When you saw E&D’s pictures for the first time, did anything about it strike you? Especially at that time it would’ve been weird to see two pretty clean cut normal looking kids were behind all the chaos that was going

From what I recall, they looked just like the kids I used to pass by on the street and like the kind of people I could’ve gone to school with. They looked very young in those photos and it was hard to comprehend why they would do something as horrible as that. (It still is tough to understand why, but life experience unfortunately taught me there can be plenty of reasons that sound okay when you’re messed-up inside.) It made me wonder even back then what had happened to them that convinced them to do this and hurt so many people. They didn’t look any different from you and me, which I think is one of the main impressions of Columbine that truly matter in the long run. Those photos reminded us that this ideology could be alive in anyone we met, but also reminded us that the boys committed a monstrous act while not appearing as monsters themselves.

I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s very hard to get across how surreal that news was. If you weren’t alive yet or too young to witness it at the time, it’s hard to explain how it felt to see that footage. Sure, you can watch a lot of it on Youtube and elsewhere now. I would encourage everyone to do so, in fact, as it confronts you with the confusion and the panic that reigned during and after. But seeing it now isn’t the same as seeing it live. Everybody knows some of the most iconic images like the ones of kids running out of that school with their hands raised high and an injured Patrick Ireland toppling out of the library window, but it’s another thing to watch that for the first time while it is still happening and trying to wrap your mind around something that you previously didn’t even consider to be possible.

Do you think that E&D would have carried out their bombing plans if they were unable to acquire guns? From Eric’s diary it seems clear that the guns gave them a great sense of power. I’m just curious, living in Australia our last large shooting spree was in 1996 in Port Arthur and the gun culture is vastly different. In lieu of firearms do you think they would have focused all their energy on the bombs?

I think they certainly wouldn’t have gone “oh, we can’t acquire guns so let’s call it a day”. Plan A was always to execute a perfect bombing and shoot the survivors/first aid responders afterward. If the bombing had been successful, the chaos would have been even more substantial. The explosion of the diversion bomb would’ve been greater, as that one only partially detonated, and the cafeteria bombs would have caused such damage to the internal structure that the risk of the library collapsing on top of the cafeteria would’ve been quite severe. The car bombs, if successful, would have greatly hindered (if not outright injured) first responders, as they were timed to go off after the cafeteria bombing and first responders to the scene did use the parking lot. If they really wanted to, they could have used the smaller bombs they carried with them to hinder first responders and survivors even more. I believe over 90 explosive devices were found in the aftermath, which is a number that would likely have increased even more if the boys had not been able to acquire guns.

Of course, not having the guns would’ve complicated not only their plans to attack survivors/first responders but also their plans to not be taken alive. Certainly if they had stayed outside, they would’ve been in a precarious sitting duck position once first responders figured out what was going on and who was involved. Walking away from it wouldn’t be an option for them either, as they not only wanted to see the destruction they caused but also wanted to die that day instead of be taken in alive. They would have to figure out a way to do that on their own terms without the guns, but that’s not an impossible thing to do and we know that Eric was banking on suicide-by-cop anyway. Pulling this off without the guns would’ve been a little trickier, but they might have spent more time on creating successful bombs in that case and then we’d be talking very differently about Columbine than we currently do.

Stop glorifying a goddamn school shooting

Please enlighten me as to how the fuck I’m glorifying it, exactly?

The update of my about-page is finally complete! It details some of my blog’s journey and also links to the stuff I love when I’m not busy with thedragonrampant, so I hope you’ll like it!

have you seen the 20/20 interview with sue and diane sawyer? what do you think about it? the things said about the boys especially eric aren’t the nicest

Here are my thoughts on the interview, posted right after I watched it. It’s not my favourite interview with Sue (the tentative honour for that goes to Dr Oz) but it was the first one we got and it was illuminating just to hear her speak about her story and her son. This happened prior to the book release, so a lot of what she had to say was news to us.

I don’t know what was said about Dylan in this one that wasn’t so nice? I still feel like yelling and making murder gestures at my screen every time they talk about Eric, though, so that kinda gives you an indication as to what I think of that part of the narrative.

