Columbine wasn't the first
The incident at the American Columbine School was not the first joke in history. There had been violence and cruelty before this. For example, in 1979, 16-year-old Brenda Spencer discharged 30 rounds of ammunition from a semi-automatic rifle inside Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. She killed the director and injured many people, including children. Cause? Brenda just didn't like Mondays.
Brenda Spencer
school student
Another case. In 1989, Patrick Edward Petrie armed himself with an AK-47 and came to a Cleveland school, but this time in the city of Stockton. There he shot more than a hundred times at children and teachers. As a result, five children died and 29 were injured. It is noted that the victims were predominantly from Southeast Asia. Having finished the reprisal, Petri fired a bullet at himself. Acquaintances of the killer noted that he had a psychiatric disorder, “hatred of everything,” as well as racist views regarding Vietnamese emigrants.
In general, before Columbine there were more than ten bloody shootings in American schools, but for some reason teenagers all over the world began to copy Harris and Klebold, and not Petrie or Spencer.
Bowling for Columbine
In April 1999, American society was split into “before” and “after.” The watershed was the same massacre that would later become the most famous shooting incident in history. Two teenagers entered the Columbine High School cafeteria, planted explosives, and then began pouring lead on everyone they saw. During the fatal incident, 13 people were killed and 24 were injured. Not the bloodiest numbers, but it was the April events that later formed the basis of many films, books and songs: from Roger Moore’s documentary to Eminem’s lines in I’M Back and Rap God.
Eric Harris
student of the school
Because the shootings of Harris and Klebold are not just the behavior of two teenagers who have lost their minds. There is a whole ideology built behind them. Judging by the diaries they both kept, the criminals differed in character. Harris dreamed of militarism, ideas of natural selection and rough sex with his classmates. Klebold drew flowers in his diary, sighed about unrequited love and thought a lot about death. In general, these guys personified the two main teenage psychology: all-consuming hatred and languid torment. It is not surprising that, after so many years, today's teenagers see kindred spirits in killers - the essence of youthful suffering never changes.
Dylan Klebold
student of the school
The imitators also liked the “cape mafia” aesthetic, which was ridiculed by the killers’ classmates. A long raincoat on a thin body, army boots, hard rock from the speakers, complete nihilism and a powerful interest in the ways of Nazi Germany. Dangerous mix landmarks, making his admirer “not like everyone else” - perhaps perfect recipe for the teenage outsider. Footage of cinematic - whatever - guys with guns in their hands destroying a cafeteria is even now circulating in the public pages of the social network VKontakte. When Gus Van Sant made his "Elephant", he didn't have to invent anything - he just dressed the teenagers in black clothes and it was an explosion.
The very idea that this world of popular and beautiful schoolchildren could be subject to the vengeance of an outsider dressed in a black robe will resonate at any time. As long as there are outsiders, there are black robes and there are weapons from which revenge can be carried out. The schoolchildren from Columbine could not help but have followers.
Shooting around the world
One of the bloodiest shootings in the United States happened in 2007 - eight years after Columbine. A Virginia Tech student named Cho Seung Hee walked onto campus with a gun drawn. There he killed 32 people and wounded 25 more. After this, the student committed suicide. Cho Seung Hee had mental disorder- the killer was prone to outbursts of aggression.
Another bloody tragedy occurred five years ago at a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Adam Lanza had passed adolescence - he was 20, but he carried out the entire “procedure” according to quite “Columbine” canons. First, Adam shot his mother, then looked into the elementary school - there Lanza killed 20 small children and six adults. The school director was also hit by bullets. Of course, it soon became clear that the killer had mental problems: at the age of 13, Adam was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.
It is a mistake to think that shootings only happen in the United States. Yes, there are all the conditions for mass shootings in schools - free distribution of weapons, but a ban on carrying them on the territory government agencies. However, the bloody fashion has long spread beyond the United States.
Back in 2002, a resident of the German town of Erfurt entered the building of the local gymnasium, where he had previously studied until he was expelled due to a false certificate of illness. The expulsion put an end to the guy's future career, so he decided to take revenge. The killer shot 16 people until he came across a former teacher - after a conversation with the teacher, the teenager shot himself.
