Get off my lawn

I'm 38 years old and I still post on a Columbine board ... so, WTF, right?

It keeps me young, I guess. I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard about NBK, on the day it happened. I remember how fascinated I was by the story of Eric and Dylan. I remember how pissed off I was when Dave Cullen came out with his book ten years later and started spreading his view of the massacre.

Some of the posters here who are in their late teens and early twenties might not realize how difficult it was to obtain information on mass shootings in the late '90s. Pretty much everything was filtered through the mass media. Even today most of what we know about the basement tapes comes from a few articles published in Time magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post, and Westword. The only reason the photos of Eric and Dylan's corpses are publicly available is because the National Enquirer published them a few years after the massacre.

The most frustrating thing about studying Columbine is that two key recordings have never been publicly released - the basement tapes and the 911 call. I believe that copies of the basement tapes still exist and I believe that Randy Brown had them at one point. I still hold out hope that we'll get to see them one day.

Eric and Dylan did not take full advantage of the technology of their era. They could have digitized the basement tapes and posted them online. Even in 1999 it was possible to watch full-length movies over the Internet - I did it myself. The video and audio quality of the highly-compressed files was generally appalling but it was better than nothing.

I used to think that, if I had the opportunity to see the tapes, I would gain some sudden new insight into Eric and Dylan that would finally unlock all of the secrets and make all my years of Columbine obsession seem worthwhile. I no longer believe that to be true. I would like to see the tapes but I don't think that watching them would alter my perspective all that much.

Despite the rapid advance of computer technology, it was not until 2019 that we got a full-length video recording of an entire massacre. For the first time we could see the shooter fire bullets into people's heads and watch them die. This was an epochal event in the history of mass-shooting research.

Think about the endless arguments we've had on this board and its predecessors about what *really* happened in that library. There will never be any such questions about the Tarrant massacre. It's all right there.

For years and years and years I wanted to know what it was like to watch people die at the hands of a mass shooter. On March 15, 2019, I finally got to find out. It was ... a little disappointing, to be honest. I guess I half-expected to receive some kind of sudden new insight into the meaning of life or something. But I didn't.

When I finished watching that video, I had no desire to know anything more about that massacre. I had seen enough. The whole thing seemed kind of sad and pointless.

I realized that, if a similar video had been released of the NBK massacre in 1999, I would have watched it, said, "Wow, that sucks for the people who got killed," and then moved on to something else.

It's the *mystery* that attracted me to Columbine - what *really* happened? why did they *really* do it? It is the *mystery* that keeps me here long after a saner person would have quit.

And it is the *mystery* that, ultimately, is kind of bullshit, because nobody really knows why anybody does anything. I watched Tarrant shoot and kill those people but I don't know why he did it. I "knew" Adam Lanza on the old board and I don't know why he killed all those five-year-old kids. I'm no closer to understanding Eric and Dylan's "real" motivations than I was on April 20, 1999.

Many people who choose to embark on an in-depth study of Columbine go through an initial phase of intense fascination, where they're almost desperate to unlock the mystery. They slog through all of the material - the 10K, the journals, the transcripts, everything - and chew it over. And then they shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, Eric and Dylan were just kind of fucked up, and we'll never really know why," and move on. That's what I've decided, more or less.

When the war in Ukraine began, I spent a few days staring at every image and video clip I could find. I think I saw more pictures of dead bodies in the first week of that conflict than I had in the previous 36 years of my earthly existence. I developed an overwhelming sense of the sheer futility of the conflict - of all conflicts. I didn't see any point to any of it. It just seemed like a total fucking waste. So I just kind of tuned it out.

When the current war between Hamas and Israel began, I waited about a week before tackling the Documenting Reality threads. And then I went through and spent a couple of hours looking at all of the pictures of dead bodies I could find. I saw a picture of a baby where one half looked normal and the other half looked like shredded hamburger. And, again, I developed an overwhelming sense of the sheer futility of the conflict - of all conflicts. I didn't see any point to any of it. It just seemed like a total fucking waste. So I just kind of tuned it out.

I'm kind of burned out on death at the moment. I'm burned out on life, too. So I post random shit online - just a little something to ease the boredom.

That, ultimately, is the sum total of my existence - the random shit I've posted online. That's kind of depressing, but whatever.

Yeah, i'm 39 and don't remember hearing about columbine when it happened. Probably cuz i'm in Australia and had just turned 15 beginning of April so had my own teenage shit going on. I doubt we will ever see the basement tapes but still there's a tiny part of me that holds out hope. What difference it would make is zero, it's just my curiousity. Being an introvert who only leaves the house if i need to i'm lost in my own little world pretty much. And yeah i watch gore vids and have seen the tarrant vid. Yeah it was bad but to me wasn't AS bad as i had read about. I wonder if we had this technology back when columbine happened, would they have live streamed it? We'd definitely have more than we do now. Same with 9/11. Those kids were talking about mailing the tapes to news stations so why didn't they do it.

And stay off my lawn

LPorter101 wrote:

I'm 38 years old and I still post on a Columbine board ... so, WTF, right?

It keeps me young, I guess. I remember where I was and what I was doing when I first heard about NBK, on the day it happened. I remember how fascinated I was by the story of Eric and Dylan. I remember how pissed off I was when Dave Cullen came out with his book ten years later and started spreading his view of the massacre.