Why do you think E&D didn’t kill more people during NBK? Obviously it’s good that they didn’t, but their original plan was to kill 100s of people w/ the bombs so why do you think they didn’t try to kill/injure more than they did with their weapons?

I have always thought it was because killing people from a distance is very different from killing them up close. Creating bombs that will kill hundreds is vastly different from making the rounds and shooting everyone you see on sight. Bombs are just that one singular kill that encompasses the loss of many lives – a huge explosion, a moment suspended in time, and then the burning and screaming aftermath. While it can be a thrill to the bomber, it’s also a very remote way of committing murder. They don’t get their hands dirty beyond the creation of the explosives. They certainly don’t run any risk of injury or death themselves, in most cases, and the adrenaline kick only comes from watching their work come to fruition.

How very different, then, is shooting people at point-blank range. How bloody, how frenzied, how chaotic. There’s the fire alarm blaring overhead, set off by the smoke of smaller explosives. There’s the smell of gunpowder curling into your nostrils and wedging itself into your mind in a way that tells you this is reality even when the haze of adrenaline makes it feel like a dream. There are screams and pleas and prayers reaching your ears in haphazard snapshots of someone else’s fear. You know it’s all your doing, all on you and because of you, and what’s one more death except a weight on your soul? You think you’ve killed just about anybody you pointed your gun at. Think you’ve killed more than you probably actually did, but you can’t stop to find out and you can’t drop your guard long enough to take a break from murder. Then you finally get away from the blood and the horror you’re committing and you find yourself wandering rather aimlessly. You know there are people hiding from you, scared of you, but you can’t muster up the effort to find them and make them face you. Not when you’re no longer sure of who you are, not when this all feels like a distant dream and yet there’s the taste of blood in your mouth and the sound of pitter-pattering gunshots and explosions reverberating through your body.

The massacre was a disorienting experience that brought the boys far closer to death than they had banked on being. Sure, they’d fantasized about shooting survivors of their bombs. But that’s not the same as going in and doing everything themselves, not really, and I think the effect it may have had on their psyches isn’t one to discount. We know that Dylan was very focused on suicide and that Eric was very focused on his blaze of glory. Killing people was a bonus for one of them, as though it was something to try on for size and then discard in favour of his grand finale. The thought of dying became the new focus for the other, now that all his plans fizzled out. There’s such a strain on both of them in that moment. One is waiting, hoping, praying he’ll die that day and relieved to find it’s almost the end of the road for him. The other is clinging, screaming, waiting for something that tells him it’s been worth it and disenchanted to find that all roads have only ever led him nowhere. They got so caught up in the destruction of their own minds that the destruction they caused on the outside shifted into a submissive state to discard and finally neglect instead of an active one to enjoy and pursue for a while longer.

I have a morning ritual. I wake up, i switch on my computer and i check my two favorite blogs: this one and thedragonrampant. I look forward to new posts and i’m genuinely happy when i see one. Please don’t delete, you are very important to me and i’m sure also to many other people.

rebsg0ddess-deactivated20170313:

Aww..that’s really sweet! Especially considering I haven’t been making any quality posts of my own recently. Getting messages like this outweighs the hate any day. 😘💛💙
@thedragonrampant

Thank you, anon, that’s very sweet and good to hear! =) Made my day too!

Have you ever considered stop sharing and take a break from this?

Yes, I have. There have always been times in my research/blogging when I needed a break and took it, though they were never very extensive leaves of absence and I used to post pretty infrequently before my askbox began to fill up. All throughout last year, though, I not only considered taking a break but actually came quite close to deleting the whole blog. I felt like I was hitting the wall over and over again and couldn’t see the point of investing all that time and energy into it. I had some intense rounds of “I’m not fucking doing this anymore” that directly impacted the way I blogged, but also caused a significant change in the way I interacted with people from here. I announced a break in March 2016 and stayed lowkey active afterward, though I think you can see that I really wasn’t feeling it if you take a good look at my archive from last year.

