The Opinion of Morgan Rowland
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are white supremacists. They are also the monsters who committed one of the most gruesome mass shootings in human history, Columbine. And them being white supremacist is DIRECTLY tied to why they committed the crime that they did. They idolized Hitler, wore red shoelaces-which in the punk subculture red is associated with fascism and Nazis-and even committed Columbine on what would’ve been Hitler’s 110th birthday, April 20th, 1999. But none of this is common knowledge, there are, in fact, many people who believe the lie that Klebold and Harris were just bullied, misguided youths who’d had it and snapped; this is untrue. They were extremist with plans to BLOW UP their school (plans that, thankfully, were thwarted as a result of their poor wiring of the device) who had been showing signs of white supremacist beliefs and an aptitude for violence for months leading up to the shooting.
They made a video about the new guns they bought for a class at school. They listened to German music, spoke German, and talked to anybody that they could about nazism and their fascist beliefs. These were two incredibly hateful individuals who were fully inducted into the online alt-right movement that first gained prevalence in the early 00s. To ignore how Klebold and Harris were influenced by the online media they consumed and how they are some of the most notable members of the alt-right pipeline is to leave out a crucial part of the story and speaks to a larger issue in how the media discussed them and other school shooters post-columbine. That being, that White Men are given excuses. They are constantly absolved for the blame of their crimes and painted as the victims. Even articles, like one from the Washington Post that mention the white supremacist motivations of the boys, don’t do this conversation justice, describing Klebold and Harris as “confused, angry young men drowning in a sea of lurid imagery and frightening violence.” This makes mention of the fact that two were white supremacist and that they were influenced and directly inspired by white supremacist imagery online but it paints them as helpless victims. As though they, and anyone else, can just fall down the alt-right pipeline, be radicalized, bullied by their peers and then commit an atrocity, but this is simply not the case.
Not everyone can be radicalized into committing atrocities of this nature and not everyone can be set off. There's a very specific combination of factors that cause this, the main one being white maleness. The overwhelming majority of school shooters in this country are white men and this isn’t a coincidence. This is a direct result of that fact that we live in a society that breed entitlement in certain groups of people and this entitlement when coupled with white supremacist radicalization creates the monsters that commit crimes like Columbine, like Parkland, like Morgan State, like the University of Michigan, and all the other mass shootings and mass casualty events people in my generation and millennials are constantly living through. This entitlement is what causes school shootings, not bullying.
The simple notion that bullying causes school shootings is simply preposterous. That is not to say that bullying can’t be a factor in school shootings but they are not the direct cause. If bullying truly caused school shooting then all the black kids, brown kids, disabled kids, neurodivergent kids, queer kids and all other marginalized children who are bullied, psychologically tormented on a daily basis, and physically assaulted by their peers would have the numbers skewed much heavier in their direction when it comes to who commits these crimes. But that’s not the case and to paint it as such is a cop out; a cop out that is incredibly prevalent in the media whether it be the news of these atrocities or materials we use to talk about school shootings.
A while ago I saw a PSA video about school shootings. It was a news broadcast taking place the day before a school shooting in which they talk about what is going to happen the next day and how these incidents can be avoided; in my opinion, it was questionable. Two specific scenes stick out to me, one of a child who is a friend of the person who will commit the shooting and the other of the bullies of the person who will commit the shooting. In the first scene the kid talks about how his friend talked about having a gun but that he isn’t going to say anything. This is questionable because it takes some of the blame off of the person who committed the shooting and put it on their peers. This is not to say that if a friend says they have a gun you shouldn’t tell anybody but to act as though that’s all it takes and it’s that easy is ridiculous. If you tell the school and they don’t do anything, then they haven’t done anything. If you tell them and they do something, like suspend the kid, that’s great but now what? If someone has murderous intentions I don’t think a suspension is gonna stop them and now a child has become a target and is also being in a way blamed for what happened. Again this is not to say if you see something don’t say something but context is important.
In regards to the clip of the bullies it’s the same point that I made before, bullying doesn’t cause school shootings and the idea it does is a racist lie meant to absolve people of responsibility for their crimes. This doesn’t mean I think you should bully people, or that I think bullying is okay but if you’re proudly a white supremacist and constantly say and do white supremacist things you should expect pushback, no? Not every mass shooter is a white supremacist and not every white supremacist is a mass shooter but these groups are directly connected and consistently have overlap and that overlap kills. If we want a proper end to gun violence, to school shootings, we need stricter gun control laws, politicians out of gun lobbyist pockets, and a complete overhaul of a society that breeds people who feel as though they have the right to take another person's life.
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