10-year 'milestone' for Columbine shooting survivors

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: USA Today

Kristi Mohrbacher will stand with friends Monday afternoon at the Columbine Memorial to remember the day 10 years ago when her high school changed forever.
"Ten years, it feels like a milestone," says Mohrbacher, 26. She was a 16-year-old junior at Columbine High School outside Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, when seniors Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, tore through the suburban school, killing 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. Mohrbacher escaped uninjured.

"I feel almost pulled there to see how everyone is doing and where everyone is," she says. "A lot of people have made their peace with it, but it doesn't mean they're forgetting it."

Tributes began Sunday evening with a candlelight vigil at the native Colorado stone monument in neighboring Clement Park, where the community left impromptu memorials in the days after the shooting. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter ordered flags to fly at half-staff Monday. A formal commemoration begins at 5 p.m.Monday at the Clement Park Amphitheater.

"We cannot allow the lessons of this tragedy to fade with the passage of time," Ritter said in the statement.



Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-04-19-columbine_N.htm

[bluestateguy]

1. The parents of those two killers belong in jail

Such parental negligence should have criminal consequences.

[Odin2005]

2. What about all the bullies that caused those two to snap in the first place?

[bluestateguy]

3. There is a lot of evidence now to suggest that they were not bullied very much at all

that in fact, they did a fair amount of bullying themselves. Normally, yes, I do favor harsh punishments for school bullies, but the evidence in this case does not add up.

[canetoad]

4. What Harris and Klebold did

could be considered the ultimate in bullying behaviour.

[Jkid]

10. Then why there was some reports

...that they were harassed because they wore goth clothing?

But the bullying aspect has been, IMO, woefully under reported.

[mitchum]

12. Because of ..."truthiness"...

rather than the truth

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. There's a new book - 'Columbine' by (I think) Jeff Cullen

which addresses a lot of the myths that sprang up - mostly as a result of shoddy reporting and incompetent investigation into it. When you have people blaming bullies, video games, 'The Matrix' and gawd knows whatall you are going to get a lot of bad information crystalizing into "fact".

Haven't read it yet, myself, but it sound like it's got a good handle on it.

[RamboLiberal]

13. I'm just about finished with the Dave Cullen book

He was a local Denver reporter and continued to dig into and follow the case all these years. Much of what the media reported was myth.

Journalist and author Dave Cullen was one of the first to take on what he calls the myths of Columbine. He kept at it for a decade, challenging what the media and law enforcement officials reported.

"Kids had never been attacked in this kind of way until Columbine," he recently told CNN. "I just had to find out what happened to those kids." See if you know what really happened at Columbine »

Cullen's book,"Columbine," was released this month -- just in time for today's 10th anniversary of the shooting at the Colorado high school. While tackling popular misconceptions, Cullen also gives a riveting account of what happened that day and how the survivors view the event that marked their lives forever.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren't part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren't bullied by other students and that they didn't target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn't their initial intent, he said. They wanted to bomb their school in an attack they hoped would make them more infamous than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

-----

The two killers were far from normal teens. Harris was a psychopath and Klebold battled depression, according to psychologists cited in the book. Even so, they also weren't the extreme social outcasts and loners depicted in the early days of media coverage.

Records released later by the Jefferson County Sheriff's office showed that Harris and Klebold had their own circle of friends. Klebold took a date to the prom, riding with a dozen friends in a limo, just days before the shooting.


http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/20/columbine.myths/index.html

[mitchum]

11. One of the many myths fanned by the alarmists who jumped all over the story

[Endangered Specie]

5. So does the bitch that sold them the weapons illegally.

Why is it we cannot enforce our existing guns laws and punish people who straw purchase guns for soon to be mass murderers?

[bluestateguy]

6. All for enforcing existing gun laws

That's what we should be doing.

[ManiacJoe]

15. In this case both the buyer and seller did go to jail.

They each got eight month sentences, IIRC, according to my local papers.

[DinahMoeHum]

7. IIRC, Eric and Dylan each had older brothers who are doing fine

and are upstanding citizens.

If their parents were so lousy, how come their older sons are doing OK?? No police blotters on THEM, as far as the general public knows.

[Midlodemocrat]

9. +1. How could your child amass an arsenal like that without your knowledge?

[raccoon]

14. Either (1) they had their heads up their arses, or (2) lawyers told them to say that. nt

[Xithras]

16. Do you regularly search your entire home looking for illicit weaponry?

I could think of a dozen places in my home where my kids could hide things, that I only access once every year or two. Anyone who thinks "My kids couldn't hide that from me" is guilty of the same kind of thinking that the Columbine shooters parents enjoyed. It's denial, pure and simple.

Teens generally have all of the intelligence of an adult, with a bunch of hormonal emotionalism, inexperience, and immaturity that we generally don't. If you could hide something in your home from your teen children, they can probably do the same to you.