| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
20 Apr 2004 01:36:11 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Columbine Revisited-Case Closed {2 articles} |
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099203/?GT1=3256
The Depressive and the Psychopath
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
By Dave Cullen
Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004, at 8:59 AM PT
Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their
classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have
reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first
conclusion is that the pair of supposed "Trench Coat Mafia outcasts"
were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable
for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable:
We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence.
But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached
an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and
Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more
troubling than our misguided conclusions. Three months after the
massacre, the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Va., that included
world-renowned mental health experts, including Michigan State
University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as Supervisory
Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI's lead Columbine investigator and
a clinical psychologist. Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions
publicly here for the first time.
The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the
popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—click
here to read more about Columbine's myths—and to abandon the core idea
that Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can't understand why
they did it until we understand what they were doing.
School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their
rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year
and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to
terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life.
Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not
motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers
were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as
"collateral damage."
The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged
about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally
scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted
on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine
was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a
massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the
propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people.
After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors.
An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still
more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of
survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured
on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier
bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating
infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to
create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world
would shudder at their power.
Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed
the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights
on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never
saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in
precisely the wrong direction.
Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand "the killers,"
quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were
radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and
opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more
familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed
himself for his problems.
Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and
even some other kids, described him as "nice." But Harris was cold,
calculating, and homicidal. "Klebold was hurting inside while Harris
wanted to hurt people," Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled
kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.
In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in
psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves
killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of
touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions,
hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most
other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience,
the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the
psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by Slate for this
story*.) "Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and
aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of
choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents
neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great
deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.
Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened
his private journal with the sentence, "I hate the f---ing world." And
when the media studied Harris, they focused on his hatred—hatred that
supposedly led him to revenge. It's easy to get lost in the hate, which
screamed out relentlessly from Harris' Web site:
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? Cuuuuuuuuhntryyyyyyyyyy music!!! . . .
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who say that wrestling is real!! .
.. .
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who use the same word over and over
again! . . . Read a f---in book or two, increase your vo-cab-u-lary
f*ck*ng idiots."
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STUPID PEOPLE!!! Why must so many people
be so stupid!!? . . . YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? When people mispronounce
words! and they dont even know it to, like acrosT, or eXspreso, pacific
(specific), or 2 pAck. learn to speak correctly you morons.
YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STAR WARS FANS!!! GET A FaaaaaaRIGIN LIFE
YOU BORING GEEEEEKS!
It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in
the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more
revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the
hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.
He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings
of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take
it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade
superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its
appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about
demeaning other people," says Hare.
A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris' perpetual
deceitfulness. "I lie a lot," Eric wrote to his journal. "Almost
constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ***** out of the water.
Let's see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking.
For doing it, not for getting caught. No I haven't been making more
bombs. No I wouldn't do that. And countless other ones."
Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be
something of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. "Duping
delight"—psychologist Paul Ekman's term—represents a key characteristic
of the psychopathic profile.
Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or
empathy—another distinctive quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was
finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris' response to
being punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and
Harris had avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a
"diversion program" that involved counseling and community service. Both
killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had
relished the opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to
his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier
remembers that it was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now
how you feel and I understand what this did to you.
"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was
complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his
real feelings in his journal: 'Isn't America supposed to be the land of
the free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid f---ing
dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front
seat of his f---ing van out in plain sight and in the middle of f---ing
nowhere on a Frif---ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F---er should be
shot.' "
Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and
superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist
and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the
case that Harris was a psychopath.
It begins to explain Harris' unbelievably callous behavior: his ability
to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in
pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a
different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find
their behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict
than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much
stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are
unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement.
(The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators
to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse
tactics if they think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch
between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)
None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes
other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he
feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they
feel. The truly hardcore psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions
like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them
directly.
"Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some
psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only
horrific but baffling," Hare writes. "For example, they can torture and
mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel
when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."
The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership.
Despite earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners,
the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and
driving force. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical
psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually
psychopathic killers crave the stimulation of violence. That is why they
are often serial killers—murdering regularly to feed their addiction.
But Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he
and Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers
complemented each other. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold
when he got hot-tempered. At the same time, Klebold's fits of rage
served as the stimulation Harris needed.
The psychiatrists can't help speculating what might have happened if
Columbine had never happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have
pulled off Columbine without Harris. He might have gotten caught for
some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have
gone on to live a normal life.
Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was
not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was
irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching
for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood
and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no
telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped
him from doing something even worse.
Correction, April 20, 2004: The article originally identified Dr. Robert
Hare as a psychiatrist. He is a psychologist. Return to the corrected
sentence.
Dave Cullen has written for Salon.com and the New York Times and
maintains The Columbine Almanac. You can e-mail him at
davecullen@earthlink.net.
Video capture by Jefferson County Sheriff's Department/Gary
Caskey/Reuters.
(c) 2002 Slate.com
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099203/sidebar/2099208/
What most people know about the massacre is what they learned in the
first few days after it occurred. The basic narrative of Columbine—the
story that Americans absorbed—was based on fragmentary and incorrect
information from the first hours after the shooting. The story was that
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, a pair of lonely, outcast Goths, tore
through the school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud
between athletes and the Trenchcoat Mafia. After years of bullying, the
pair finally snapped and turned on their tormenters with automatic
weapons and pipe bombs. They arrived at the school with a hit list of
victims, including despised minorities, Christians, and athletes. In
fact, this tale was mostly a myth, as were other supposed "facts" about
Columbine involving Marilyn Manson, the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, and
a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into New York City.
Here is the straight story on seven of the central myths:
1. Targeting jocks, blacks, and Christians: There were no targets.
Harris and Klebold just wanted body count, and they didn't care who
died. They expected their bombs to do most of the killing, murdering
everyone in the cafeteria, irrespective of clique or social standing.
When the bombs failed, they shot indiscriminately, firing into open
crowds and under tables without bothering to see who their victims were.
They taunted jocks briefly in the library, but they taunted virtually
everyone else there, too.
2. The Trenchcoat Mafia: A small group of Columbine students did dub
themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, and they did have a feud with a band of
jocks in 1999. But it was never a formal gang or club, and most of the
members graduated nearly a year before the massacre. Harris and Klebold
were never closely affiliated with the group and did not appear in the
1998 yearbook picture identifying the members. The TCM had little to do
with Harris and Klebold and nothing to do with the massacre. The killers
wore long coats in order to hide their weapons.
3. The Hit List: Eric Harris did create an enemies list, with a wide and
sometimes comical assortment of personalities: students that pissed him
off, girls who refused his dates, Tiger Woods. There's no indication
that these were ever intended as targets. No one on the list was killed.
4. Christian Martyr Cassie Bernall: One of the killers allegedly asked
student Cassie Bernall if she believed in God, then killed her when she
said yes. Bernall became a revered figure among evangelical Christians.
In fact, one of the killers posed the question to another girl, Valeen
Schnurr, after she had already been shot. They had a short exchange, he
reloaded, got distracted, and she crawled away to safety.
5. Marilyn Manson: Klebold and Harris hated Marilyn Manson. On his Web
site, Harris said he loved, "Good, fast, hard, strong, pounding TECHNO!!
Such as KMFDM, PRODIGY, ORBITAL, RAMMSTEIN, and such."
6. Escape to New York: Harris' journal does contain a passage about
hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City, but that appears
to have been an early fantasy. He settled on a more practical scheme
long before he and Klebold actually staged their massacre. By the time
of the attack, they fully expected to die at the high school. They refer
to their death routinely and explicitly in their writings and in their
videos.
7. Outcasts: Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that Harris and Klebold
were rejected outcasts. They were not captains of the football team, but
they were far more accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung
out with a tight circle of close friends and partied regularly on the
weekend with a wider crowd.
(c) 2004 Slate.com
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
.
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| User: "Carol Lee Smith" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Columbine Revisited-Case Closed {2 articles} |
20 Apr 2004 05:48:06 PM |
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Salon also has an article, but Salon articles are only available in their
entirety to subscribers:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2004/04/20/columbine_anniversary/index_np.html
"Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking,
which leads by a slippery slope toward constitutional democracy."
-- Robert Anton Wilson
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