Columbine Massacre Revisited

It is hard to believe that in about 5 months it will be 9 years since the Columbine Massacre took place. It is equally difficult to believe that two teenage students attending a High school could actually become so enraged with their peers that they would be willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to "settle a score" about the way they felt they were being mistreated. The shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been planning the attack for over a year before they set it into motion.
It took place on the morning of April 20th 1999. Im Not sure if its a coincidence or not but April 20th also happens to be the birthday of Adolf Hitler. The whole massacre occured within the space of less than an hour between the hours of 11:30 am and 12:30 pm. The shooters showed up to school wearing black trenchcoats. Underneath his coat Eric Harris wore a t-shirt with the words "natural selection" written across it. Dylan Klebold had a shirt that simply had the word "wrath" written on it. The first two victims were shot just outside the front entrance of the school. As they made their way inside they shot more students as they encountered them. The sounds of gunfire soon caused a panic among the students who heard them and some members of the teaching staff soon called for help. By this point about 5 students had been shot. Some were wounded and some had died. A local police officer who had responsibility for patroling the school arrives and Harris and Klebold get into a shootout with this officer who returns fire from the front of the school while they are shooting at him through a window. The officer fails to hit either of the shooters and they pull back from the window and retreat into the school. This is the time when Harris and Klebold do the bulk of their killing. The shootout with the cop causes a complete panic among the students in the high school and everyone is just running for cover and to get away. The shooters are chasing students at this point through the halls and shooting anyone they come across. It is during this time that they shoot the only teacher that was killed. Running through the halls they end up at the library where there were over 50 students hiding behind desks and tables in fear. It is at the library that the majority of their victims would be claimed. A total of 12 students dead, 1 teacher, and 23 wounded.
Eric Harris's reasons for doing it may be a little easier to grasp than those of Dylan Klebold. Before the incident Harris made video tapes and also kept a journal into which he would write and record comments. In one of these entries he was writing about the kids at school and he wrote, "...I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things... " So it can be summized that at least in part one of his reasons was that he felt left out. It is also known that Harris had a fondness for the movie "Natural Born Killers" and he referred to the event in the days and months before they did it as N.B.K. day. He also had an emotional problem called Obsessive compulsive disorder for which he was taking a medication called Zoloft. The medication was making his condition worse and about 6 weeks before the massacre he was reporting to his doctor that he was having homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Instead of taking him off the medication it was simply switched to another brand called Luvox. During his autopsy large amounts of this medication were found in his bloodstream.
Dylan Klebold had no emotional conditions for which he was being treated at the time. He did however share Harris's feelings of being an outsider. They both felt like as far as their social standing at school went that they were both at the bottom of the pile. In the period leading up to the massacre Klebold was thinking about what N.B.K. day was going to do for his reputation. He figured it was going to make him an unforgettable figure and something of a folk hero. He said "...I know we are gonna have followers because we are so God like...".
After they had shot several of the students in the library they began to wander around the rest of the school aimlessly. Finding the hallways empty they turned around and wandered all the way back to the library. They get into one last shootout with the police surrounding the school by opening fire on them from one of the windows. The cops would find both their dead bodies about 3 hours later after they had done a room by room search of the school in an attempt to find and engage them. They both had self inflicted gunshot wounds to their heads and were lying in the same room next to most of their victims.