Columbine Review

Columbine by Dave Cullen

Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 8/10

Reading Columbine felt like narrating a gripping Netflix documentary to myself. I finished it in maybe ten hours of reading? Twelve? And it was ten hours of focused reading because I was anxious to read more — not the ten hours of unmotivated reading I do with a bad textbook that yields only a page or two of knowledge.

Dave Cullen created an excellent documentation of the Columbine massacre, and it was clear that he was an expert. However, all of the intricate details about how the killers’ families dealt with the aftermath, or how there was an entire web of lies spun by the Jeffco police department, were not thrust at the reader as a “look at me and how much knowledge I have about this”. The nuanced knowledge was fed spoonful by spoonful, exactly when and where you needed it. I grew to appreciate Cullen’s choice of jumping back and forth between the killer’s storyline and the multiple arcs in the aftermath. It was refreshing to see the growth of a community juxtaposed with the development of a plan of mass murder.

A couple months before I got this book from Catherine (in exchange for Sapiens), I read the entire Wikipedia page on the Columbine shootings. After I started the book, I realized that the Wikipedia page covered just the basics. I had examined a tree trunk, and the book brought me a couple paces back where I could see the tree in its entirety. Columbine was a massacre, but it was much more than that. It was the culmination of years of pain and sadness for Dylan, anger for Eric; it was multiple failed bombs in a mostly faulty plan; it was countless signs overlooked by friends, teachers, and police. But it was also a story of resilience, faith, forgiveness, and community. I had never once thought about the Klebolds or the Harrises outside of what their sons did at that high school. How they had to endure the brunt of the public’s anger because the shooters killed themselves. I had never thought about how the kids could even return to the school the next year, and what it would be like (can you believe the school reopened in August, not even four months after the massacre!?). I had never thought about all of the controversy that thousands of eye-witnesses could cause; how it would spin off into an entire evangelical martyr movement because of the death of Cassie Bernall.

Most of all, however, it exposed the hard truth that even in tragedies like Columbine, the story is often much more complex than it seems. It takes years and years to find out who the killers truly were. It might take even longer to find out the whole truth, even when there were so many people who experienced it first hand. And while it’s easy to wave your hands and say that we need to compensate all the victims, when it comes down to actually doing that, the entire ordeal gets very complicated. Do we count the Klebolds and the Harrises as victims? How should the families of injured students be compensated differently from the families of the murdered?

It was amazing to get a very full picture of the Columbine massacre. It was also nice to have a (somewhat) happy ending, with Patrick Ireland leading the kids into school and with some parents forgiving the Klebolds and Harrises. It feels like case closed, but it really isn’t. Transcripts of a sealed conversation are set to be released in 2027. New facts may come to light, but I don’t think they will be monumental. The fact is, we can’t ever really “close” a case like this in our society. The best thing we can (and should) do is learn from it and adapt. Zero-tolerance was a good start. Background checks on firearm purchases was a step in the right direction. The survivors of Columbine and the countless school shootings in the years since, are a testament to the resilience of a society. We as a nation have a long way to go, and we can’t let them down.