ur 28?

Yes I am!

Reblog if you were alive when Columbine actually happened

i understand that both boys were bullied but they became the bullies when they picked up the guns (and bombs) and started killing people. dylan called isaiah a racial slur which is also bullying, and both boys taunted and mocked their victims.

I’ve stated before that I count bullying as one of the many factors as to why Columbine happened, but not as the main factor and therefore also not as the main motive. Eric and Dylan didn’t only become bullies on the day of the massacre, but had a history of bullying/antagonistic behaviour directed at other people around them. It’s well-documented that they were not just victims but also aggressors on various occasions.

As you can see, we are in perfect agreement here..?

How many followers do you have?

Changes all the time, but this is the current number. =) (Accumulated over the course of the past 4 years somehow – it keeps surprising me how many people read what I have to say about the case, lol.)

what does ur username mean? (sorry if its been asked before)

I answered this a while ago, but no worries – with all I’ve got on my blog, it can be hard to find if something’s been asked before. =)

crunchydragon isn’t my main blog these days, so that part of the connection is mostly gone, but I’ve had the name thedragonrampant for so long now that I don’t feel like changing it anymore. I think I’m one of the few Columbine bloggers whose username doesn’t refer to the case outright, haha.

ummm idk who to ask and i hope its ok to ask you- both harris and klebold wore their hats backwards, and seung-hui cho did too (idk if other shooters did too), do you know if there’s a connection or if i’m reading too much into things? (maybe cho was inspired by columbine?)

It’s always okay to ask me stuff!

Cho was definitely influenced by Columbine. He proclaimed in the material he left behind that Eric and Dylan were martyrs and I do think that Cho felt as though he was ‘fighting the same fight’ that the boys were. I guess he felt a kinship of sorts with them, though some have suggested he may have also seen them as competition of sorts.

I don’t know if you should read so much into how they wore their hats, though, because that’s just how hats were worn back in the late 90s/early 00s. It wasn’t cool back then to wear them any other way, haha.

racheljoyscotts:

“All I want is for someone to walk through these halls of a tragedy with me.” – Rachel Scott (1998)

 Filmed by Rachel almost exactly 8 months before the massacre.

Hello! So I’m fairly new in the columbine community and one thing I don’t understand is how it all started. I understand that both wanted it but there’s a difference between wishing for smth to happen and planning smth. How do you think they brought up the topic the firs time. Smth along the lines with “Y’know I’d LOVE to bomb away this fucking school” – “Same bro, guess what, I’ve got some explosives in my room, we could ACTUALLY do this!” or how do you think one begins to plan smth like that?

Hi! (Sorry, this is a late-as-hell answer – I hope you’re still around!)

I don’t think anyone really knows how it started. I sometimes feel like Eric and Dylan wouldn’t be able to tell us when it all started, either. I don’t think there was any one point in time that was IT in terms of “hey this is a great idea”, nor do I think there was a specific moment they’d be able to pinpoint as the first time the topic was brought up between them.

I think it started out as a joke. When you read the statements their friends made to law enforcement and in interviews later on, you get the sense that the school blowing up or getting shot up or whatever was something that was talked about and joked about semi-regularly within their crowd. I think they had this running commentary going of “yeah one of these days it’s gonna go boom” or “I wish this place would just catch fire already” or something along those lines in order to help them cope with the everyday reality of being in that space with these people.

I think that they sat in the middle of one of those jokes and that one of them turned to the other and said “we could pull that off”. I think that one of them may have made a very asinine murderous comment, to which the other may have replied “yeah same here/me too”. I think it may not be very likely that they bonded over a lament of “I wish I was fucking dead”, as that’s way too personal for Dylan and way too outright suicidal for Eric, so I’m banking on the murder-section of the plan being the thing they initially pounced on together. I think that Dylan was the big dreamer/visionary in some respects, while Eric was the practical one who could pull shit together in record time to make that vision happen. I think that they just sat and fantasised out loud and then gradually came to the thought of actually doing it.

I also still think that they had both been toying with these ideas individually, if I know Eric well enough by now to assume as much and if we take Dylan’s first mention of murder into account, before they ever said anything about it to each other. I think this was a private fantasy before it became a shared idea/plan. I’ve put together a more-or-less accurate timeline of when it might have become a shared plan here, because we’re able to piece some of that together with the information they left behind. As for how that conversation actually began, though.. we’ll never know.

Dylan wrote a love letter to this girl he loved and she knew him, also he said that they’ve the same friends. And then he wrote I love her andshe loves me? But then he wrote that she didn’t know him or that he existed.

