Columbine Themes

The horrifically violent shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 was the most high-profile school shooting of the nineties. In a spree that claimed the lives of twelve students and one teacher, seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold brought several firearms and homemade bombs into the school and began picking off their classmates, culminating in a cold-blooded massacre within the school’s library. The spectacle of the act was unlike anything America had witnessed, and the…

In a school of over two thousand students, fifteen members of the Columbine community died from injuries sustained in the attack. The incident left behind many more survivors—and potential witnesses—than it did fatalities. Though being a witness, Dave Cullen argues, is a difficult and complicated role to play in any situation of gravity, in the Columbine attack—the traumatic nature of which actually made reliable eyewitness testimony nearly impossible to obtain—the role of witness was an…

Dave Cullen, a decorated journalist, wrote Columbine over a period of ten years with the intention of “setting [the facts] right.” He describes the “great media blunders” that plagued the initial coverage of the Columbine shooting: as “the narrative unfold[ed] on television, the media was not about to [wait]” for accurate facts. This reliance on speculation and conjecture created a new kind of media sensationalism. It fed on the accounts of frightened, disoriented victims…

Dave Cullen describes Colorado—and Jeffco in particular—as “the heart of Evangelical country.” As the attack on Columbine unfolded, the intense religious atmosphere in the community contributed to the spread of rumors of martyrdom and warrior-like defiance in the name of God occurring during the attack. The escapism provided by religious narratives was a comfort to many witnesses and victims alike, not to mention their friends and families. By recounting the ways in which the area…