In Sweden there was a similar case, coupled with racial intolerance. 21-year-old Anton Lundin-Pettersson was fond of Nazism, hated immigrants and liked pictures about Adolf Hitler on Facebook. In October 2015, he opened the doors of the Krunan Municipal School. It was no coincidence that Anton chose the school: about 90% of the “newcomers” studied there, mainly from Somalia. Before entering the building, the killer put on a black cloak and mask (to resemble) and also armed himself with a sword. In total, he brought death to three people: a 20-year-old teacher's assistant, a 15-year-old schoolboy and a 42-year-old mathematician. Eyewitnesses noted that Anton was aiming at “people with dark color skin."
School attacks also occurred in Finland, France and Estonia. In many cases, the aggressors knew about Columbine and deliberately imitated the style of the American killers.
Came to Russia
As you can understand, the cult did not bypass Russia either - the incident at the Perm school was not the first time when teenagers were inspired by Harris and Klebold. On the morning of September 5, 2017, 15-year-old Mikhail P from No. 1 Ivanteevka near Moscow brought an air gun and a kitchen hatchet to class. He was a computer science teacher with whom he had a conflict. The woman suffered a traumatic brain injury. Then the teenager headed to the auditorium, where the other half of his 9 "A" class was sitting, to deal with long-time offenders. The attacker wore a black cloak and dreamed of militarism, which caused ridicule from his classmates; Mikhail wanted revenge. Fortunately, most of the students managed to escape. As a result, only three people were injured: a teacher and two schoolchildren who jumped out of the windows.
Mikhail is not just a duet from Columbine in appearance- he completely shared their philosophy and even called himself Mike Klebold on the VKontakte social network. On the page, the attacker posted videos and photographs of his idols, and always told his friends that he wanted to repeat the path of the two killers.
Our selection presents cases of massacres in schools committed by teenagers. Cruel and pointless...
On the morning of September 5, a monstrous incident occurred in Ivanteevka near Moscow: a 9th grade student burst into the computer science classroom screaming: “I came here to die,” after which he attacked the teacher, hitting her on the head with a kitchen hatchet. The crazy teenager didn’t stop there; he opened fire from a traumatic pistol and began throwing smoke bombs around the classroom. His frightened classmates, trying to escape, jumped out of the windows.
The criminal was captured by school security and handed over to the arriving police. The teacher and several students who received fractures while jumping from a window were hospitalized; now their lives are not in danger.
It was possible to find out that the student had been preparing for the attack for a long time. Judging by his page on social media. network, he was very interested in mass murder and was a fan of Dylan Klebold, the teenager who carried out the brutal massacre at Columbine High School in 1999.
Why does this even happen? Why do seemingly prosperous teenagers grab weapons and go kill their teachers and classmates?
Perhaps we can answer these questions if we look back at some of the most notorious school massacres.
February 3, 2014. School No. 263, Otradnoye, Moscow, Russia
Tenth-grader Sergei Gordeev, armed with a rifle and carbine, burst into the geography classroom and killed teacher Andrei Kirillov with two shots.
When the police arrived at the school building, Gordeev opened fire on the police, as a result of which senior sergeant Sergei Bushuev was fatally wounded.
Gordeev was detained and taken to a pre-trial detention center. At trial, his lawyer insisted that the teenager was mentally ill:
“He thinks that he invented all of us, that now he will close his eyes, and all those who are not interesting to him will disappear. He told his own mother that she was his illusion.”
According to the lawyer, his defendant committed murder to prove the theory of solipsism - a doctrine that states that all the world exists only in your imagination. Gordeev also planned to commit suicide.
By a court decision, Sergei Gordeev was declared insane and sent for compulsory treatment to mental asylum.
April 20, 1999. Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, USA
One of the worst massacres in US history occurred at Columbine High School.
At 11:10 a.m., two heavily armed high school students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, parked in their cars outside the school building and planted two timed bombs in the school cafeteria.
The youths planned to wait for explosions on the street and then shoot all the people running out of the building. The schoolchildren hoped to kill about five hundred people in this way, but the bombs planted in the cafeteria did not go off. Then the frustrated criminals burst into the school and began shooting at everyone who came into their field of vision. They killed one teacher and 12 students, the youngest of whom was 14 years old. More than 20 people were injured. After the massacre, the killers committed suicide: each shot himself in the head.
Harris and Klebold come from wealthy, respectable families. Both were unpopular at school and were passionate about computer games. As follows from their personal diaries, they began preparing for the massacre a year before the tragedy.
December 14, 2012. Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut, USA
This crime is especially heinous because its victims were small children.
