The 14th Anniversary of Columbine

is today. In light of our recent struggles with what it means for our country, our society, and our citizens with the violence we face, this older story exemplified for me what needs to be focused upon to truly get to the root causes and provide solutions...not because it is necessarily entirely correct, but because it explains well the mental health problems some individuals suffer and how destructive they can be when not properly identified and addressed. It's 3 pages long, but well worth the read.

The Depressive and the Psychopath
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
By Dave Cullen|Posted Tuesday, April 20, 2004

Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it.

But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more troubling than our misguided conclusions.

The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—<snip>—and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can't understand why they did it until we understand what they were doing.

School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life.

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. ...Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." ...the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand "the killers," quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions.

Sound familiar? As we learn more in the coming days and months of the two suspects in the Boston bombing, we must remember that they are two vastly different individuals, and hope that investigators do not settle for the low-hanging, easy explanations both of those accused perpetrators and of the choice of venue, but dig deeper for meaning and motive, for only then can we truly comprehend what kicks someone over that line of thinking/planning to doing.

www.facebook.com/pages/Remembering-Columbine/185100148307218
www.facebook.com/ThePEACEChallenge

This was an incredible story, thanks to the I Love U Guys Foundation for sharing it on their Facebook Page . I highly recommend making time to watch all 6 clips, break it up if you have to (it's about 40 minutes total). Dateline NBC followed one of the survivors of Columbine as he visited other sites of school shootings as the 15th anniversary of Columbine approached. He was looking for answers for how others have coped with the lingering emotional trauma, to form connections, and to help benefit others who continue to suffer as he and his fellow classmates have.

I was so touched to learn of the Dream Catcher that was paid forward to Sandy Hook from Red Lakes in Minnesota, which had received it from people at Columbine after their incident.

Columbine: 15 Years Later. 'The Road Home'
April 21, 2014

Sam Granillo survived the 1999 shooting at Columbine as a 17-year-old junior. As the 15 year anniversary approached, Sam to embark on a 10 day journey, visiting the sites of other school shootings and meeting with survivors in an effort to find tools for healing.