• If you would like to get your account Verified, read this thread
  • The TMF is sponsored by Clips4sale - By supporting them, you're supporting us.
  • Reminder - We have a ZERO TOLERANCE policy regarding content involving minors, regardless of intent. Any content containing minors will result in an immediate ban. If you see any such content, please report it using the "report" button on the bottom left of the post.
  • >>> If you cannot get into your account email me at [email protected] <<<
    Don't forget to include your username

columbine

jk666uk

Guest
Joined
Jan 30, 2002
Messages
1,171
Points
0
columbine school shooting 5 years today
what is everyone views on it
why i ask? because it was in a UK news paper
 
jk666uk, look above at the thread 4/20 and the NRA. It's about Columbine.

Here's an interesting article about the killer's psychology.
[http://slate.msn.com/id/2099203/]

Three months after the massacre, the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Va., that included world-renowned mental health experts, including Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI's lead Columbine investigator and a clinical psychologist. Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions publicly here for the first time.

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. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as "collateral damage."

They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary.

It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

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. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems.

Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as "nice." But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. "Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people," Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.

In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis.

"Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by Slate for this story*.)

"Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.

Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened his private journal with the sentence, "I hate the f---ing world." And when the media studied Harris, they focused on his hatred—hatred that supposedly led him to revenge. It's easy to get lost in the hate, which screamed out relentlessly from Harris' Web site:

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? Cuuuuuuuuhntryyyyyyyyyy music!!! . . .

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who say that wrestling is real!! . . .

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who use the same word over and over again! . . . Read a f---in book or two, increase your vo-cab-u-lary f*ck*ng idiots."

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STUPID PEOPLE!!! Why must so many people be so stupid!!? . . . YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? When people mispronounce words! and they dont even know it to, like acrosT, or eXspreso, pacific (specific), or 2 pAck. learn to speak correctly you morons.

YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STAR WARS FANS!!! GET A FaaaaaaRIGIN LIFE YOU BORING GEEEEEKS!

It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.

He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about demeaning other people," says Hare.

A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris' perpetual deceitfulness. "I lie a lot," Eric wrote to his journal. "Almost constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the water. Let's see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking. For doing it, not for getting caught. No I haven't been making more bombs. No I wouldn't do that. And countless other ones."

Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. "Duping delight"—psychologist Paul Ekman's term—represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile.

Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or empathy—another distinctive quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris' response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris had avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a "diversion program" that involved counseling and community service. Both killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had relished the opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier remembers that it was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you.

"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: 'Isn't America supposed to be the land of the free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid f---ing dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his f---ing van out in plain sight and in the middle of f---ing nowhere on a Frif---ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F---er should be shot.' "

Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath.

It begins to explain Harris' unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)

None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.

"Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling," Hare writes. "For example, they can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."

The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership. Despite earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and driving force. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually psychopathic killers crave the stimulation of violence. That is why they are often serial killers—murdering regularly to feed their addiction. But Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he and Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers complemented each other. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when he got hot-tempered. At the same time, Klebold's fits of rage served as the stimulation Harris needed.

The psychiatrists can't help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris. He might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life.

Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.
 
A few questions...

Harris does sound very much like a psychopath (or sociopath in some terms), but I wonder.... Didn't Harris kill himself after the shooting, just like Klebold did? I mean, it makes sense why Klebold did it; he probably felt unbearably guilty for what he had done. On the other hand, it would have made far more sense for Harris to stick around and enjoy the limelight....

As far as Harris is concerned, I think he demonstrates the danger of psychopaths (sociopaths) to society. It may sound a little psychopathic to suggest this, but perhaps, it would do the world a lot of good to be able to identify all of the psychopaths throughout the world and then execute them to protect the rest of humanity. Hopefully, research is being done to identify the genetic factors responsible for this disorder. If we can successfully determine genetic markers relating to psychopathy, then we could opt for sterilizing people that carry such genetic markers. Granted, I know that sounds fascist, but still....
 
Re: A few questions...

MrMacphisto said:
Harris does sound very much like a psychopath (or sociopath in some terms), but I wonder.... Didn't Harris kill himself after the shooting, just like Klebold did?
Maybe Eric Harris wanted to go out "in a blaze of glory", or maybe he was afraid of prison.

The saddest thing to me about this article is that, had Dylan Klebold been noticed by someone who could help him, he could have gone on to live a normal life.

~Rose~
 
*sigh* the usual problem

As someone who is an educator in training, I know that this is something we're learning to deal with, spotting the "at risk " child, even @ the tender age of kids I work with( 6 and 7 yr olds). Sadly this is so often easier said than done, as most teachers have way too many kids in their class to be able to pay all tha much attention to the needs of one slightly "odd" child.. And the sad part is if the kid is not a behavioral problem ect, jsut " shy or introverted" soemtimes it takes longer to spot.

Obviously in a school district like Columbine, overcrowded calsses wasen';t a problem, but it is tragic that not one person in the lives of these kids( Harris Especially) couldn;t have noticed the signs and DONE something.


Tho this DOES defiantely open up the whole "nature vs Nuture" debate afresh.




*sigh* My heart goes out to all who lost a child on this tragic and black day.


Ghostie
 
Ghost2004 said:
*sigh* My heart goes out to all who lost a child on this tragic and black day.
Ghostie
Thanks, Ghostie. All of us in this community were affected; but I can hardly bear to imagine the pain of losing one's child.

As far as preventing it goes - I don't know if anything could have been done since Eric Harris was so good at "presenting" as a normal nice guy. You know that's what successful sociopaths are so good at.

Apparently his father also normalized Eric's interest in bombs & guns, and helped to deflect any investigations into his son's activities.

It might have been helpful if Dylan Klebold had been treated for the depression & rage that drew him to violence. But there were so many factors that combined to make him snap. Lots of kids struggle with these feelings and DON'T go on to commit murder.

Button
 
Excellent article, ticklebutton! Thanks!

An ironic sidenote: The Special Agent who investigated Columbine carries the name "Fuselier". That's a French word, meaning "shooter"!
 
omg another ironic coincidence.

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

And, yer right, Button an Ghost. We can never know what might have changed the ending.

~Rose~
 
He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.


Yep! We already had one of these already to contend with. A man named Adolf Hitler.
 
Yeah, Knox, but unfortunately Hitler wasn't that brilliant. Killers who are thinkers are 10x more deadly
 
And, Hitler pretty much thought it all out beforehand. Something called 'Mein Kampf'. You can get it at Borders, or you can take it out of the library.
 
His plan for conquest and resettlement of eastern frontiers:
The Russia as the world had known it was not only to be blotted off of the earth, but the sheer memory of it would be erased as well. All cities would be razed to the ground. The indigenous Slavic races would be reduced to slavery, worked and eventually starved to death, until no memory of them could possibly be detected. All of that territory to the east would be living room for the growing German empire.
No, Natural, not just one race. All races who didn't measure up to his standard. Trust me on this one, Natural...the guy was for real.
 
You're right, Knox, and who knows how much damage he could have if we never entered the war.... He just might have succeeded in world conquest:sowrong:
 
What's New
3/5/26
Visit Clips4Sale for the webs largest selection of tickling clips in one location!

Door 44
Live Camgirls!
Live Camgirls
Streaming Videos
Pic of the Week
Pic of the Week
Congratulations to
*** Anyone/M Lee ***
The winner of our weekly Trivia, held every Sunday night at 11PM EST in our Chat Room
Top