Some of the posters here who are in their late teens and early twenties might not realize how difficult it was to obtain information on mass shootings in the late '90s. Pretty much everything was filtered through the mass media. Even today most of what we know about the basement tapes comes from a few articles published in Time magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Post, and Westword. The only reason the photos of Eric and Dylan's corpses are publicly available is because the National Enquirer published them a few years after the massacre.

The most frustrating thing about studying Columbine is that two key recordings have never been publicly released - the basement tapes and the 911 call. I believe that copies of the basement tapes still exist and I believe that Randy Brown had them at one point. I still hold out hope that we'll get to see them one day.

Eric and Dylan did not take full advantage of the technology of their era. They could have digitized the basement tapes and posted them online. Even in 1999 it was possible to watch full-length movies over the Internet - I did it myself. The video and audio quality of the highly-compressed files was generally appalling but it was better than nothing.

I used to think that, if I had the opportunity to see the tapes, I would gain some sudden new insight into Eric and Dylan that would finally unlock all of the secrets and make all my years of Columbine obsession seem worthwhile. I no longer believe that to be true. I would like to see the tapes but I don't think that watching them would alter my perspective all that much.

Despite the rapid advance of computer technology, it was not until 2019 that we got a full-length video recording of an entire massacre. For the first time we could see the shooter fire bullets into people's heads and watch them die. This was an epochal event in the history of mass-shooting research.

Think about the endless arguments we've had on this board and its predecessors about what *really* happened in that library. There will never be any such questions about the Tarrant massacre. It's all right there.

For years and years and years I wanted to know what it was like to watch people die at the hands of a mass shooter. On March 15, 2019, I finally got to find out. It was ... a little disappointing, to be honest. I guess I half-expected to receive some kind of sudden new insight into the meaning of life or something. But I didn't.

When I finished watching that video, I had no desire to know anything more about that massacre. I had seen enough. The whole thing seemed kind of sad and pointless.

I realized that, if a similar video had been released of the NBK massacre in 1999, I would have watched it, said, "Wow, that sucks for the people who got killed," and then moved on to something else.

It's the *mystery* that attracted me to Columbine - what *really* happened? why did they *really* do it? It is the *mystery* that keeps me here long after a saner person would have quit.

And it is the *mystery* that, ultimately, is kind of bullshit, because nobody really knows why anybody does anything. I watched Tarrant shoot and kill those people but I don't know why he did it. I "knew" Adam Lanza on the old board and I don't know why he killed all those five-year-old kids. I'm no closer to understanding Eric and Dylan's "real" motivations than I was on April 20, 1999.

Many people who choose to embark on an in-depth study of Columbine go through an initial phase of intense fascination, where they're almost desperate to unlock the mystery. They slog through all of the material - the 10K, the journals, the transcripts, everything - and chew it over. And then they shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, Eric and Dylan were just kind of fucked up, and we'll never really know why," and move on. That's what I've decided, more or less.

When the war in Ukraine began, I spent a few days staring at every image and video clip I could find. I think I saw more pictures of dead bodies in the first week of that conflict than I had in the previous 36 years of my earthly existence. I developed an overwhelming sense of the sheer futility of the conflict - of all conflicts. I didn't see any point to any of it. It just seemed like a total fucking waste. So I just kind of tuned it out.

When the current war between Hamas and Israel began, I waited about a week before tackling the Documenting Reality threads. And then I went through and spent a couple of hours looking at all of the pictures of dead bodies I could find. I saw a picture of a baby where one half looked normal and the other half looked like shredded hamburger. And, again, I developed an overwhelming sense of the sheer futility of the conflict - of all conflicts. I didn't see any point to any of it. It just seemed like a total fucking waste. So I just kind of tuned it out.

I'm kind of burned out on death at the moment. I'm burned out on life, too. So I post random shit online - just a little something to ease the boredom.

That, ultimately, is the sum total of my existence - the random shit I've posted online. That's kind of depressing, but whatever.

The feeling is mutual but more with the MO than the motive. And I speculate the tapes were more for their parents - if they wanted to be confused for victims, which seems to me more plausible with each passing day, then it makes sense the tapes were a "visual suicide note" to the parents.  And so perhaps with the obsolete format to communicate to your boomer parents.  I'm not so sure they could have done it digitally. But if you are right about that, it seems another reason in that version's favor. Same for "Those kids were talking about mailing the tapes to news stations so why didn't they do it."

Being confused for victims also explains "why did they return to the library" for which other interpretations seem the most tantalizing aspect to the worst copycats like Lanza, and so sometimes I feel like it's not futile.

I think I've gotten over the hump of "Well, Eric and Dylan were just kind of fucked up, and we'll never really know why" in a lot of respects. I at least have a working hypothesis it was revenge for the van break in arrest and playing vidya games IRL a lot more than it was just being kind of fucked up, or to get revenge on Rocky.  A bit burnt out on both life and death to write the book on the case, though I think I could do, including a truer version of the library massacre, with that final cafeteria bomb still active.

I often wonder if younger people researching the crime don't notice how hard it was to be online in 1999. That it seems to me they were video game nerds rather than the idea they were constantly researching online methods of weaponry.  Remember that in 1999, being online tied up the phone line, which your parents needed to use. "Being on the computer" and "being online" weren't synonyms like they are today.  A computer still had use off line. Video games in particular. Indeed DOOM with its port of 666 is one of the first games to be online at all.