“Columbine”: The tragedy that has become a symbol of school shooting
Dmitry Kurkin
The massacre, organized by two teenagers in the school "Columbine"in April 1999, it was far from the first outbreak of violence in educational institutions (they have been counting in the USA since at least 1840). And nevertheless, it was she who became a pop-cultural phenomenon, references to which repeatedly emerge when investigating similar incidents.
The word "Columbine" for nineteen years has become almost the official synonym for the massacre of classmates and / or teachers. The recent armed attack in the Perm school was almost immediately dubbed "Perm Columbine", as soon as it turned out that one of the attackers was keenly interested in the history of the Columbine assassins Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The case at the Ivanteevskaya school, where a high school student, on the Web who called himself Mike Klibold, injured a teacher, became "Columbine in Ivanteevka." The attack in the school of Ulan-Ude is not yet connected with the events of nineteen years ago, but by inertia it was also called the “Buryat Columbine”. Russian media have already picked up the label and it seems they are not going to refuse it.
Despite the fact that the initial plan of Harris and Klibold, by and large, failed (otherwise there could have been many more victims), their followers from among the so-called columbiners are trying to stage their actions over and over again, trying to imitate them in everything, including choosing clothes. We understand how it turned out that two murderers found a romantic aura of people who "avenged all those who were hunted at school" and whether it is possible to fight columbainers as a destructive subculture.
Blame Video Games
The tragedy at Columbine plunged America into shock: researchers note that the school massacre even pushed the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City (at that time, the largest in US history) out of mass consciousness, the second anniversary of which Harris and Klibold initially chose during the day to attack.
Trying to assign the perpetrators, the public dumped responsibility on industrial metal and Marilyn Manson (who by 1999 had finally become an All-American bogeyman), the film “Natural Born Killers” (which, strictly speaking, ridicules the media cult “Bonnie and Clyde”) and “violent video games promoting violence "(note that the realism of video games at that time was relatively low). When it became known that the psychiatrist, who had observed Harris, prescribed the medicine for him, some suspected that the refusal of the antidepressant could have caused an outbreak of aggression in the adolescent, but the version was not confirmed: an autopsy revealed that Eric continued to take it.
Much more prosaic reasons - the bitterness of two teenagers, one of whom (Harris) complained of depression, anger and thoughts of suicide, and the second (Klebold) was harassed by classmates - became apparent after a year: after conducting a study of similar incidents, they found out two thirds of them were related to bullying.
However, such an explanation did not give the average man a switchman, on whom responsibility for the tragedy could be hanged, nor a simple answer to the question of how to prevent school shootings in the future. As a result, the legend of "Columbine", warmed up by the media and mothballed by the Internet, began to live its own life. Columbineers appeared.
Cult of Dylan Klebold
Only three years passed before Columbine, from provocative tabloid headlines, grew to an ominous pop cultural phenomenon that put Harris and Klebold on a par with serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. The tragedy formed the basis of "The Elephant" by Gus Van Sant and the less well-known "Zero Day" by Ben Cocho - both tapes were released in 2003 and became a kind of artistic reconstructions of "Columbine". The documentary film "Bowling for Columbine," in which director Michael Moore focuses on the arms lobby, supporting the free sale of firearms in the United States, won the Academy Award. Direct references or indirect references to the mass execution, arranged by two teenagers, became commonplace in the lyrics. "Columbine" became part of the urban folklore.
The author of Generation X, Douglas Copeland, worried that in the history of Columbine, the murderers get much more attention than the victims wrote the novel Hey, Nostradamus! The heroes of which are the survivors of the school massacre or who have lost their loved ones as a result trying to cope with PTSD. However, this attempt to shift the focus did little to clarify the story: its main characters in popular culture still remain two teenagers who took up arms.
The core of columbineers who romanticize the crimes of Harris and Klebold are teenagers who were hunted down by classmates or suffer from lack of attention. Remarkably, thematic communities focused primarily on the Klebold figure. “[They] admire Dylan, the tragic depressive boy, the girls are simply in love with him,” said journalist Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, drawing attention to the discrepancy between the network myth and the nuances of real history. “Although Eric was the leader in Columbine , and he should have been more attractive, but the cult of Dylan is much bigger than the cult of Eric. Girls fall in love with him just as adult women fall in love with drug addicts or alcoholics - believing that they will save his lost and suffering soul. "
Cullen notes that columbainers are most often driven by a desire to shock peers and research interest: “I’m sure that for most it’s a posture: when a teenager isn’t particularly successful in real life, he sees a way out of constructing a hard personality on the Web. but at the same time they believe that the rest of them say it all seriously ... It becomes terrible when you realize that in 0.01% of such cases there may be a conditional Adam Lansa (Teenager who committed a massacre at Sandy Hook School in 2012. - Ed.)which is really serious in his words. After all, he discussed with his peers "Columbine" - they answered him with an interest, which he regarded as support. "
It is still not difficult to find the killer diaries and videos from school surveillance cameras that show what Klibold and Harris were wearing and how the Klebold and Harris behaved on the day of the massacre. New incidents in Russian schools once again fueled interest in history: it is argued that users have become five times more likely to use the hashtag #columbine.
Concerned public figures have already called on the Prosecutor General’s Office to recognize as extremist "any mention" of "Columbine", but this proposal does not seem to be effective in essence, or to be implemented in practice (see "The Streisand Effect"). In the coming months, the communities of columbaineers will most likely be cleared out in social networks - VKontakte has already begun to delete the corresponding publics, but there is no doubt that they will “win over” in the dip-web and return to public access.
"Top 10 Bloody Crimes"
“Columbine,” perhaps because of this, has become a household name, having asked several painful questions at once, concerning both the psychological climate in schools and modern ethics. How responsible are the media (in the widest sense of the word) for the "glamorization" of massacres and is it right to restrict access to information about them? How to talk about especially cruel, far reaching over the edge of everyday crimes, without falling into cheap sensationalism and savoring someone else's grief? Can we assume that the collections of the “bloodiest massacres” are pushing angry and psychologically unstable people to try to get into the “top-10”? And is it possible to prevent the emergence of new columbines, "banning the Internet"?
Photo:Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3)