Obviously, I’m still here now. I won’t say I’m fully out of the woods with it just yet, but for the moment there’s no danger of deletion and I have found some interesting things to say about it again. I find it normal to want to take a break from it, which I also detailed on this page because I know I’m not alone with the sentiment.

Do you know why the propane bombs never exploded? And also, when the boys realised that they didn’t go off, why didn’t they cancel it for that day and do it the next where they could try again with the bombs? It almost seems impulsive that they rushed straight into the school when Plan A failed

Officials say it was because of faulty wiring and fusing. Even the diversion bomb didn’t fully detonate, so it’s quite likely that only the smaller explosives were built properly. I don’t think they’ve ever gone into detail in the official reports about what exactly was wrong with the bigger bombs, possibly to prevent copycats from achieving what Eric and Dylan failed to do, but the bombs fall under the so-called BLEVE category and reading up on that might give some insight into how the bombs should have worked. The description of one of the cafeteria bombs that failed to detonate but did cause a fire might also give some insight into what went wrong:

They would have had to walk back into the cafeteria and carry the bombs back outside into their cars that were also rigged with bombs and drive home and somehow store them safely and try to figure out what the hell went wrong without blowing themselves to pieces in the process. I don’t know about you, but the last thing I would do is try to move a live bomb out of a crowded area. There would be absolutely no possibility to defuse the bomb within the cafeteria itself, so they would’ve had to trust that the detonation was not delayed and that they really did do something wrong in the construction instead. Leaving the bombs in the cafeteria wasn’t an option either, because they would need to figure out what went wrong with those and not draw any kind of attention to the rather large bags they put those bombs in. If lunch period ended and nobody came to collect those bags, how long do you think it would take for someone to notice them? They couldn’t run that risk of having the bombs be found by anyone prior to detonation. It makes sense to me that the boys went into the school and tried to detonate them manually. All the other options sound like the equivalent of a very messy suicide waiting to happen, so I can understand why they didn’t backtrack and try again later.

Of course, from a more psychological point of view rather than a practical one, we also have to consider just how long they had been looking forward to this. They had built up this day in their heads as their ultimate goal in life. They’d prepared so long for it and worked so hard on it. Turning away at that point would be like failure, like admitting they were losers, like they couldn’t even get this one thing right. They couldn’t back out now, not now that they were ready and armed to the teeth and still had hopes of successfully detonating the bigger bombs. It seems like an impulsive decision to not back down from this because, well, it is. It’s an emotional decision to go through with it anyway, to shrug and say “fine, we’ll just start shooting then”. They both didn’t want to live to see tomorrow. They closed off all other options and barricaded all the doors that led to a way out for them. To then back away from it because one thing went wrong wasn’t an option.

Why wasn’t Dylan comfortable with his rage? Did he feel guilty? I don’t understand :L And why did Eric feel the opposite? So comfortable with his rage that he wouldn’t mind to “hurt” others or that people notice that

Dylan wasn’t comfortable with a lot of emotions, as far as I can tell. His body language often shows he wasn’t even really comfortable in his own skin, as though his own body was a stranger to him and he was just a tourist in that foreign land of humanity. A lot of his writings come back down to that feeling of being alien, of being somehow different, of not belonging down here with these people in this stifling rinse-and-repeat structure of a life. The only emotion he gives voice to freely is that sense of what I call ‘homesickness’, of deep longing for something that isn’t what he is living now, and that sense is more powerful than anything else. That’s the thing that can make you feel alone in a crowd of people. That’s the thing that can make you feel like you don’t belong here at all and that there must’ve been some kind of mistake in letting you be born at all. When you feel that on the level at which Dylan felt it, it’s all too easy to begin feeling disdain and anger toward the people who’re seemingly fully content with their lives. It’s too easy to start thinking of them as sheep following along to their eventual slaughter, and all too easy to think that you’re never going to be one of those sheep even though you look like one too. That’s what gives birth to that “godlike”-thing that Dylan spoke about and what informs his words when he laments his existence.