In the morning, 20-year-old Adam Peter Lanza shot his sleeping mother, armed himself with several pistols and rifles from her weapons collection, got into the car and headed to primary school Sandy Hook.
At 9:35 he burst into the building and shot children and teachers for 11 minutes. Then, hearing that the police were approaching, he shot himself. This happened between 9:46 and 9:53.
The victims of the 10-minute massacre were 26 people: 20 children aged 6 to 7 years and six women. The headmistress and school psychologist were killed while trying to stop the killer, 4 teachers died trying to save the children and covering them with their bodies.
dead children
The motives for the brutal massacre remain unclear. Adam Lanza was born into a prosperous family, his mother was a teacher and collected weapons. It was to her that all the weapons from which her son shot his victims were registered. Adam was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism, which, however, is not characterized by aggressive behavior. He was characterized by increased anxiety, was fond of computer games and did not eat meat, not wanting to be the cause of animal suffering...
March 11, 2009. College Albertwil-Realschule, Winnenden, Germany
A former student at the school, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer, carried out a shooting using his father's pistol, which killed 15 people. At first he operated in the school building, and then moved to the streets of the city, where he killed several more people. Finding himself surrounded by police, Kretschmer shot himself.
The motive for the brutal crime was the refusal of the girl whom Kretschmer was courting to meet with him. This girl studied at the school where the massacre took place, and was one of the first to be killed.
November 7, 2007. Jokela Lyceum, Tuusula, Finland
18-year-old student Erik Auvinen carried out a pistol shooting at his school. 8 people died: 6 students, the school principal and a nurse. After the massacre, Auvinen disappeared into the men's restroom and shot himself in the head.
On the eve of the tragedy, Auvinen posted a video on YouTube entitled “Massacre at Jokela School – 7.11.2007.” The film contained photographs of the school and Auvinen himself with weapons, as well as excerpts from amateur videos of Klebold and Harris carrying out the Columbine High School massacre. Auvinen was a quiet and shy teenager who was bullied by his peers, and he himself bullied elementary school students. The killer was fond of computer games, was interested in weapons and wanted to leave a memory of himself. He hated gays, single parents and couples. He began planning the mass murder back in March.
March 24, 1998. Jonesboro School, Arkansas, USA
On that fateful day, Jonesboro school students Andrew Golden, 11, and Johnson Mitchell, 13, opened fire on children in school yard. The weapon was stolen by Mitchell from his own grandfather. The shooting killed four children aged 11 to 12 years and a teacher who shielded the students with her body. More than 10 people were injured.
students and teacher killed in shooting
The police who arrived at the scene detained the teenage killers.
Golden and Mitchell were never able to explain what became the motive for the crime. According to some reports, they were interested in the occult. The criminals received 8 and 10 years in prison and this moment are free.
March 21, 2005. Red Lake School, Minnesota, USA
16-year-old teenager Jeffrey Weese shot and killed 9 people and then committed suicide. Jeffrey's first victims were his grandfather, a retired police officer, and his girlfriend. Having dealt with them and armed with two pistols and a shotgun that belonged to his grandfather, Wiz went to his school, where he killed seven more people: five students, a teacher and a security guard. According to eyewitnesses, the smile never left Wiz’s face during the murders.
After a shootout with the arriving police, the teenager locked himself in one of the offices and shot himself in the head with a shotgun.
Wiz was a quiet and shy boy who was bullied by his classmates. He was a poor student, obsessed with computer games, and admired Hitler. 4 years before the tragedy, his father committed suicide. After some time, Jeffrey’s mother, who suffered from alcoholism, died in an accident, so the teenager was raised by his grandfather, with whom Wiz was in conflict.
A terrible massacre occurred on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Having thoroughly prepared, two “outcast” students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, showed up at their school with two sawed-off shotguns and walked through the library, classrooms and offices - in less than an hour they sent 13 people to the next world. Another 24 were shot. Fortunately, two homemade bombs planted in the school cafeteria did not go off. When the “plan” was carried out, the teenagers put guns to their heads. As investigators later found out (there were 80 people working on the case), the high school students were fans of neo-fascism and timed the attack to coincide with Adolf Hitler’s birthday. Many times they “simulated” their execution in computer games. Their “feat,” unfortunately, became an example for mentally unstable teenagers. In the USA, in Europe, in Russia - all over the world.
