‘Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings...’
As a child of the ’90s, the Columbine massacre of 1999, along with the 9/11 terrorist attack two years later, signalled the end of what had been a sunshine period both here in the UK and across the pond in America. I was first introduced to the atrocity through Michael Moore’s incendiary documentary Bowling for Columbine, and while that is an excellent time capsule of liberal attitudes at the tail end of the millennium, it’s a film that only tells half the story of what happened on that fateful day. Dave Cullen’s 2009 book Columbine is the definitive reflection on the Columbine massacre and remains a heartbreaking and powerful piece of nonfiction…
Told in alternating chapters that deal with the attack itself and subsequent aftermath, Columbine primarily exists to dispel the myriad of myths that still swirl around the Columbine killers. No, they weren’t victims striking back against the jocks who bullied them. They weren’t loners. They didn’t suffer as children. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold is how ordinary their lives had been up until that point. Perhaps the biggest misconception about the Columbine Massacre is that it was just a school shooting. This was supposed to be a mass terrorist attack. A series of bombings to rival and even dwarf the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. In that context, the book makes it clear that, as bad as Columbine was, it could have been much worse.
While Harris and Klebold are certainly the centrepiece of the book, we also learn about the victims and their families, the teaching staff and their own struggles with returning to work, and how the authorities bungled the subsequent investigation so badly that their intervention led to years of lawsuits, resentment and denial. Cullen is excellent at capturing the minutiae of suburban life in middle America, and anyone growing up in the ’90s, as I did, will recognise many of the cultural touchpoints here. If I could offer one criticism, it would be that I could have done with a little more about how the media tried to partly blame the massacre on pop culture figures such as Marilyn Manson – while this is mentioned in passing, another chapter on this topic would have been better.
Columbine is undoubtedly the final word on what is no longer the deadliest school shooting in American history (that dubious honour goes to the Virginia Tech shooting, in which 32 people were killed), but it is still perhaps the most infamous. Cullen’s book is harrowing and tough to get through at times, but it’s also vital – a modern classic.