At the same time, Dylan wasn’t raised to just fly off the handle about things. He certainly threw temper tantrums when he was a child, but as he grew older those evaporated. We can tell from Sue’s book that the household Dylan grew up in was very cerebral, in a way – there was more talk about what the kids thought than about how they felt, about what was rationally right and wrong rather than about the feeling of something being unfair, and about how one should treat other people rather than about how the kids felt about how they were being treated. I believe Sue when she says that Dylan didn’t do the massacre because of how he was raised, but in spite of how he was raised – just as I believe that Dylan didn’t know how to express the mess he was feeling because he had been raised to reason his feelings away and taught to think before acting. When I say Dylan wasn’t comfortable with his rage, I mean that he didn’t know what to do with it or how to stop it once it was there. He was the kind of person who’d bottle all of his feelings up and think about them and maybe, just maybe, let them out in private when he was completely alone. He’d be the type to simply erupt if his emotions kept piling on and I don’t think he knew how to stop once he got going. It’s like he warned his mother – if you keep going, mom, I’ll get angry and I don’t know what I’ll do. That says a lot about Dylan and shows that he was conscious of his feelings but tried to rationalise them away or reason them out with words. I also think that his rage is visible in his sadness, if you look closely enough. I’ve cried while angry before – when I am furious, I have tears streaming down my face from how mad I feel – and I think that this is a similar mechanism to Dylan’s rage in a way. Dylan kinda had the tendency to collapse in on himself a lot feelings-wise and shoulder them all on his own.

With Eric, you also have that bottle-up situation going on when it comes to feelings.. but different from Dylan’s, vastly so, and what informed Dylan’s way of thinking was not what fueled Eric’s. Eric was taught that his feelings didn’t matter in the grand scale of things. There is a level to his emotional life that speaks about loss of control more than anything – Eric never felt in control of anything and needed the massacre to feel like he had some semblance of control over his own life and death. Eric was comfortable with his rage primarily because it kept people from seeing how hurt he was and how desolate he felt. Anger is the one thing that truly stops people from wanting to find out how you’re really doing. Anger’s safe because people don’t get close enough to hurt you that way. Eric wasn’t comfortable with his other feelings such as sadness and loneliness, though, and he put those feelings into his anger and built up his rage through that. A lot of what people perceive as Eric being hurtful and angry is really just Eric being in his full-on stage of walling off his own pain and protecting himself from further harm. Unlike Dylan, Eric wasn’t really aware of that he was doing this. It’s a very subconscious process for Eric because he wasn’t the type to rationalise how he was feeling. He just felt it, all of it, and if it got to be too much for him to handle he exploded outward rather than inward. Eric made how he was feeling the world’s problem rather than just his own problem.

I don’t want to get into the current goings-on of this community too much, but I do wish to state the following.

I don’t
condone any kind of disrespect shown to the victims, the perpetrators,
or the families associated with the massacre. It is our responsibility as a community to stay mindful of what we choose to share, but also to speak out when we feel something crosses the line and to say “this is not okay” out loud if necessary. I feel we need to be aware of how we come across to other people and that we need to ask ourselves why we share the things we do.

Creative expression is not
always free of offensive qualities, but I believe an artist is also
supposed to be mindful of and sensitive toward any subject that is so
wrought with tragic loss. I am among the first to honour and applaud creativity, though I also think that art should serve a purpose that is not just about shock value or attention.

if a person killed themselves with someone else’s gun that was in there name but that person had no knowledge of it would that person get in trouble? cause I know this happened with mark manes when he gave eric one of the guns but then they went and killed people so whole different scenario.

I think someone could be held accountable for a suicide that was committed with a gun that was registered in their name if they willingly provided the suicidal person with access to the gun and if they were aware of the suicidal ideation in this person at that time. What you’d have to look at here are laws about assisted suicide, too, as well as gun laws in general – what matters here is how that person got access to that gun and if the provider of that gun was aware of the motive behind its acquisition. I also recall there are rules regarding secure storage of firearms which may come into play where this is concerned. Obviously, someone cannot be held fully accountable if their gun was stolen from them and then used in a murder or suicide, but perhaps they could be held accountable for not taking preventative measures against the stealing of the firearm. I think the charges might come down to negligence or something of the like, though I’m not as well-versed in US gun laws because I’m not a US resident.