In terms of the number of victims, this tragedy has never ranked first in the American anti-rating of massacres in educational institutions. Even in 1999 she was in third place. It was later “displaced” by the terrorist attacks at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. However, it was after Columbine that America shook. Firstly, everyone noticed an unhealthy trend, and secondly, there was someone, or rather what, to blame: violent videos and computer games (teenagers loved Doom), weak parental control and the free circulation of firearms.
Perhaps precisely because the tragedy was widely covered and exaggerated in the press (according to CNN, the funeral of the first victim of the massacre, Rachel Scott, showed the highest viewing figures in the history of the television company and even surpassed it), it was Columbine that mentally unstable teenagers around the world wanted to repeat .
Collage: Channel Five
"Cloak Mafia"
In the United States, this phrase has become a household word for teenagers who want reprisals against those who make fun of them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were members of this “interest circle” even before its name acquired such a gloomy connotation.
Denver school shooting survivors say the two killers wore ski masks and raincoats and were part of a tight-knit group of loners known as the Raincoat Mafia. A photograph of this group was published in a 1998 album. At school, participants are described as obsessed with guns, Nazis, the military, the Internet and Marilyn Manson songs,” wrote BBC newspaper the day after the tragedy.
Photo: schoolshootingsusa.weebly.com
Members of the “mafia” always wore black raincoats, regardless of the weather. Later, the “technically useful” side of long-skirted clothing became clear - it is very easy to carry a weapon under it to school. The “interest circle” united outcasts from society, who were constantly bullied by school “stars” - athletes, players of football teams. After Columbine, the name became a household name.
Sea of followers
A real wave of horror swept the Western world precisely after the shooting at Columbine High School. The speed of repetition of aimless and merciless killings was also striking. Just eight days later, on April 28, 1999, the first case of imitation occurred. 14-year-old Todd Smith Camiron fired a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle in the hallway of Canada's W. R. Myers High School and killed 17-year-old Jason Lang. Another person was injured. A child with a gun was tied up by a physical education teacher. At his trial, the shooter said he was inspired by the Columbine massacre. Cameron was sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 2005. He immediately tried to hide from the authorities and was arrested again.
Exactly one month after Columbine, on May 20, 1999, 15-year-old Thomas Solomon Jr. committed a shooting at his school, Heritage High School. He wounded six people with a revolver and a .22-caliber semi-automatic rifle. But then he surrendered to the police. On November 9, 2000, the shooter was sentenced to 40 years in prison and another 65 years of probation. Solomon also stated that he was inspired to shoot by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. In addition, he also called himself a member of the "Cloak Mafia".
Further, on March 5, 2001, 15-year-old Californian Charles Williams, the son of a military and field doctor, stole a revolver and a semi-automatic rifle from his father in order to deal with the offenders at Santana High School. He killed two people and injured 13. He was later arrested. During interrogations, he admitted that he wanted to repeat Columbine. Since 2002, he has been serving a half-century prison sentence.
16-year-old Jeffrey Weese was much more determined. On March 21, 2005, before going on a showdown with schoolchildren, he shot and killed his grandfather and his girlfriend. At his school in Red Lake, Minnesota, he killed seven people and wounded five. At the same time, he tried to copy the Columine shooters. Since one of their victims was a Baptist, there were rumors that the shooters asked her if she believed in God and allegedly this question was addressed to other victims. The FBI later did not confirm this information. As eyewitnesses later stated, Weese asked the same question to one of the students.
Do you want to play a game?
Developer Danny LeDonne was also affected by Columbine. And in 2005 he created a computer Super game Columbine Massacre RPG, completely repeating the 1999 massacre. The creepy shooter simulates the day of the tragedy every minute. Scenes are accompanied real photos and video from the scene. The goal is to shoot as many people as possible.
It was this far from harmless “shooter” that auto mechanic Kimvir Gill, one of the followers of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, often played. On September 13, 2016, a Canadian with a rifle, a sawn-off shotgun and a pistol entered the building of Dawson College in Montreal and began firing left and right. As a result, he wounded 20 people and shot an 18-year-old student, and he himself took a bullet in a shootout with the police.
Just like Harris, Gill kept a “hate blog”, which no one looked at in time either. The man liked to wear military-style clothes and was good with weapons. He underwent combat training and was a member of the hunting club, which gave him the right to own a small arsenal. On his blog, he even published pictures with a carbine, with which he later went to shoot children.
