Boys with bombs

There was a great deal I did not understand about the Columbine Massacre until I read Columbine by David Cullen.

I didn't know that the teens who murdered their classmates that day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were not bullied misfits striking out against their persecutors. I didn't know that they did not, actually, target jocks, popular kids, or Christians. They were not part of a group called the Trenchcoat Mafia. They were not goth.

Most of all, I did not realize that the Columbine incident was never meant to be a school shooting at all. Had things gone according to plan -- the explicitly documented plan Harris left behind -- Columbine would have been a bombing, like Oklahoma City but worse: an act of American terrorism. The boys meant to bring that school down, with its thousands of students, teachers, and administrators inside.

This book is an incisive and detailed explanation of what really happened. Cullen explains who the boys were, and how they came to kill thirteen people that day. Not only that, Cullen tries to explain why the story has been told so wrongly in the years since. It dispels myths. It describes the blundering confusion of the press, and the appalling cover-up perpetrated by Jefferson County authorities afterward.

It is a frightening book to read, but one that brings light to one of the darkest days America has ever known.