(anon that sent the question about why E&D didn’t kill that many people) No worries! I just wanted to make sure you had gotten it because sometimes Tumblr eats up messages. I’d like to hear your thoughts on it, but i understand if you’re busy so no rush :)

Tumblr tends to do that sometimes, yeah! It’s good of you to check in to make sure I didn’t miss it. =) Yours isn’t the only question I’ve yet to get round to, though, so I figured posting a little explanation might not go amiss here. I’ll probably get to it over the weekend!

Why do people bully others even after Columbine? Nobody learns?

People bully others for a number of reasons. I’ve always thought that one of the main reasons must be that these people are somehow insecure about themselves and feel the need to put others down because of that. It’s a way for them to build up their own strength by making sure that nobody else is liked more than they are, doing a better job than they do, etc.. =) It’s something that is unfortunately quite ingrained in some people. Some bullies don’t even see that the behaviour they engage in is bullying.

I personally don’t tolerate bullying and I do my best to never engage in that myself. As someone who’s been on the receiving end of it, I know all too well what kind of an impact it can have on a person to be told they’re worthless and so on. Being kind sometimes takes more effort than being nasty, but ultimately it’s a more rewarding experience to make someone smile or be the bigger person in a conflict than to have everything escalate and have everyone feel miserable for it. I keep hoping that ‘leading by example’ might make more people be kind to one another, you know? I’m a huge fan of “treat others the way you want to be treated” and that’s what I want to advocate more than anything else.

did you receive my question asking you why you think E&D only killed 13 people during the shooting even though they originally meant to wipe out hundreds? i sent it a couple days ago

I did, yes. Yours is a question that requires a little more effort on my part to answer, so that’s why I didn’t get round to it yet. I recently started a new job that’s currently a fulltime occupation, so the time I get to spend on this blog is a little more limited than I’d like. I want to keep delivering quality in the answers I do give and not rush an answer out for a question that deserves more nuance and thought. =)

I’ll leave you with Tim Krabbé’s observations at the moment, which are a great thing in association with what you just asked: here.

Have you ever been inside CHS? Have you ever talked to the Klebolds or the Harrises?

I live in the Netherlands, so that’s not exactly next door to Colorado.. Ideally, I’d like to visit Littleton someday to form my own impressions of the town and the school’s environment. I don’t know if I’d actually venture into the school or simply visit the memorial and the immediate surroundings. I wish to remain respectful of that space, though you wouldn’t hear me say ‘no’ to an invitation to go inside.

I’ve never spoken with the Klebolds or Harrises either. I don’t want to insert myself into their lives that way at all unless they offer to talk and be asked questions. I’m as mindful of them as I am of the other families involved in this tragedy – the last thing these people need are spectators to their grief.

You said in a ask along time ago after you read Sue’s book that you had to put the book don and cry because of a line that she said “I felt the presence of children, and I felt peace.” why did you have to put it down and cry?

I actually described the reason why in the original paragraph of that post from a year ago, in which I talked about my favourite bits of Sue’s book. What I said about that line was:

It is so close and identical to the very strong personal
impression I was given of the scene that it shattered me beyond belief
to read the following words as confirmation. “I sensed only two things before I was overtaken by tears. I felt the presence of children, and I felt peace.” I had to put the book down and sob for
a while after that sentence – it brought my own impression crashing
down on me once again and it was hard to continue reading afterward.

Like so many of us, I’ve had some dreams about Columbine. I have also had very vivid daydream-like ‘visions’ while writing about it in the past. When I read that line in Sue’s book, I was reminded of the sense I personally got from the library through those experiences as well. It felt like she was describing how it had felt to me – not empty, but serene – and I can’t really tell you how good it feels to have someone confirm you’re not crazy but that’s how it felt to me when I read her words. Like I wasn’t as batshit as I thought I was, haha.

