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Cause and effect of columbine shooting
What was the general impact of the Columbine shooting
How columbine high school shooting effected us today
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Columbine is a non-fiction story written and spoken by author Dave Cullen based on the true events of the horrifying Columbine shooting that occurred on April 20th, 1999.
Two boys by the names of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris walked into Columbine High School around 11:19 A.M. with 99 home-made explosives, a 9mm carbine, a pump shotgun, and a double barrel shotgun. As well as being accompanied by four knives. Both managed to murder thirteen innocent people in total, twelve students and one teacher.
Dave Cullen includes descriptive language while providing accurate information based on research he has gathered in the past and to this day continues to study.
“There is a photograph. A blonde girl lets out a wail. Her head is thrown back… she became the image of columbine.” (Page 101)
This book was written by Dave Cullen published on April 6th, 2009. This story is a stated form of literature due to Dave Cullen directly stating in this story his reason for writing this book. Cullen was one of the first reporters to arrive to the site of this crime committed by Dylan and Eric, and since the day of this massacre Cullen had then spent ten years to publicize this very informative and crucial information for those who wanted the truth and nothing but the truth. I chose to read this book due to wanting to learn more information, and learn the hard facts and truth of this horrid massacre. I myself was in a similar situation, a school I had gone to had threats of being bombed and shot at, as well as students including myself being threatened to be harmed if they did specific actions or did nothing at all, and I was extremely adamant on learning more about what happened when things, such as the Columbine Highschool Massacre, do
Robert Hare. “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can,” he writes in a journal entry, just months before the attacks (Cullen 294). Eric had a major sadistic side to him and dreamt of destroying the human race entirely. He found himself to be superior to nearly everyone. Hare created a special screening test used for mainly juveniles that listed ten hallmarks of early psychopathy. Eric spoke about nine of the ten hallmarks on his website alone, some in grave detail. But Dylan, on the other hand, showed none of these traits, except possible persistent aggression. According to Dwayne Fuselier, the head profiler on the Columbine case, Dylan hardly seemed committed to the plan the boys had organized. His main goal was to kill himself, not other people. “.......Good god i HATE my life, i want to die really bad right now,” he writes in the end of a journal entry (174). This is one of several times he talks about suicide in his journal. Sometimes, his self-hatred strayed away from exclusively himself to other people. These were the times
"Columbine High School Shootings." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 08 Sept. 2015. Eighteen year old Eric Harris and seventeen year old Dylan Klebold were two boys with a fascination of violent video games and music. These young men were known to be “goth” and were bullied all throughout their high school careers because of their different interest. In 1999, on April 20th these boys went into their high school with mixed emotions and a devious plan to get revenge. The two teens went into the high school with handguns and killed both students and faculty members, before they turned the guns around on themselves. This is a reliable source because it informed us of both previous emotion, and the aftermath of the tragedy with detail about the boys, the school and the lives affected. This source was relevant for me because of how thoroughly it described the shooting, and gave me background information as to why and how it happened.
The Web. The Web. 08 May 2014. Pilkington, Ed. - "The 'Pilot'" "Sandy Hook Report – Shooter Adam Lanza Was Obsessed with Mass Murder."
April 20th, 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, experienced a mass shooting. Thirteen people were injured and more than twenty were injured. Twelve were students and one was a teacher. Two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire on their high school for forty one minutes before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. School shootings are notorious for making headline news but in 1999, school shooting were not as prevalent as they are in the present day. The media blew up on the catastrophe that was Columbine and many questions were raised, who were these kids and why did they do this? Speculation arose about why they did it. Maybe they were bullied for being goth and social outcasts or maybe they
and Dylan Klebold were two teenagers that walked into their high school and killed students while the students were in school. In all, thirteen people were killed by the murderers. The two boys were part of the Trench Coat Mafia that killed a dozen students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. Cassie Bernall and other students hid in the library of Co...
The columbine massacre the day where no one is safe in school or out of school. The columbine massacre is about two students named Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris both seniors 17 years old both two weeks before graduating they killed 12 students, one teacher, and 21 injured to their shooting on April 20, 1999. Both Dylan and Eric were some believe they were bullied by the sport teams in their school so they planned to kill the people who bullied them and other mostly anyone who gets in their way but that wasn’t really why the FBI he said that there target was everyone no one in pacify we will not get in to more details now. Dylan and Eric were both intelligent boys with solid parents and a good home and both had brothers younger than them. They played soccer, baseball, and both enjoyed to work on computers. Both boys were thinking on commit suicide on 1997 but instead started to plan a massacre in 1998 a year before it happened. Then the two boys had got into some trouble for breaking into a van on January 30, 1998 trying to steal some fuses and wires for bombs for them to make, but they got caught in trouble. So the court put them in a program called the juvenile diversion program, but even if they were there they were still planning the massacre and the court also put Eric in some angry management classes and people believe it worked but it didn’t he just did it to look like it work and both boys made it look like they were really sorry but they weren’t. Dylan and Eric both really hated everyone in their school and the court as well after they got caught breaking in to that van that’s when they really started to plan the massacre more and that’s when Harris started he’s journals no one really knows way but they didn’t hate a hand...