He wasn’t talking about the same girl throughout his writing, but about two or more girls that he harboured feelings for/had a crush on. The letter is different from some other journal entries – they’re not all about one girl that he pined after for years, thank the gods.

Dylan also idealised love and envisioned being (re)united with Her somewhere, somehow – the Her here is not any specific person he knew in life, but rather his ideal love he believed he would find someday. The very last section of his journal where he’s talking about love and saying it’s only five days until the massacre reads as very metaphysical/spiritual where his love is concerned to the point where it seems like he is convinced he is only going to be with Her in the afterlife. The way he spoke of Her in some of this doesn’t indicate to me that he actually knew Her in real life, you know? Some of his other entries are more grounded in reality, like when he’s saying he feels like he can’t call her, and those are the entries that are about an actual person he knew. The letter, too, is rooted in the same reality – he knows this girl and wants to connect with her somehow. It’s as though he gradually descends into this more idealised conceptual form of The Girl the closer he gets to the massacre, almost as if he realised that he would only find love in death.

What do you think Dylan’s cause of depression was besides the bullying? Also I remember reading something about him dropping quite a few pounds as it got closer to the massacre. What do you think made this happen?

I think the main and perhaps even sole cause of his depression was his giftedness. Dylan’s depression, as far as we are able to infer from the writings he left behind, seemed existential in nature: it concerned itself to a high degree with existential matters such as death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Existential depression is something that tends to occur in people who’ve suffered heavy loss (or are about to suffer it), but it can also occur spontaneously. Gifted individuals tend to be more susceptible to the latter, especially because their idealism and their intelligence are hopelessly at odds with society’s many shortcomings. Dylan’s writings centred around spiritual concepts (fate, some form of afterlife) in combination with observations of people/society (the human race as zombies) and his own feelings of isolation and destruction (flirtations with murder/suicide).

I wanted to find a good example of how this particular form of depression is triggered so often in gifted people, so I located a fantastic article that I think is worth reading in full. These excerpts may hopefully explain some of the feelings and thoughts that had a huge hand in causing Dylan’s depression:

Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how
things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are
simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it
might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the
disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached.
Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies,
arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those
around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged.

When gifted children try to share these concerns with others, they are
usually met with reactions ranging from puzzlement to hostility. They
discover that others, particularly of their age, clearly do not share
these concerns, but instead are focused on more concrete issues and on
fitting in with others’ expectations. Often by even first grade, these
youngsters, particularly the more highly gifted ones, feel isolated from
their peers and perhaps from their families as they find that others
are not prepared to discuss such weighty concerns.

The reaction of gifted youngsters (again with intensity) to these
frustrations is often one of anger. But they quickly discover that their
anger is futile, for it is really directed at “fate” or at other
matters which they are not able to control. Anger that is powerless
evolves quickly into depression.

This text may be of interest as well, though it’s far more in-depth than the article and touches upon a very specific psychological theory. (Dabrowski’s theory is also mentioned in the first article, so this text makes for some great background reading in that respect. Definitely worth your time!)

As for the weight loss, which was indeed substantial.. depression can cause this. Some people gain weight from it, but others lose it. Some people might lose their appetite, but Dylan seemed to be a voracious eater overall. I remember I lost a fair few pounds during my worst rounds with depression, too, so it’s likely to me that his depression did affect his weight. The added stress of planning a massacre can’t have helped matters much in that regard, though!

everlasting-contrast:

paperviolence:

Wow I’ve been on the Columbine tag for a little bit over a year now and so much has happened like remember when Brooks showed his penis to little girls and Alice was a bitch and remember when everyone hated Boredstonerrr or whatever for like no reason and when that girl was obsessed with Steven Curnow and was freaking out at everybody for liking his murderers and remember askreb and everyone like loved him so much and then when I ran askericharris and everyone wanted askreb and I to start a war and then remember the columbiner prom and how much of a fail that was because no one even knew what we were supposed to do even though everyone was asking everybody out and everything and then when there were all those awesome Columbiners that were always around and awesome and everybody knew them and like wow I don’t know anybody on the tag anymore what happened we all used to be one big messed up family where did everyone go we used to have such fun

*sigh* Ahh, yes, those were the days. Good times. 😐😆

Good times indeed! I think I finally got round to actually talking with people back when Columbiner prom was a thing, haha, and I do admit to missing most of this.. like the togetherness of it, and the discussions, and all the encouragement between bloggers? It was awesome stuff.