I wonder if that anon wouldve lost respect if you wrote that about sunshine boy dylan

That’s the big question of life, isn’t it? 😉 Would people react the same way if I said “I like Dylan” and talked about some of my personal feelings attached to that statement? I guess I surprised that anon with what I said or something, which is weird because I think my stance on Eric has always been very clear. Oh well..

Before You Ask..

Last year, I made a decision that I would no longer be answering everything that makes its way into my inbox. I have occasionally strayed from that by answering a few things here and there that I would otherwise have refused, but I really do wish to go back to a part of the original decision from here on out. This will allow me more time to put some things in order information-wise and hopefully also allow me to write the same quality content for this blog I hope I have given you so far.

I will no longer be answering anything pertaining to the following:

• Questions about how Eric and Dylan would be as boyfriends, what a
  relationship with them would be like, what type of girl they would like,
  and all variants thereof. My archive features plenty of
  posts that relate to this subject and should be comprehensive enough to
  form the answer you seek.
• Any and all sexual questions you can
  think of. The only sex-related things I will answer and address in my
  posts are the ones that directly relate back to their respective journal
  mentions of the subject.
• Questions regarding if they would like a certain
  book, movie, tv show, videogame, or music artist. Both of their likes
  and dislikes in terms of pop culture are very well-documented in the
  available evidence, which should be enough to help answer your questions in this regard.
• Questions that will literally take
  no more than half a minute on Google to find the answer to. You will get
  the answer a hell of a lot faster if you type it into that magical
  searchbox, because it often takes me a day or more to get back to my inbox and find the time to answer things in peace.

I encourage you to use the links I’ve gathered on my resources-page as well as the search function on my blog if you’re in need of information that falls under one of these categories. I realise that a lot of you ask me things because you’re genuinely curious as to what I have to say about it, and I do hope you’ll continue doing so in future, but I have to keep things workable and interesting for myself here as well and this decision is one that has worked well for me in the past. (Observant people will notice that it’s one bulletpoint shorter than the original PSA was, so consider that a little gift from me to you.. kudos if you figure out which subject I left off this time. ;))

I have 2 questions for you if you don’t mind 1. What was said before Dylan started screaming for the third time in Hitmen for Hire? It sounds a little gibberish to me. 2. Why was Eric’s little threat/rant in Hitmen for Hire more serious than Dylan’s? Dylan’s threat even made him laugh because of how exaggerated it was but Eric was more mad and serious with his threat.

I don’t mind at all!

I have no idea what was said before Dylan entered his third take. I can hear Dylan say “just keep it running so I can–” before our cameraman interjects with a comment I can’t decipher for the life of me. The transcripts I found only reflect what Dylan said, not what was said by someone else in the room with him, so if someone who’s a native English speaker can try to decipher it that’d be stellar.. =)

Eric’s rant was more serious, because Eric had no problems accessing that part of him that was angry. Eric could essentially switch his rage on and off – it didn’t take long for him to build up on it and get it out right on camera. With Eric, there was always this part of him that relished his rage and got caught up in the moment. It was his safe emotion for a number of reasons and something he felt comfortable expressing. He could fly off the handle one minute and be relatively fine the next. He held grudges, sure, but of all the emotions he bottled up.. anger wasn’t really among them. Anger was his default wall with which to keep the world at bay.

With Dylan, that’s different. Dylan wasn’t comfortable with his anger at all. He pushed a lot of it down into himself and bottled it all up. When it came out, it erupted out of him in this white-hot flash of rage that he couldn’t hold back or switch off again. I feel like he fumbled with his rants in Hitmen For Hire not because he wasn’t angry, but because he didn’t really know how to express his anger at all. He had this “all or nothing” type of rage going on, in which he’d either spit it all out or keep it all to himself. There was no middle road there. This is the guy who’d never tell anyone that something had made him angry, unless he reached the full-on boiling point and out would come the hurt from years instead of just the hurt of that one moment. Dylan didn’t use his anger as a wall the way Eric did – their emotional mechanisms are different that way.