How could I have known I was writing an origin story? Mass shootings didn’t start at Columbine High School, but the Mass Shooter Era did. The killers’ audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation. I’ve tried to leave this story so many times, but a diagram I have created of Columbine-inspired attacks torments me, ruthlessly expanding like an unstoppable spider web, devouring all the lives and futures in its path. It demands we address the cause. More than fifty ensuing shooters have taken nearly three hundred lives and wounded over five hundred more, and every shooter on that page left evidence they were inspired or influenced by the attack at the centre. And a 2015 investigation of Columbine copycats by Mother Jones found more than two thwarted attacks for each one that succeeded. It identified fourteen plotters targeting Columbine’s anniversary, and thirteen striving to top its body count. Surviving mass shooters have admitted they are now competing with each other. Twenty-five years later, Columbine haunts our present and our future, with no end in sight.
The connections keep multiplying, and all roads lead back to Columbine. The Arapahoe High gunman studied the Columbine and Sandy Hook attacks; the Sandy Hook shooter researched the Northern Illinois University (NIU) shooting and was obsessed with Columbine; the NIU killer studied Columbine and Virginia Tech, where the shooter described wanting to “repeat Columbine” and idolised its “martyrs”. Five generations of fallout, and they’re all re-enacting the legend that set it in motion.
The legend of Columbine is fiction. One of the working titles for this book had been The Other Columbine, because there are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on 20 April, and the story we all accepted in 1999. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly: a pair of outcast loners from the Trench Coat Mafia targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. Supervisory special agent Dwayne Fuselier, who led the FBI’s Columbine investigation, is fond of quoting HL Mencken in response: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Fuselier warned how appealing the myth might sound to social misfits, but he could not foresee the power of social media five years before Facebook was born. Decades later, a perverse fandom has recast the Columbine killers as champions of the nobodies.
Eric Harris ridiculed the nobodies. Neither he nor Dylan Klebold were loners, misfits, or outcasts. They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. (An ammunition problem delayed it a day.) So much of the legend hinges on bullying, but the killers never even mentioned it in the vast trove of journals, web posts, and videos they left to explain themselves. They both did enjoy violent movies, industrial music, and video games, but there is no evidence any of that played a role.
They did not target jocks, Christians, or African Americans. They targeted no one. They shot randomly and designed their bombs to kill indiscriminately. They mocked earlier school shooters and would have been horrified to find their attack immortalised as a mere shooting. That was supposed to be the “fun” part, but the bombs were the main event: hundreds dying in the burning wreckage before the first shot.
Their bombs failed. Yet the legend made them heroic to their progeny and gave birth to a sprawling fandom. By the tenth anniversary, I was encountering a small band of “Columbiners” online. They soon gravitated to a new name, “True Crime Community” (or TCC), to include more mass killers, but Eric and Dylan remain the megastars.
I hear from them constantly, because this book made me enemy #1 – for portraying Eric and Dylan as ruthless killers, who murdered other kids for their own petty agendas. The TCC have migrated over time from blogs and online forums to YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, and smaller apps. They’re highly active on Instagram and Twitter today. (I encounter them only on the apps I use.) I’ve watched the groupies multiply, as fresh crops of teens join their ranks each season. Initially, most were just interested in criminology, or they were amateur sleuths fascinated by the criminal mind. Many still are. But within a few years, vast numbers of new arrivals were unabashedly calling themselves fans. They use the killers’ faces as icons, extol their virtues, and compose love poems, fan fiction, and gory memes. Many twist the story to cast the murderers as victims, while the dead, wounded, and traumatised become villains. When I discussed the TCC on CNN in 2019, I observed that nearly every profile stated either “I condone” or “Do not condone”. But the condones gradually grew so ubiquitous that it became a given, and few bother anymore.
