So, Everything I “Knew” was Wrong: a Review of Dave Cullen’s Columbine

I was a freshman in high school when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed their heinous crime against their peers at Columbine High School. An unpopular, often bullied teen girl,I didn’t relate to the two boys, but I did feel sad for them. So shunned and alienated that they felt they had no other option, they had resorted to the unthinkable...

So imagine my surprise when I found out that nearly everything I remember from the media coverage surrounding the shooting was wrong. The boys weren’t in the “Trench Coat Mafia.” They weren’t bullied (and in fact often bullied younger students and people from marginalized groups). They came from normal families with decent incomes and Eric even had a date for prom. In other words, after reading Columbine by Dave Cullen, it seems more like Eric and Dylan we’re bored suburbanites suffering from mild affluenza than the outcasts I have spent my life believing they were.

While the correction of the media portrayal of Dylan and Eric was by far the element that I was most interested in, that’s not the only revelation the book discusses. Cullen explores the impact of the shooting on local religious groups, the truth behind the alleged martyrdom of Cassie Bernal, and the personal effects: things like depression, the dissolution of marriages, and more.

Columbine shone an in-depth and vivid, yet respectful, light on what will always stand out to me as the very unfortunate beginning of something. While the massacre at Columbine was certainly not the first school shooting on America’s soil, it is the first I was aware of and the one that stunned me to my core. It was the one that made me wake up to the fact that bad things could happen at school. Now, twenty years later, school shootings get a day or two of media coverage and are largely forgotten. Columbine, as Dave Cullen tells his audience, was first page news in The New York Times every day for two weeks. 

While this book doesn’t have a blatant message, it definitely shows us how much our culture has changed as school shootings have become all too common. Constantly showing a new angle, yet easy to follow and understand, this book was a page turner from the opening. I would recommend this very strongly with the warning that it isn’t easy to read.

4.5/5