Surpassed the "teachers"
The Virginia Tech massacre in Blacksburg was carried out on April 16, 2007 by a student from South Korea Cho Seung Hee. The man started the massacre from a student dormitory. With two pistols in his hands, he shot everyone who got in his way. Then he moved to the educational building. In total, he killed 32 people and wounded 25 more. He left a farewell video in which he mentioned “martyrs Eric and Dylan.” In terms of the number of victims, this massacre became the second mass shooting in the United States. In first place is the terrorist attack on the Bat Elementary School in 1927.
According to the same scheme
One of the most recent shootings occurred on December 14 at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Although after the investigation the connection with Columbine was not directly discovered, 20-year-old Adam Lanza repeated the senseless actions of his “predecessors”. Lanza shot and killed his mother before heading to the slaughterhouse. In elementary school, he targeted six- and seven-year-old children. He killed 20 children, six adults, and wounded two others. A total of 28 people died in the massacre, including the shooter himself. As a result, this case took third place in the history of murders in US educational institutions.
We also know of at least three prevented massacres, when the future killers could be identified in advance.
"Russian Klebold"
In September 2017, Russia experienced first-hand the American tragedy of 18 years ago. , which later hit the teacher on the head. Before the attack, a post appeared on the student’s social media page “Deleting my life 09/05/17”. According to one version, the student was bullied by classmates for being strange and wearing military-style clothes, and could even come to class with camouflage paint on his face. He took a nickname that was not just speaking, but directly indicating his “idol.” Mike Klebold - indicated on his page on the social network. The 15-year-old “Ivanteevsky shooter” is really called Mikhail, but no one paid attention to the seemingly fictitious surname before the tragedy.
The student was detained by a special forces unit that arrived at the scene. A criminal case was opened against him under the article “Attempted Murder.”
Video: Channel Five
Not virtual reality
Augmented reality glasses, super-clear graphics - technologies that are improving every year and... help teenagers immerse themselves in a world of violence and murder, where, if something goes wrong, new life, and the difficult level can be completed again. It is generally impossible for teenagers to understand that the “next level” will, at best, be in a mental hospital or a penitentiary. Chief freelance psychologist of the Ministry of Health Yuri Zinchenko in an interview portal iz.ru told how to work with teenagers stuck in their own world of illusions formed by social networks, games and media.
“There are many pain points among teenagers: this high level aggression and senseless cruelty, suicidal behavior and substance use, escape from reality into a fantasy world and computer addiction. Solving problems by attacking rather than finding a compromise is often promoted in movies and social networks. The reasons for this crisis are the glorification of violence, the devaluation of human dignity and the fetish of personal success according to the principle “the end justifies the means.” The value of human life is significantly underestimated thanks to the same computer games, where a character can have ten or a hundred of them. It is foolish to expect that strengthening school security will save the situation. Conversations with teenagers about how violence is bad are unlikely to have any effect. It is necessary to correct the attitudes and behavior of children, to help them correctly express their position and emotions. But as long as we get into discussions about whether children need psychological support, who should do it and how, the situation will only worsen,” says Yuriy Zinchenko.
The "superpredator" theory
In the 90s, youth crime statistics in the United States simply went off scale. Since 1983, the number of murders committed by teenagers with firearms has tripled. Moreover, since 1980, the number of victims of “street wars” has quadrupled. And this category of murders was the fastest growing. For the first time, criminologist John Dilulio, a professor of political science and social science at Princeton University, spoke about child killers in 1997. He published an article in the Weekly Standard magazine, “The Emergence of Super Predators,” in which he talked about a terrible “demographic crime time bomb.” The political scientist assured that an “explosion” would occur as soon as the number of 14-17 year olds with illegal tendencies reached half a million.
In response, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang objected. He conducted a study showing that only 6% of boys commit serious crimes involving murder. And, accordingly, by the year 2000, when, according to the theory of “superpredators,” there should be at least half a million young criminals in America, there will be only 30 thousand of them, i.e. the same 6% of the total number of teenagers. Another crinologist, Mark Blumstein, attributed the rapid increase in murders since 1985 to the emergence of a new drug, crack. According to him, dealers hired countless teenagers, supplying them with both drugs and weapons. The theories were quickly forgotten, and the term from the loudest of them about “superpredators” migrated to the political sphere.
Information about Columbine can still be found freely on the Internet. The tragedy turned into a “heroic saga” for teenagers with an unformed psyche and destructive behavior. The “feat” is repeated with varying frequency by the followers of the absurd cult, who are now rightly called “super losers” and do not really remember the names of the continuers of the gloomy story.
