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LITTWIN: Columbine connection informs church killings

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 13, 2007 at 12:30 a.m.

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And so it turns out that the final tragic lesson of Columbine is that Columbine simply won't let us go.

Columbine doesn't just haunt us. It taunts us, too.

In the church killings, perhaps the least surprising moment came when we learned of the Columbine connection. It was, in a way, all we needed to know. Once we knew it, we knew who the killer was - without knowing his name, without needing to know his background, without having to know anything else about him.

We knew this: He was a disaffected young man (almost always a young male) who had access to guns (always to guns) and saw a revenge-filled path to fame. And if he stole innocent lives and broke a thousand hearts in the process, that, he figured, was someone else's problem.

The timeline is instructive. He killed Tiffany Johnson and Philip Crouse at the Youth With A Mission dorm in Arvada. He then went to a computer. He reportedly typed a post onto a Web site, using these words: "Christian America this is YOUR Columbine." It reminded us of the Virginia Tech killer, who killed once, then mailed his video manifesto in which he called the Columbine killers "martyrs," and then, finally, went to the classrooms and opened fire.

This is what Columbine has come to mean. It is the revenge fantasy made real. It is the fantasy played out. It is the knowledge, now somehow ingrained, that fantasy doesn't have to be fantasy anymore. You get a gun. You find a public place.

And now four are dead, many injured. Jeanne Assam emerges as a hero who stood up against the killer at New Life Church. But the killer, in the end, killed himself. Have we been cheated? And, if so, cheated of what?

I don't use the killer's name, although it's a little late for that. In any case, I doubt his name will be remembered except by those in the missionary school and in the church and by every person touched by the lives of the victims. For the rest of us, he will be one more disaffected young person who went, in the words of the Santana High School killer, to "pull a Columbine."

The concept has sadly expanded. It doesn't have to be a high school anymore. It can be Virginia Tech or Dawson College in Montreal. It can be a mall in Omaha.

When the Virginia Tech killer turned out to be a troubled misfit, one with mental health issues who had given off a long series of loud warning signals, it was entirely expected that he would have been influenced by Columbine. What else?

I haven't heard of a Columbine connection in Omaha. But before the killer went to the mall, where he killed eight, he wrote in a suicide note, "I'm a piece of s---, but I'm going to be famous now."

You won't remember his name. And you may not remember the name of the Virginia Tech killer. Columbine is different. Columbine is forever different.

I remember in the week after the massacre that there was much concern about glorifying the killers. But how do you deal with that twisted view of glory?

The media looked for heroes. It's what we do. We found Dave Sanders. At the New Life Church, Jeanne Assam stepped forward. We all want to believe that people are good and brave and that there are antidotes for evil.

The Assam story has taken on a strange life of its own. Some insist that the moral of the story is that guns prevent guns from killing people. After Columbine, we talked of gun control and gun shows. Those are old angles now that no one seems to want to hear anymore, as if that argument was settled.

But it can't be that the argument ends with the addition of more rent-a-cops. Any fair reading of the small minority of people who use guns violently shows that they are rarely deterred by other guns. And so we have the death of little Auralia Cisneros, killed in the crossfire of a gunfight. No heroes there.

The unavoidable issue this time is of copycats and the media's role. Obviously, as a reporter I don't believe in suppressing information. I'm pro-information, pro-informed decision-making, within reason and taste.

And yet, it's true that when the Arvada killer went to his computer, he wrote a screed quoting long passages from Eric Harris. He didn't get the words, we'll assume, from a yellowed copy of the Rocky. He got them, we'll assume, from a Web site citing Columbine. It's no trouble finding one.

These days, newspapers and TV stations don't have a lock on information. These days, a Web site would probably have its hands on the so-called basement tapes, the Columbine tapes made by the killers that have never been released.

There's an argument that the slow drip of information about Columbine helped make the killers seem somehow mysterious and knowing to a certain sub-culture. I don't know if I buy the argument.

But what does explain Columbine? It came at a time when we were still shocked by such carnage. It came at a time when this kind of senseless killing needed a name.

What's clear is how much our world has changed after Columbine. What we don't know - in one more lesson from Columbine - is how to find a way back.

Comments

  • December 13, 2007

    10:09 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Elwood writes:

    Instead of finding a way back, how about a way forward past this?

  • December 14, 2007

    9:50 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    ONEman writes:

    Man, you would think Columbine was the worst tragedy in U.S history.Yes we feel sorrow and loss, but this has happened long before Columbine and still here after. What is the connection that it happened to good, wholesome, all American, white bread people in the suburbs and that it was a disturbed and neglected kid. Well that's the case in most killings, theres no link to Columbine exclusively.Funny how when a kid gets killed in the inner city or who's last name is hispanic or happens to be black, or is white but lived in the projects.Well then it's not seen as such a tragedy to everyone. Because their life some how was not as precious, because the people from Littleton and Cherry Creek etc. are just more valuable human beings. As Elwood said move forward. Stop playing to always draw attention and sympathy.