78 pages • 2 hours read
Dave CullenColumbine
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
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How and Why the Attack Was Carried Out
Central to Cullen’s text are the recreation of the attack itself and the attempt to locate answers for the reason or reasons the attack occurred.
Chapter 8, “Maximum Human Density,” recounts the blueprint for the attack, as Harris and Klebold envisioned it. Chapter 10, “Judgment,” offers a minute-by-minute account of the movements and actions of Harris and Klebold in the moments directly preceding the attack. The following Chapter, “Female Down,” is the first to chronicle actual shootings. The perspective of the media and law enforcement officials is outlined in Chapter 12, “The Perimeter,” and Chapter 13, “1 Bleeding to Death,” contains further actions by law enforcement. Chapter 52, “Quiet,” offers a recreation of the attack that is at least in part from the perspective of Harris and Klebold themselves. Interspersed through the book are, also, recountings of victims of Harris and Klebold; of especial note is Chapter 16, “The Boy in the Window,” which contains Patrick Ireland’s exit from the school building via a library window.
Past these moments, Cullen focuses on how Harris and Klebold were able to obtain the firearms they used in the shooting and the method by which they learned to make bombs (Harris downloaded and printed off a copy of The Anarchists Cookbook, a by-now infamous text that details how to stage attacks and construct weaponry.)
In regard to why the attack was carried out, Cullen stops short of offering any definitive answer, though a large portion of the text comprising the book’s closing chapters is lent to the psychological profile of Harris, whom Cullen, via FBI Agent Dwayne Fuselier, presents as a clinical psychopath. This psychological assessment, coupled with Dylan Klebold’s perceived desire to take his own life in one way or another, would seem to be presented as the paramount answer to why the attacks were carried out.
Separate from this, Cullen notes that area clergy speak consistently of the presence of the Christian Satan as being present in the community. The area of Colorado where Columbine High School is located harbors a large Evangelical Christian community, and theological leaders, in the days and weeks after the attack, posit that the attacks occur at least in part due to the presence of evil associated with the Devil.
Perhaps as importantly as why the attacks occurred is Cullen’s disavowal of other possible motives or reasons for the attack. Among these are that Harris and Klebold directly targeted specific students and peer groups and that Harris and Klebold were part of a larger militant organization. Cullen gives ample space in his text to showing that these reasons were wrong.
Community Response to the Attack
Community response to the attack is documented in great detail in Columbine and through a large number of different, figurative lenses. Among these are law enforcement response, response by the Christian community, and response by family members of victims.
Law enforcement response to the Columbine attack came under great scrutiny in the days and weeks that followed the shooting, so much so that there was a paradigm shift on the part of law enforcement agencies in regard to how they go forward in handling such crimes. Cullen makes note in Chapter 12, “The Perimeter,” that law enforcement officials did not immediately enter the school and attempt to neutralize the shooters (either kill them or otherwise stop them from shooting), and instead set up a perimeter around the school, while they attempted to deduce the number and type of attackers they were dealing with. This runs counter to contemporary law enforcement response, which mandates that SWAT teams and/or other officers enter the location of the shooter or shooters as soon as possible, to neutralize the threat. This ideological shift is due at least in part to the events at Columbine.
Far more dubious in nature is local law enforcement’s response upon realizing that they had files on both Harris and Klebold and were aware of the content on Harris’s website. This awareness led to a police cover-up and all copies, both paper and electronic, of the report disappearing from law enforcement files and computers. Numerous lawsuits on the part of families of victims would result from this cover-up.
Regarding the response from church leaders and the Christian community, Cullen notes that area churches become central in the days after the attack. They provided environments that could handle the large numbers of community members seeking a place to be with others to collectively grieve and in this way offered respite to both the devout and the secular. Jefferson County was, and is, highly evangelical, and one of the most highly visible victims of the Columbine attack was Cassie Bernall, an Evangelical Christian. Cullen notes that while response by the religious community was largely selfless, there were exceptions, with components of said community seeing the attack as a means of adding numbers to their congregation.
Cullen further highlightsactions and reactions among members of the religious community. Among these are the crosses brought to Columbine by the Chicago carpenter and his subsequent nationwide tour (Chapter 34); Dylan Klebold’s funeral, which is presided over by Reverend Marxhausen, who is subsequently terminated from his position for doing so (Chapters 24 and 49), and the decision not to omit Cassie Bernall’s supposed last words before she was killed in the memoir of Cassie’s life penned by her mother, Misty (Chapter 38).
Cullen also includes the responses to the attack by numerous different family members of some of the Columbine victims. Most often, these responses take the form of lawsuits; Cullen also highlights the father of one victim who, following a protest at an NRA rally, joins an organization dedicated to getting safergunlaw legislation into Congress.
The Role of Media During and After the Attack
Here, “media” takes on two forms: the role of the press, and the role of media technology. In regard to the former, Cullen is highly critical of national press response to the Columbine attack, while consistently applauding one local news source, the Rocky Mountain News. His criticism of national press response extends from the copious amount of misinformation the press’s various institutions are able to spread in the hours, days, and weeks following the attack. Paramount among these is the falsehood that Harris and Klebold are part of a larger Goth gang that is determined to carry out retribution against other peer groups at the school due to perceived past wrongs. In the hours after the attack, reporters for cable news media will effectively put words in the mouths of traumatized students who had endured the attack, getting these students to concur that the shooting must have been carried out by the group the press conjured. The press will then take this figurative ball and run with it, putting together stories such as the 20/20 television piece that identified Goth subculture as hellbent on murder and killing, and hyper-violent.
Cullen describes the Columbine attack as “the first major [school shooting] of the cell phone age” (66), and media plays an important and wide-ranging role in both the attack itself and some of the events leading up to the attack. First, there is the fact that what most television viewers believed to be live coverage of the event was actually footage that had been delayed between thirty and sixty minutes at the behest of law enforcement agencies. This was due to the fact that it would have been possible, were the footage to be live, that Harris and Klebold could watch what was happening on the televisions inside the classroom.
The grainy surveillance footage of Harris and Klebold walking through the school cafeteria is likely memorable to anyone who has followed the attack on Columbine. The school’s only cameras were in the cafeteria; the world would have had more footage of Harris and Klebold were it not for a custodian failing to insert a VHS tape to record the daily events of the cafeteria in a timely manner. Nonetheless, the available images would be shown again and again in the days and weeks after the shooting, and can be seen, in retrospect, as foreshadowing for the continued school gun violence now endemic to American society.
There also the Basement Tapes (focused on more fully in the Symbols/Motifs section of this guide): the video recordings of Harris and Klebold made with a video camera checked out from Columbine High. Cullen offers in multiple places in his text that Harris was well aware that he would have an audience for his planned and impending massacre, and both Harris and Klebold seem eager actors in their home recordings.