In 2016, a girl tweeted: “hey @DaveCullen block me or else i shoot my school.” I checked her Twitter feed, and she’d been ranting for hours, posting pictures of school shooters, and tweeting: “It’s also something a lot of people need, To die….I wish i was dead…I LIKE VIOLENCE…I want to be killed in front of an audience. . . . I think someone failed to abort me (:”
In 2012, a kid left a jarring comment on a random YouTube video I’d posted about my new apartment: “Hello mr. cullen, Um I have a question on columbine. Now i recently got expelled from school for writing that i was going to killl every one.” While I waited to hear from the FBI, I decided to see if I could clarify his threat level. “That sounds like a rough situation,” I replied. “Why did you say that? Did you mean it?”
He said he was a fourteen-year-old boy with autism and ADHD, who recently got expelled from his middle school on Long Island. “I wrote that i was going to shoot every one in school and i also wrote that i was going to Slit this girls throat if she talked to me,” he wrote. “I know it was stupid but i get so angry because i get lonley, And annoyed at people for leaving me alone. But i dont get bullied. Its just i fell left out.”
So many versions of reality there. His principal and the local cops added another: they told me he was a troubled kid with a rough home life and extreme boundary issues – but a great heart. He was desperate for affection and had no clue how to express it.
We in the media created the Columbine myths by leaping to conclusions way too soon. We tried to correct them later, but there’s no eraser on the internet. The groupies are now the carriers, spreading the Legend of Dylan and Eric to remote reaches of the globe. They seem to number in the tens of thousands — a tiny fraction of the population, but a magnet for a dangerous cohort of marginalised, disaffected, and hopeless teens — a frequent pool of aspiring shooters. Adam Lanza obsessed over the Columbine killers and spent years immersed in these groups celebrating them as folk heroes. Then he murdered twenty little kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Here’s the twist: many of the TCC don’t really mean it. I mostly block them now, but I’ve chatted online with hundreds over the past few decades, some at great length. Most describe themselves as awkward outcasts, desperate to fit in somehow — and the fandom feels cool. It’s heartbreaking to hear these kids describe the pain they endure at school every day and the affinity they feel for “Dylan” and “Eric”, the fictional characters they’ve constructed.
When I’ve engaged deeply with TCC kids, the word they nearly always use is cool. “I was just trying to look cool.” I get that, I say – but had they realised that most of the other TCC were just posing too? Never. They believe the others really are badass; it’s only them putting up a front. The typical TCC bravado seems comically obvious to me now, but it probably wouldn’t have been at sixteen. Was it obvious to Adam Lanza? He died in his attack, so we’ll never know. We do know that right now, a distraught and lonely kid is contemplating an attack, and this vibrant community insists it condones Columbine and its progeny. It glorifies its selfish inclinations as noble and heroic.
Actual shootings unnerve the TCC. Their postings grow quiet, respectful even, after a tragedy. I feel the change instantly, as the harassment stops cold, for a week or two. The 2018 Parkland shooting, in which 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Florida, was different. It was six months before the taunts began trickling back in, and I haven’t gotten a death threat in the six years since.
Why? There’s no way to be certain, but my educated guess is that survivors David Hogg, Emma González, and the rest of the March For Our Lives kids were suddenly much cooler than the young men shooting at them. And so much more powerful.
Here’s another reality check: Eric and Dylan weren’t powerful — their plan failed. Every element fizzled: the car bombs, the diversionary bombs, and the cafeteria bombs designed to trigger the carnage; no burning wreckage meant no stampede of fleeing survivors to mow down. The cops wouldn’t even kill them in a final blaze of glory. Eric and Dylan came to miserable ends under ghastly conditions after every attempt to salvage their mission had failed. But their fans, oblivious to the full story, regard them as champions.
The Columbine effect has gone global. It has inspired mass shootings in Finland, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Russia – and knife and axe attacks in places as remote as Siberia.
I can tell when the TCC colonises a region, because I get a flurry of taunts in a new language. It’s social contagion. My biggest surprise has been how little most of these groupies know about the murderers over whom they obsess. They keep repeating the same misreporting that was debunked decades ago.
In the final pages of my book, I sought to convey just how pathetic and gruesome the killers’ final moments were. That’s what their fans need to hear: the ugly truth. Who wants to celebrate failure? Or emulate it?
The Columbine groupies have no idea they’re exporting a fraud. They need to confront the selfish motives and the dismal fate of their “champions”. Legends are challenging to dismantle, but truth is on our side.