I also loved ur statement about how at first many people including you seemed to get Dylan right away rather than Eric but then it switched the opposite way bc that’s what happened to me. Dylan was so much more complex to me because of that romantic, sensitive side & then that monstrous side which makes me feel sick for some reason. Like w/ Eric he had bottled his feelings up so well 4 so long that he was able limit his sympathy and empathy (which I personally think he turned into a sociopath)

(Pt 2 of my rant lol) And I think Eric really laid his cards out 4 the
most part. Like it just came to me right away that this was an angry,
pissed, depressed individual who was treated like shit&became so
upset w/ how wrong society is &the way the government/world works
etc that it caused him to start lacking empathy & turn homicidal
whereas w/ Dylan.. he was the textbook definition of a depressed &
suicidal teenager that definitely could’ve made it to adulthood
&maybe overcome it or live w/ it

pt 3. but that didnt happen bc overtime he became legitimately homicidal
whereas in his journal I think the few times he displayed homicidal
thoughts were honestly what most hormonal, depressed/suicidal teens
feel. like Dylan just fucking confuses me bc he also had intense
feelings of love &care 4 people & not in the sexual lustful way
anyways I’m basically rambling but what I was trying 2 get at was ur
thoughts on how/why Dylan became homicidal & basically ur best
description of his personality

Sorry it took me a while to reply, I was kind of pondering what to say here.. It’s a complicated subject that doesn’t let itself be captured easily. Still, let’s try to make sense of things.. I’ve chosen to do a Dylan-focus entirely because including Eric would make this post even more long-assed than it is, lol. (I would not really say that Eric laid out his cards in full, though. There is another side of the coin with him, too, that made him fascinating to me once I realised it was there.. Making him a textbook definition of something sells Eric short.)

What I think gave me the ability to understand Dylan straight away is the fact that I was a lot like him. I saw my younger self in him, to the point where reading his journal made me backtrack into my own old journals for a second to ‘compare notes’. I caught sight of Dylan having been in a program for gifted children back in primary school, too, and because I classified as a gifted child myself I had a new angle from which to look at Dylan. I doubt that the program was for gifted children only, as we’re not that widespread – about 2% of the general populace is gifted – and it would make sense for regular smart cookies to make their way into the program too. Dylan matches other characteristics for gifted children, though, and I am personally hoping that more of these make their way into Sue Klebold’s book this February.

Gifted kids virtually all contend with existential angst and an inability to “get out of their head”. They will have all these rapid flowing thoughts, all these philosophies, all that stuff going on in their brains.. and then they are stuck in a body that doesn’t quite have the ability to translate all of those ideas into a working form of reality. Intellect has the upper hand. They rationalise their feelings: they need to be able to quantify them into thought structures that can be managed. But rationalising them doesn’t always work. Their feelings are sometimes so intense that they overwhelm entirely. Hysterics, numbing depression, anxiety going through the roof, anger anger anger RAGE – they are never quiet emotions and they eventually cannot be rationalised away. They’re war. There is a very deep-seated sense of frustration in many gifted young people because they cannot make the outside world understand where they are coming from. Often, they feel separate from children their age because these children function at a different developmental stage in both emotional and mental spectrums. (The actual peer group of gifted children is the group that lies slightly ahead of their own age: a four-year-old gifted child will get along quite well with a six-year-old, for instance.)

What we see on a professional level is that many gifted kids either adjust or act out. Many don’t make it through school altogether: they drop out as teenagers or face expulsion due to the problems they can exhibit in a classroom. Young children aged five and six were in the group of dropouts I guided back to regular education. I’ve had kids as young as four years old say things that fully classify as existential angst the way Dylan expresses it in his journal. For most, the need to understand their own existence surpasses anything and everything else. Many of the older kids I guided dealt with an all-consuming hunger for something they couldn’t identify. Very few of them lacked empathy outright, but all of them were able to comment along the lines of “voluntary extinction is the path humanity should follow” or could philosophise endlessly over the morals and ratio involved in committing a crime such as murder. Humanity as a whole fascinates as much as it repels and the questions along the lines of “why are we alive?” dictate a gifted mind’s direction entirely.

How does this relate back to Dylan? Well, you tell me.. how doesn’t it? He feels deeply and his world of inner emotion is one that is infinitely complex. He rationalises it in parts, certainly, and we know that many of those emotions never came out when he was around other people. He toys with philosophies, with symbols, with things that give life meaning.. He creates his own universe in the space of that journal. And he places the highest value on the mind: to him, thought is the most powerful thing that exists. Yet, he laments being separate from humanity. People around Dylan.. they can’t see things the way he does, not really. He is “the transceiver of the everything”, which reminds me of the time a six-year-old told me that he had downloaded the entire universe into his brain and it was speaking to him. (”Not the kind of speaking people experience when society says they’re crazy, miss, but rather the kind of speaking that is like the inner version of yourself making perfect sense of the things the outer version of yourself experiences.”)

