JanCinVV: I’ve done exhaustive research on Columbine, along with the other notorious school shootings in the U.S. I did this back in 2005 while writing my first novel, which was centered around a group of school shooters. And today’s strip was actually driven by the new “evidence” that seeks to further whitewash the whole affair and further the myth of the saintly little “victims” of Columbine.
Columbine was not the first shooting. In fact, there’s evidence that Eric and Dylan were inspired by the shootings at Paducah and Jonesboro. They picked their targets carefully, singling out the jocks in the classrooms they went through. It struck me at the time, and even more so while researching the shooting between 2003 and 2005 for various reasons, as a classic revenge killing on a grand scale.
Columbine has been one of the most investigated and most documented crimes in modern history. Anyone writing a book ten years later claiming “everything you know is wrong” about a crime we’ve all seen investigated and replayed to death (no pun) is probably taking part in revisionist history if you ask me.
It’s not unlike the effort a few years back to recast Matthew Sheppard’s killers as only intending to rob him, not single him out because he was gay, despite what they themselves admitted in their trials.
However we shake it, the only people who REALLY knew why the Columbine shooters did what they did, and what their targets may have done to them, are ten years dead.
And how we as a culture have reacted to Columbine was akin to putting a band-aid on a brain tumor. I dare say that the shootings that have come since (like Henry Ford, Virginia Tech, Delaware State, NIU just to name a few recent notorious ones) are due at least in part because we DIDN’T learn the lessons of Columbine.
In my still unsold novel (I’ve gotten praise from every editor who’s passed on it, took), Jake (my narrator) put it best:
“By all rights, Columbine should have gotten the message across loud and clear to kids across the country: don’t ** with the wrong people or you will end up dead. It didn’t, though, and neither did the killings that came later, because people love victims. Because a couple of kids who were sick of being kicked around killed their oppressors, they wound up making themselves into the bad guys, and made the bad guys into victims in everyone’s eyes. People were too overcome with grief over the senseless bloodshed to think about what had driven the two shooters to do what they did. And for those jocks, having their blood spilled wound up washing away their sins as far as everyone was concerned. Don’t think about what they were really like, turn them into perfect little angels in everyone’s eyes. And, personally, I am not really in favor of giving the world of jocks any new martyrs.”
The truth is that EVERYONE at Columbine was a victim: shooter, casualty, and bystander alike. And EVERYONE was a villain for perpetuating an atmosphere that bred those killers and drove them to killing.
But, like the man said in /The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance,/ “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The legend is that two psychopaths took out 13 perfectly innocent people, and that’s unfortunately what history is probably going to reflect.
JanCinVV: I’ve done exhaustive research on Columbine, along with the other notorious school shootings in the U.S. I did this back in 2005 while writing my first novel, which was centered around a group of school shooters. And today’s strip was actually driven by the new “evidence” that seeks to further whitewash the whole affair and further the myth of the saintly little “victims” of Columbine.
Columbine was not the first shooting. In fact, there’s evidence that Eric and Dylan were inspired by the shootings at Paducah and Jonesboro. They picked their targets carefully, singling out the jocks in the classrooms they went through. It struck me at the time, and even more so while researching the shooting between 2003 and 2005 for various reasons, as a classic revenge killing on a grand scale.
Columbine has been one of the most investigated and most documented crimes in modern history. Anyone writing a book ten years later claiming “everything you know is wrong” about a crime we’ve all seen investigated and replayed to death (no pun) is probably taking part in revisionist history if you ask me.
It’s not unlike the effort a few years back to recast Matthew Sheppard’s killers as only intending to rob him, not single him out because he was gay, despite what they themselves admitted in their trials.
However we shake it, the only people who REALLY knew why the Columbine shooters did what they did, and what their targets may have done to them, are ten years dead.
And how we as a culture have reacted to Columbine was akin to putting a band-aid on a brain tumor. I dare say that the shootings that have come since (like Henry Ford, Virginia Tech, Delaware State, NIU just to name a few recent notorious ones) are due at least in part because we DIDN’T learn the lessons of Columbine.
In my still unsold novel (I’ve gotten praise from every editor who’s passed on it, took), Jake (my narrator) put it best:
“By all rights, Columbine should have gotten the message across loud and clear to kids across the country: don’t ** with the wrong people or you will end up dead. It didn’t, though, and neither did the killings that came later, because people love victims. Because a couple of kids who were sick of being kicked around killed their oppressors, they wound up making themselves into the bad guys, and made the bad guys into victims in everyone’s eyes. People were too overcome with grief over the senseless bloodshed to think about what had driven the two shooters to do what they did. And for those jocks, having their blood spilled wound up washing away their sins as far as everyone was concerned. Don’t think about what they were really like, turn them into perfect little angels in everyone’s eyes. And, personally, I am not really in favor of giving the world of jocks any new martyrs.”
The truth is that EVERYONE at Columbine was a victim: shooter, casualty, and bystander alike. And EVERYONE was a villain for perpetuating an atmosphere that bred those killers and drove them to killing.
But, like the man said in /The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance,/ “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” The legend is that two psychopaths took out 13 perfectly innocent people, and that’s unfortunately what history is probably going to reflect.
And more and more people will suffer as a result.