue workers.
The main focus of their
attack were propane bombs
in the cafeteria which
were supposed to kill
hundreds of people.
Again, showing the attack
was about pure violence
and numbers of the dead, not
targeting anyone specific.
Because they were teenagers
and bad bomb makers,
all of their bigger bombs
failed foiling their plan.
The guns they amassed, the
ones they ended up using,
were just there as backup to shoot those
who were fleeing the bombing.
This mass shooting, which has
inspired dozens of copycats,
was actually a failed bombing.
This is important because for
a certain type of young man,
the guns and shooting
themselves were glamorized.
And in America, guns are a
hell of a lot easier to get
than bombs.
Even the reporting on the actual deaths
was rife with inaccuracy.
Cassie Bernall was 17 years
old and one of the 13 people
killed that day at Columbine.
It's tricky to talk about
her because Cassie herself
did absolutely nothing wrong.
She played no part in the
somewhat bizarre mythologizing
of her death.
The original account of Cassie's death
was that in the moments
before she was killed,
she was asked do you believe in God
by one of the shooters.
The implied question here was
do you still believe in God
in the face of this murder, this violence.
Cassie said, "yes," and then was killed.
This account of her saying yes
launched evangelical rallies,
Christian rock songs, even a
book written by Cassie's mother
called She Said Yes.
Cassie had become a full-fledged martyr
for refusing to deny God.
In this face of this horrible tragedy
for the evangelical and
Christian communities,
here was this inspiring girl.
The story started because that
day a student had overheard
a girl say she stilled believed
in God before being shot,
it wasn't Cassie Bernall.
It was another student named Val Schnurr.
Val survived, badly wounded,
four bullets still lodged in her abdomen.
By the time the investigators
realized they had
the wrong martyr, so to speak,
Cassie had already become famous.
Investigators told Cassie's
parents that, unfortunately,
the story was not true,
Cassie didn't say yes,
and many eyewitnesses corroborated that.
But they didn't publicly expose the truth
because they felt it had gone too far,
that too many Christians were
already devoted to the legend.
As the Bernall's pastor
told The Washington Post,
"You will never change
the story of Cassie.
"The church is going to
stick to the martyr story.
"It's the story they heard first
"and circulated for
six months uncontested.
"To the church, Cassie will
always say yes, period."
I feel like that quote
could apply to the whole
of the Columbine myth.
You will never change the story,
it's the story they heard first, period.
This brings us to the real question.
Why is it even important to
get Columbine right anymore?
It happened 20 years ago.
Well, first of all, Columbine
is not less relevant
or less dangerous than
it was 20 years ago.
The shooters wanted to exploit
the 24-hour cable news cycle
just like the mass shooters
of the last five years
want to grab the news and
internet through manifestos
and videos of live streaming.
And that desire to capture
and exploit our fear
and imaginations through media,
always seems to work
exactly as they planned.
Dave Cullen, whose book
Columbine is considered
the definitive text on the murders,
is against publicly naming mass shooters
and sharing glorified photos of them.
Sure, the truly curious can
find out every grotesque detail
they're interested in online
but by keeping their names
and images out of mass
media, it denies the killers
the notoriety they seek.
You don't murder dozens
of people at random
without seeking notoriety.
Cullen says that for
killers there are two roots
to the elite club where the
media rolls out the red carpet
and gives you the star treatment.
Body count or creativity.
If you choose body count
you better break the Top 10
because the media loves keeping score
in the chiron beneath your
high school yearbook photo.
And if you choose creativity,
you have to shock us
by killing little kids or the Amish.
These amount to spectacle
killings, performance violence.
Adding to that, Columbine is
still being used as inspiration
and as a source of contagion.
Just like high profile suicides
have been proven contagious,
shootings are also contagious.
That's why it's so important
that the media gets things right.
One study at Arizona State
found that mass shootings
can infect new shooters like a disease.
There is "significant
evidence" that mass killings
involving firearms are
incented, meaning incentivized,
by similar events in the immediate past.
And no one talks about the
danger of this contagion
more than an unlikely source, Sue Klebold,
Dylan Klebold's mother.
She told The New York Times,
"We don't do this intentionally
"but we glorify shooters by
showing the damage they've done,
"all the crying, all the empty seats,
"and for people with rage,
"that has a particular appeal for them."
Klebold realizes that angry young men
are using every part of
Columbine as a blueprint.
There are Tumblr
communities devoted to them.
She still gets letters from
young women in love with Dylan.
Because of this, she has
specifically fought against
the release of video tapes
that the two teenagers
filmed in her basement
talking about why and how
they would commit the killings.
In fact, Sue Klebold is the
reason I became so interested
in the truth behind Columbine.
I met her when we were both speakers
at the TEDMED Conference.
As soon as she found out
I was a funeral director,
all she wanted to talk with
me about was brain donation,
which brings us to our
final misunderstanding
about Columbine.
Yes, there were two killers at Columbine.
But they weren't equal
criminal masterminds.
It's generally understood
by the psychiatrists
and investigators that
have looked most deeply
at the murders that
Dylan Klebold, Sue's son,
was severely depressed, hated himself,
and was suicidal.
Eric Harris was callous, self-obsessed,
full of sadistic fantasies and
believed to be a psychopath.
Eric wanted to kill others and
Dylan wanted to kill himself.
That takes no blame off of Dylan
for helping plan a massacre
but it might have made
him more susceptible
to someone like Eric.
Today, Sue Klebold works
with suicide prevention
and is interested in funeral homes
being aware of brain
donation because she wants
more direct research done on
mental health and depression.
She lives everyday wishing
she had known what to look for
in Dylan's actions.
History that is wrong
always should be corrected
but history that is so relevant
and still causes so much
pain 20 years later,
requires to be corrected
sooner rather than later.
If you're interested in more details,
Columbine by Dave Cullen
and A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold
are a good place to start.
All of Sue's profits from the book
went to suicide prevention and research.
People kill people, sure,
but readily available
high-powered guns and
the exciting possibility
of unchecked media
celebrity also kill people
and continue to kill people
20 years after Columbine.
This video was made
with generous donations
from death enthusiasts just like you.
(light piano music)