Do you think Eric would’ve been surprised at the level of attention the massacre had then, and even now? Since his plan only partially worked

Hm, no, I think he’d just go “I knew we’d be famous cos we’re so fucking godlike” and preen a little about it. 😉

I think that he always had the feeling that this would be big. Even without the bombs, a school shooting of that magnitude simply hadn’t really happened in the US yet. He knew that what they were going to do had the potential to reverberate through society in massive ways. It was fairly obvious on the day itself that this was a huge deal, even through the rather limited view the boys had of what was going on outside the school. I don’t know if you guys have seen the photos, but this was roughly some of what was going on outside at the time:

Seeing as the cafeteria windows do provide a perfectly good look at what’s going on outside, it’s likely that the boys saw at least some of the chaos they had caused. I feel that there was still a lot of disappointment and a sense of failure over the failed bombing, especially in Eric, but I do think that they both knew that they were breaking news and potentially part of a historic event.

We all agree with the fact that the attitude from Diane Sawyer towards Sue was unprofessional, judgemental, or more specifically: A TOTAL PIECE OF SHIT? We all agree. I just wanted to hug Mrs Klebold and protect her.

We do not all agree, because my main criticism when it comes to that particular interview has more to do with the superficiality/scatteredness of the questions and the editing format they used for it rather than with Diane Sawyer’s attitude. It’s not the best interview Sue did about Dylan and her book, but it’s an important one.

I didn’t think that Sawyer was unprofessional about it, but you could definitely tell that there was some judgment present in the way she asked/phrased certain things. This makes her an excellent choice as a first interviewer, as her critical notes are ones that the viewers themselves will have had as well. Keep in mind that we’re in this niche community that knows a whole lot about Dylan and Columbine. You and I (and every other Columbiner out there who watched that thing) have a vastly different perspective on the case than your average Joe who just tuned in to watch 20/20 on a whim and maybe retained just enough information about the case to go “oh yeah, wasn’t that that school shooting in the 90s?”.

It’s that viewer that Sawyer represented in that interview: that viewer that’s sitting at home and asking themselves “how the fuck didn’t this mom see what was going on?” and who’s yelling at their TV about bad parenting. It’s for their benefit that the tone was judgmental – and, believe me, it was exactly what Sue expected to be confronted with when she shared her story with all of us. Sue got this one out of the way first because it was one of the hardest to do: not only was she speaking about Dylan in public for the first time, but she was also subject to thinly-veiled criticism that she had probably heard many times before from just about anyone who ran into her post-massacre and questioned her parenting and her decision-making and whatever else. She remained so calm throughout that I really think she prepared for the worst.

Objectively speaking, the interview was necessary. It may not have been the nicest, but it didn’t have to be.

Why not release the tapes? People are already “inspired” by the attacks so it won’t cause much harm, really.

Preachin’ to the choir here. I’ve always said that releasing the tapes might see a temporary copycat upheaval, but in the long run I genuinely think it’d do more good to have them out there. I’ve talked about this a lot on my blog already, so I’m not gonna repeat the entire argument, but it pains me that law enforcement and families such as the Klebolds have halted the tapes from ever being released.

I finally decided to wade through the murky waters of Cullen’s book with your posts as my guide. Your commentary was at least 90% of the reason I managed to finish it, and I took savage joy in giving it one star on Goodreads. Thanks for always being a wonderful source for everything Columbine :)

Always happy to serve as a shining light in Cullen’s swamp! Thank you very much for letting me know this – it’s certainly incentive for me to actually finish the last hurdle of chapters, haha, and post the final review sometime.

I assume that this is the star you gave Dave on Goodreads:

you’re probably the best blog reporting on comlumbine thank you

Thank you for saying that! That’s a huge compliment and I feel very honoured to receive it. =)

”I would find a way to survive. Anything to be with you. I would enjoy life knowing that you loved me.” Do you think that things could have been different for Dylan if he had a powerful partner that would helped him to realize that he was special and gorgeous?

I personally don’t subscribe to the whole “love could’ve saved them”-idea. I know we all would like to think that love would’ve been enough to stop a massacre from happening. I know we want to think that we could’ve stopped Columbine from becoming a household name the way it is now. All of that is just wishful thinking to me. 

You cannot love someone’s problems away. The most you can do is be a positive influence on someone’s life. It’s something that you can’t always succeed at being. Someone’s problems will impact the relationship whether you want them to or not. It’s very naive to think that depression is magically cured simply by falling in love (oh, if only it was that easy) or that someone’s aggression is somehow going to evaporate if they are loved (it really isn’t going to, believe me). I think the best you could hope for is that this love and your presence in someone’s life is going to inspire them to put up a fight and find healing/balance for themselves within life.