One of the most obvious characteristic of a school shooter would be parental neglect. This neglect was evident in both the Columbine shooters as well as fictional character, Peter Houghton. If Dylan and Eric’s parents took interest in their sons, they would have recognized the boys’ obvious dysfunctional thinking. Written on the front of Harris’s journal was, “I hate the fucking world.” (Rosenburg). He continued to write that he hates racists, martial arts experts, and people who brag about their cars. Through out the following pages, he continued to state what else he hates, including Star Wars fans, people who mispronounce words, and other ridiculous things. If parents believed that their sons were normal, the boy’s yearbook should have definitely raised a red flag. In 1988, the boys wrote about killing and retaliation, and even drew a picture of a person holding a gun with dead bodies surrounding them. A caption stated, “The only reason you’re still alive is because someone has decided to let you live.” Videotapes as well as guns and bombs were also in the boys’ rooms. Harris also made a w...
There is no single factor that caused the outburst of violence on 20th April 1999, in Littleton, Colorado. Blaming a single factor as the cause of the Columbine High School massacre is as ludicrous as a nation blaming an economic crisis on one person alone. There were many contributing factors that led to this massacre, and with that, an array of warning signs, all of which were ignored by most people.
Crime manifests itself in various ways in society and oftentimes difficult to pinpoint what drives people to commit certain actions. The Columbine shooting was a particular incident that ended in tears and suffering which resulted in numerous research as to what was going through the minds of these young individuals at the time of the shooting. Therefore, this paper will analyze specifically the role of differential association- reinforcement as altered by Akers in propelling Dylan Klebold to commit such heinous act, while also giving credit to Edwin Sutherland for first formulating the framework of differential association.
On April 20 1999, in a small town of Littleton, Colorado, two high-school seniors, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris dressed in trench coats began shooting outside of columbine high school. The two boys then moved inside the school and gunned down many students in the library. Upon investigation it was found that the two boys arrived in two separate cars. At first they went into the school with two duffle bags filled with bombs set to the time 11:17, placed these bags in the cafeteria aiming to kill hundreds of students and faculty. They set these bags in the cafeteria without anyone noticing and came out to their cars to watch. When the bombs failed to detonate Dylan and Harris went on a shooting spree.
Eric and Dylan’s plan was not original. They had inspiration from the Waco and the Oklahoma City shootings. They wanted to be bigger and better than both of those, not caring how many people they killed. Their plan was called “Judgment Day” that would have the school excited with explosions (Cullen 33). Eric had made homemade bombs using, “standard propane tanks, the fat, white ones, eighteen inches tall, a foot in diameter, packing some twenty pounds of highly explosive gas” (Cullen 33). These bombs were going to kill many people, and Eric was excited. Next, they came up with a bomb tha...
15 people were killed, including the two shooters, while 24 were injured. The shooters in this massacre were two boys who attended the school, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and were believed to be motivated by bullies, but that was never proven. The pair of teens originally took two propane bombs into the school that were rigged to explode. Once the bombs failed to detonate they began shooting people. Violent video games and bullying were the two leading suspicions for the reasons of shooting. Harris and Klebold were also both suspected of being in a cult that told them to do shoot the
No one can really give a definite answer for why school shootings actually occur. We look for clues and patterns to help to look inside the mind of those who do go into schools to kill others. First let us look at the Columbine shooting. The two reasons that were most believed in why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed thirteen students and their own were because they were bullied and wanted to get back at the guys who hurt them throughout high school. The other reason was we would never know. It was just a freak thing that could not be explained. The two killers wanted to be legends. They wanted to cause the most deaths in American History. They did wire the bomb properly so they were not able to kill as many people as they had planned. The bomb in the cafeteria would have killed at least six hundred people. The survivors were supposed...
Seventeen years ago on April 20th, Dylan Klebold said a hasty goodbye to his mother and left for school earlier than normal. His mother, Sue Klebold, who believed that he had rushed out the door because he was in a hurry to pick up a classmate, was unaware that would be the last time she ever spoke to him. Eventually, at 11:19 am, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire, murdering thirteen people at Columbine High School in suburban Denver. In a CBS News article, Sue Klebold later revealed that: “[F]rom the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart. I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind.”
As the reader gets further into the novel, more of the planning behind such an attack is revealed and the missing pieces to the puzzle are placed meticulously. Background knowledge of Eric and Dylan as they go through their daily life routines from their early morning wake ups to their lunch breaks, all the way to their end of the day jobs and leisure activities are given allowing the reader to better understand the situation and all aspects leading up to it as well. A full and unbiased scope of their lives provide a well rounded story with no loose ends. A novel being unbiased is the most important aspect of any historical piece of nonfiction. This is because if a story is biased, the facts can not be trusted due to the possibility that they may be tainted or twisted in any way. Dave Cullen’s outside point of view allow for an incredibly accurate account of the events that followed that school