Aniya Bataeva
Dmitry Kurkin
Columbine High School massacre by two teenagers in April 1999, was not the first outbreak of violence in educational institutions (their countdown in the United States dates back to at least 1840). And yet, it was she who became a pop cultural phenomenon, references to which come up time after time when investigating similar incidents.
Over the course of nineteen years, the very word “Columbine” has become almost an official synonym for reprisals against classmates and/or teachers. A recent armed attack at a Permian school was almost immediately dubbed the “Permian Columbine,” as soon as it became clear that one of the attackers was keenly interested in the story of the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The incident at the Ivanteevka school, where a high school student, who called himself Mike Klebold on the Internet, injured a teacher, became “Columbine in Ivanteevka.” The attack at the Ulan-Ude school has not yet been linked to the events of nineteen years ago, but out of inertia it was also called the “Buryat Columbine”. The Russian media have already picked up the label and, it seems, have no intention of abandoning it.
Despite the fact that the original plan of Harris and Klebold, by and large, failed (otherwise there could have been many more victims), their followers from among the so-called Columbiners over and over again try to stage their actions, trying to imitate them in everything, including their choice clothes. Let’s figure out how it happened that two murderers acquired a romantic aura of people who “avenged everyone who was bullied at school,” and whether it is possible to fight the Columbiners as a destructive subculture.
Video games are to blame
The tragedy at Columbine shocked America: researchers note that the school massacre even displaced the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City (at that time the largest in US history), the second anniversary of which Harris and Klebold initially chose during the day for the attack.
In trying to assign blame, the public blamed it on industrial metal and (which by 1999 had finally become an all-American bogeyman), the film Natural Born Killers (which, strictly speaking, satirizes the media cult of Bonnie and Clyde) and “violent video games that promote violence.” (note that the realism of video games at that time was relatively low). When it became known that the psychiatrist who had been seeing Harris had prescribed him medication, some suspected that stopping the antidepressant could have caused the teenager to become violent, but the theory was not confirmed: an autopsy showed that Eric continued to take it.
Much more prosaic reasons - the anger of two teenagers, one of whom (Harris) complained of depression, anger and thoughts of suicide, and the second (Klebold) was bullied by classmates - became obvious within a year: after conducting a study of similar incidents, they found that two-thirds of these were related to bullying.
However, this explanation did not give the average person either a pointer to blame for the tragedy, or a simple answer to the question of how school shootings can be prevented in the future. As a result, the Columbine legend, fueled by the media and preserved by the Internet, took on a life of its own. Columbiners appeared.
The Cult of Dylan Klebold
It was only three years before Columbine exploded from provocative tabloid headlines into a sinister pop culture phenomenon that put Harris and Klebold on par with serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. The tragedy formed the basis of “Elephant” by Gus Van Sant and the lesser-known “Zero Day” by Ben Coccio - both films were released in 2003 and became a kind of artistic reconstruction of “Columbine”. Documentary“Bowling for Columbine,” in which director Michael Moore focuses on the gun lobby that supports the free sale of firearms in the United States, won an Oscar. Direct references or indirect references to a mass shooting carried out by two teenagers in song lyrics have become commonplace. Columbine has become part of the city's folklore.
Generation X author Douglas Copeland, concerned that the Columbine story was giving far more attention to the killers than the victims, wrote Hey Nostradamus! trying to cope with . However, this attempt to shift the focus changed little in the coverage of the story: its main characters in popular culture There are still two teenagers who took up arms.
The core of the Columbiners who romanticized the crimes of Harris and Klebold were teenagers bullied by classmates or suffering from lack of attention. What is noteworthy is that thematic communities focused primarily on the figure of Klebold. “[They] admire Dylan, the tragic depressive boy, and the girls are just in love with him,” says journalist Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, calling attention to the discrepancy between the online myth and the nuances of the real story. - Although Eric was the leader at Columbine, and one would expect him to be more attractive, the cult of Dylan is much larger than the cult of Eric. Girls fall in love with him the same way grown women fall in love with drug addicts or alcoholics - believing that they will save his lost, suffering soul."
