When I was in fifth grade, my teacher told our class about Columbine. Holding up a copy of She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, she told us the story of how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had killed 13 people, because they had been bullied for years, and had finally snapped. The story really stuck with me. I had also been bullied, so even though I thought what they had done was evil, I couldn’t help but empathize with them. But the problem is, nothing I learned about Columbine that day was actually true.
It is true that they Harris and Klebold were bullied. In fact, bullying had been a widespread problem at Columbine High School. But the shooting was not about bullying. They were not seeking revenge or targeting any one particular group. Rather, they wanted to commit a terrorist attacked that rivaled the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Harris, according to the conclusions of an FBI psychologist, was a psychopath. He was incapable of feeling empathy for others, enjoyed manipulating people, and he fantasized about committing violent acts. He was also known to have an obsession with Nazism. Some students said he was an outcast, but the truth is that he was only an outcast to them. He had an active social life and it was easy for him to pick up girls. His closest friend was Klebold, who was severely depressed and felt rejected by society.
Columbine was not the result of Klebold and Harris just "snapping." Rather, it is believed that this had been a fantasy of Harris for years prior. There is even evidence of him attempting to share this fantasy to other students, and gauging their reactions as to whether or not they would participate. Klebold just happened to be the first person whose reaction Harris found satisfactory. Harris, in a sense, groomed him for the shooting.
Columbine is in the past now, but school shootings still happen in this country. In the wake of the most recent school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a larger conversation about gun control has been sparked. In response to this, many have brought up the issue of bullying. Some people have argued that Nikolas Cruz, the shooter, was a victim of bullying, and that if the students simply treated him with kindness, the shooting never would have happened.
But Cruz was by all accounts a dangerous individual. People who knew him said he enjoyed torturing animals, picked fights, and one neighbor even reported that she saw him peeking in her window. There was evidence that he was abusive to his ex-girlfriend, too. After she got a new boyfriend, Cruz sent violent and racist threats to him. He was part of a private Instagram chat, in which he used racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic slurs, and talked about his desire to kill minorities.
Despite this, people have rushed to portray him as a victim who snapped under the abuse of his classmates. In March, two blogs went as far as to actually run stories using an out-of-context quote by Emma Gonzalez, one of the survivors and a March For Our Lives activist, to make it appear that she was admitting to bullying Cruz. In reality, all she had said was that knowing that he was a violent individual, she and her classmates had no choice but to avoid him.
People, especially children, are not obligated to be kind to somebody who might hurt them. If somebody has shown themselves to be violent or hateful, it is nobody’s responsibility to make these people feel welcome or accepted. Mass shooters do not deserve sympathy. It is one thing to give them empathy, so we understand the circumstances that contributed to their actions. However, we do not owe them our sympathy.
I was bullied throughout elementary school and junior high. I came home crying because girls spread rumors about me, humiliated me in the locker room, and called me names. Boys participated, too. They dared each other to pretend like they had a crush on me, then would laugh in my face the moment I realized it was a joke. But despite all this, never once did I think about hurting my classmates.
The idea that bullying causes school shootings needs to end. School shootings are caused by dangerous individuals who, for varying reasons, want to hurt people. Many school shooters have been bullied, but so have the overwhelming majority of children in the United States, all who never go on to commit any kind of violent crime. Even if someone was bullied, no matter how badly, that does not excuse committing a school shooting. Bad things happen to people every day, and that is not their fault. But if they choose to cope with these things by hurting other people, then that makes them a bad person.
You can debate as much as you want how we can stop school shootings, whether it be through stricter gun control, arming teachers, putting metal detectors at entrances, whatever. But to act like school shootings are the result of kids being mean to each other, that is just being willfully ignorant. If anything would have prevented both the shootings at Columbine and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, it would not have been students befriending the shooters. It would have been a greater effort on the part of law enforcement and school officials to recognize the threat that the shooters posed.
If somebody truly wants to hurt someone, being kind will not change that. Some people do not respond to kindness. Some people are not capable of having empathy for other human beings. That’s just the way things are. The sooner we accept that, and stop blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators, then we can have a more productive conversation about school shootings.