With the issues that Dylan – and Eric by extension – had, it’s not likely that love and a good partner would’ve been able to do much of anything. Sure, it could’ve changed things enough in that moment. It could’ve given him a reason to stay alive. It might have even been enough to halt the massacre, if the timing was exactly right for that. But what do you think would happen if Dylan and his partner got into a fight? What do you think would happen if they broke up? I think he’d be back to square one or worse. And the likelihood of such a fight/break-up is really substantial, given the severity of his issues and how those might have interplayed with his partner’s own foibles and hangups. 

Dylan idealised love. He idealised it so much that he would have a very hard time coping with the everyday reality of it. Don’t fall into the same trap he did, please. Don’t idealise love to the point where you underestimate how much hard work it is to stay in a relationship and make it function the way it should.

They say that the worst bullying that Eric and Dylan got was when they were juniors.. so do you think that Kevin Harris when we was a senior was mean to these guys that bullied his brother the year Kevin was gone? because it seems the jocks were huge dicks with Eric. Also do you think Kevin knew that they would bullied his brother?

No, I don’t think Kevin had anything to do with it. I think Kevin was actually a really nice guy, from all I’ve read about him, and it doesn’t seem too likely to me that he would’ve been mean to these guys that would later bully Eric. Kevin was a jock himself (or, at least, involved in sports and well-liked at Columbine as far as I know) and I think that people liked him and got along with him quite well. Seeing as Kevin moved out of the house when he went to college, I don’t think he would’ve been as aware of what was going on with Eric in those years. The two brothers were close, but I don’t think Eric would’ve mentioned being bullied (or he would’ve downplayed it if he had mentioned it) and I think that their brotherly bond faded a little after Kevin moved out. I do feel that Kevin was Eric’s main confidant in the family, though, and if he had stayed home then perhaps he would’ve known more about what was going on with Eric than either one of their parents did.

Trouble seemingly already began during Eric’s sophomore year, in which he felt mistreated at school and ignored by teachers and administrators. He became a little more outspoken in that year and really migrated further to the fringes of the social groups at Columbine. It seems to have been this really gradual process for the most part, in which his style changed over from preppy to the way we now know him best, although for some the changes in Eric’s behaviour felt pretty sudden (as evidenced by things like someone saying that Eric talked to him during freshman year but wouldn’t say two words to him in sophomore year anymore). Junior year was tough on Eric for sure and senior year wasn’t a whole lot better, though some say he mellowed a little toward the end of that last year. I think that this last bit is mainly due to Eric having found a new channel into which he could pour his rage rather than him actually feeling better, though, as evidenced by the fact that he literally turned around and killed people not too long after people thought he was improving and softening around the edges. I would say that the jocks primarily responded to what they saw from Eric, which was someone who didn’t really fit in and who really alienated himself from people in the way he dressed and acted. That’s of course not an excuse for them to go and bully Eric, but we all know how many sorry excuses people can make up for treating other people like shit. 

Hello :) I want to ask you something…. I don’t know much about Columbine since I recently found about it. My question is, why did they destroyed The Basement Tapes?. Sorry if I made any mistake, English is not my first language. Thank you!

Fear of copycats is the main reason. They don’t want anyone else to get any ideas from the tapes, seeing as Eric and Dylan used the tapes to explain how they acquired/hid their weaponry and what their other preparations for the massacre were and also what some of their underlying motives were. Eric in particular used the tapes as a call to arms for others – trying to inspire more people to follow in their footsteps. Law enforcement considers this to be very dangerous, which is why they never released the tapes. (However, they did release a partial transcript of them and allowed some journalists to see them. This means we do have a good idea of what’s discussed on the tapes and what the boys were doing during filming, so the copycat argument has always seemed a little weak to me.)

You might want to take a look at my other posts on the basement tapes, which you can mostly find through here. Your English is absolutely fine, by the way! I hope that your research into the case is going well. =)

His style, his intelligence, his sensibility… Dylan was born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. FUCK bullies and FUCK society.

Ahh.. just Dylan, then? Okay..

I would say that they were both born in the right place at the right time, however awful that may sound, as the impact their lives had on this world is still immense and they have made some lasting changes happen for the rest of us. (Both positive and negative, though people have a habit of focusing on the negative.) However, I also understand the sentiment you’re expressing perfectly – we always wish them better lives than the ones they had.