Cullen notes that Columbiners are most often driven by a desire to shock their peers and research interest: “I’m sure that for most this is a pose: when real life the teenager is not particularly successful; he sees a way out in constructing a tough personality on the Internet. They pretend, but at the same time they believe that the others are saying this all seriously... It becomes scary when you realize that in 0.01% of such cases the conditional Adam Lanza may turn out to be (teenager who committed the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012 - Ed.), who is really serious in his words. After all, he discussed Columbine with his peers - they responded with interest, which he regarded as support.”
It is still not difficult to find the killers' diaries and school surveillance videos that show what Klebold and Harris were wearing and how they acted on the day of the massacre. New incidents in Russian schools have once again fueled interest in the story: it is claimed that users have become five times more likely to use the hashtag #columbine.
Concerned social activists have already called on the Prosecutor General's Office to recognize “any mention” of Columbine as extremist, but this proposal does not seem to be either effective in essence or implementable in practice (see “Streisand effect”). Columbiner communities will most likely be purged from social networks in the coming months—VKontakte has already begun deleting the corresponding public pages—but there is no doubt that they will “overwinter” on the deep web and return to public access again.
"Top 10 Bloody Crimes"
“Columbine” may have become a household name because it immediately asked several painful questions regarding how psychological climate in schools and modern ethics. How responsible is the media (in the broadest sense of the word) for the “glamorization” of mass murders and is it right to limit access to information about them? How to talk about particularly cruel crimes that go far beyond the ordinary, without falling into cheap sensationalism and savoring the grief of others? Is it possible to assume that selections of “the bloodiest massacres” encourage embittered and psychologically unstable people to try to break into the “top 10”? And is it possible to prevent the emergence of new columbiners by “banning the Internet”?
A premeditated attack by two high school students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, on the rest of the students and staff at their school using small arms and improvised explosive devices, which occurred on April 20, 1999, Hitler's birthday. The terrorists turned out to be Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, students at the school. In terms of the number of victims, the tragedy at one time ranked third among massacres in educational institutions in the United States.
The first signs of aggression began to appear in 1996, when Eric Harris registered a personal website on the company server. By the end of the year, the site already contained instructions on how to harm others and make explosives, as well as stories about all the troubles caused by Harris and Klebold. In early 1997, the blog first began to show signs of Harris's growing anger towards the public.
Due to the low number of visitors, Harris's site did not cause alarm or concern until late 1997, when Dylan Klebold gave the address to Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris. On the website, the young man found numerous death threats directed at himself. Brown's mother contacted Jefferson County police multiple times, and Investigator Michael Guerra was aware of the site's existence.
Future terrorists filmed videos demonstrating their weapons. The recordings showed that the boys were preparing a plan to bomb the school to rival the Oklahoma City bombing. The diaries also contained ideas about escaping to Mexico, hijacking a plane from Denver International Airport and using it to blow up a building in New York.
Harris and Klebold planned to detonate bombs in the school cafeteria at a time when it would be greatest number people - several hundred. The optimal time for this was determined based on observations and notes made in advance. The attackers hoped that after the bombs in the cafeteria detonated, they would shoot the surviving students and teachers on their way out. Then, as ambulances, firefighters, police and journalists began arriving at the school, the bombs planted in the teenagers' cars were expected to go off and kill the people outside. However, the bombs in the school cafeteria and cars did not go off.
On the day of the tragedy, the boys met at Harris' car outside the school, took two 9-kilogram bombs (each based on a propane tank), after which they entered the school cafeteria a few minutes before the first lunch break and placed several bags of bombs there. When the bombs failed to explode, they began firing randomly, causing a brutal massacre in the library. After leaving the library, the young men headed to the area with offices. They looked into many classrooms through the glass and met the eyes of the students hiding in them, but did not try to break into them. According to witnesses, Hariss and Klebold's behavior seemed aimless. Students hiding in the cafeteria heard one of the attackers say: “Today the world will end. Today we will die."
A SWAT team and police quickly arrived at the scene, trying to evacuate and save the schoolchildren. Because of the gunfire that covered the evacuation, witnesses were unable to pinpoint when Harris and Klebold committed suicide.
It is worth noting that this shocking event gave rise to and inspired about 9 followers (for example, on April 16, 2007, 23-year-old South Korean student Cho Seung-hee opened fire with two pistols, first in a student dormitory and then in the academic building of the Virginia Tech, killing 32 and wounding 25 more people, the shooter committed suicide in one of the classrooms. In his farewell video, he mentioned “martyrs Eric and Dylan”)
School photo 
From CCTV cameras 
Suicide 
Funeral 