Dylan’s homicidal ideation runs hand-in-hand with that sense of separation, as his thought patterns also helped create the suicidal ideation. To him, going NBK seemed like the most logical solution to his problem.. but also to the world’s problem. Leave a mark people can’t get around. Make society see that it needs to change. Make them see that they are diseased and need a cure. The cure isn’t murder, but murder is the largest symptom of the problem. But he didn’t quite want to wait around for that cure. Dylan was done with this toilet earth. He was just the messenger – up to humanity if they’d take it or leave it. There is a certain kind of enjoyment that sometimes comes from doing the impossible or morally reprehensible: for someone like Dylan, it would be liberating to cut free from society’s constraints and do as he saw fit. He became homicidal because it made the most sense and because he had reached his max on what he could handle from those stupid insipid zombies he was surrounded with.

Dylan is complex as hell. I doubt I did him full justice in these few paragraphs, but I hope that he makes a bit more sense now. (I wrote more on him here, which might be of interest as well?)

they had a hand signal for the suicide? that’s new to me, I’ve only started researching this case for a week but thanks for the well thought out answer :-) I def think the failure got to Eric way more than Dylan, I actually don’t think Dylan cared as much about the bombs & wiping out a whole school unlike Eric of course because Dylan’s homicidal thoughts were never really on a grand scale such as Eric. I don’t think it mattered to him as long as he finally reached the stage of getting to die

How cool that you’ve only just started out researching! ^^ I’m always happy to talk about the case and the boys, so you can hit my message box anytime if you feel like it. I hope it’ll be a rewarding experience for you to research it all in detail and such – it’s so worth it. =)

Yup, they’d determined a list of hand signals beforehand. You can find most of them in this post, including the “gun to head”-signal that was their sign for suicide.

I do think that the bombs were Eric’s baby and that he was more invested in them, but I wouldn’t quite discount Dylan’s willingness to wipe out as many people as possible. He is quoted from the basement tapes as having said “We’re hoping. We’re hoping. I hope we kill 250 of you. It will be the
most nerve-racking 15 minutes of my life, after the bombs are set and
we’re waiting to charge through the school. Seconds will be like hours. I
can’t wait. I’ll be shaking like a leaf.”.. which kinda does sound to me like he was enjoying the prospect of homicide.

What I believe is that Dylan didn’t allow himself to dwell on the homicidal feelings, because those would have made it more difficult for him to keep their plans under wraps. If he constantly lived and breathed his rage the way Eric did, people’d start to notice. He wasn’t as aware of his homicidal urges as he was of his suicidal ones, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist just as grand a scale. Here are some of my thoughts on that..

If theres 1 thing that rlly haunts me about columbine is the suicide bc I just cant wrap my head around what they said/how they got to that point like did e or d just decide right there”that’s it man I’m gonna shoot myself” and Eric just went ahead & did it, where Dylan followed after maybe realizing there was nothing else left to do? do u think they planned where & when they would do the suicide and what are your thoughts on how the suicide situation was approached bc it srsly mind fucks me

Join the club.. I believe it to be one of the most haunting aspects of Columbine, too. I am guessing that it would maybe be a little less confrontational if we didn’t have the suicide photos at our free disposal. No matter how often you see those, if you linger on them too long you’ll inevitably go down a rabbithole of some sort. It’s the kind of thing you can’t really shake any more than you can shake that 911 call audio once you’ve heard it.

I think that it ‘helps’ to see the event itself as an explosion-implosion situation. The attempted bombing, shooting all those people, creating chaos in their wake.. that’s the explosion part. But it’s like all that energy that went out into that had that boomerang quality to it that made it all flood back into them in the end. I think that both of them acutely felt that implosion and that it is part of the reason why they never attempted to make their way into classrooms or other places where people were hiding. They knew their big plans were a bust and, even though it’s likely they assumed they had killed more than they did, I can see the failure getting to them big time.

We know that they had a hand signal for suicide, which I could see them use in the moment. My impression of Eric and Dylan is that they were both on their own separate islands when they entered the library for the second and final time. I don’t think there was a lot of talking going on. It’s kind of like the suicides evolved naturally from their other actions that day: it was the most logical consequence. They both knew they weren’t going to walk out of there alive. Dylan was elated about it, as he’d been playing with the idea of suicide for a much longer time, and I feel like he was relieved that it was finally happening. Eric.. I think that Eric banked on suicide-by-cop initially, but had no qualms about taking his own life once the moment came because it gave him full agency over the way he went out.

I don’t think they planned a location until they got to it. I don’t even think they had an idea of when, really.. it just felt “done” to them in that moment, when they were pretty much walking around on their own in a place they hated. I think they realised that the cops and everybody else were staying outside the school and that it would take a long time for them to be able to have a proper standoff with law enforcement. It feels to me like they didn’t even really think it through or talk it over: it just felt like the end, so they made it the end.

I also have the impression that their suicides weren’t that far apart in time, either. I have always seen the moment as Eric pulling the trigger while Dylan was preoccupied with his belongings and the molotov cocktail. Dylan would’ve been aware of Eric’s death at least peripherally, but I don’t think he’d have dared to look at Eric outright. You know how they sometimes say that a person’s soul already starts detaching from their body before that person actually dies? I think that was the case for Dylan – he was aware of Eric’s death but he didn’t acutely feel it or linger on it. Dylan was completing his ritual that he had created for that final moment. Eric didn’t have a ritual and his decision to die was more split-second. Dylan contemplated his suicide and openly dreamed of it, while Eric tried very hard not to linger on it until he couldn’t escape it anymore.

Can you just see them walking over there? Those final moments.. so easy to envision, but so hard to describe..