It looks like someone wrote an article about us.

Check it out. A lot of you were quoted in this article.

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“I sought out the forum firstly to see if there was anyone else out there who was as 'obsessed' with Columbine as I found myself to be,” says a 32-year-old from England who regulars the forum as ‘Silmo.’ “I'd read all the books available on the subject and found inaccuracies in some of them having gone through the 11,000-page police report. I wanted to speak to others who knew a lot about the topic and check if they agreed with my thoughts that some of the so-called experts who had written these books were actually wide of the mark.”

Silmo’s primary target is the aforementioned Cullen, a journalist who covered Columbine firsthand and who Silmo believes paints an inauthentic portrayal of the tragedy’s causes.

“There are people who call themselves 'Eric and Dylan fans.' These people disgust me,” says Silmo. “It tends to be younger girls who fall into this category. There are some older people who seem to prefer to claim to have sympathy for Eric and Dylan rather than claim to be fans.”

“There isn't much left to analyse really that hasn't been done already” says Silmo. “There's the basement tapes, which most researchers would like to see for themselves, but that's not gonna happen anytime soon. I think it's all down to the fact that we'll likely never have all the answers we seek. There always seems to be a little bit of evidence or information that comes to light.”

Who is Silmo?

Quote :

The forum prefers the alternative narrative that Klebold and Harris were depressed social outcasts constantly bullied by an elite varsity class. It’s the same plot that surfaced in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and it generally paints the killers as hosting a more sympathetic rage.

sororityalpha wrote:

Who is Silmo?

I tend to think it's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. He's the only one I can think of that is 32 years old, from England, who is obsessed with Columbine, who is a regular on the forum and despises fans.

What is going onnnnn

Oh hey it is written by Luke Winkie. Wasn't he on the forum telling us that he's gonna write an article etc etc? What's his account on here again?

There we go.

Wow. I am not sure on that article. It was written in such a way that it almost made fun of the community. I am not a fan of that.

At least it makes this site look better than the tumblr community.

I feel like his article IS trying to put us almost at the same level of the tumblr community. He makes us sound like we are infact fans of Eric and Dylan but we just disguise it with knowledge and research or like he stated, we empathise with them.

Which by the way, I see nothing wrong of it. Who says you can't empathise with something while knowing it's also not a good thing.

*Correction, actually what I pointed out was quoted by a member of this forum and not what Luke wrote himself.

It seems quite condescending and over-generalized.

I know there's a lot to read through here (but as a journalist, you should be reading and researching EVERYTHING before you come to a final conclusion), but it appears he read nothing aside from the following:

-a few stickied posts

-a few of the more "popular" posts questioning Cullen's book

and aside from that, the responses from people who agreed to be "interviewed" by him.

And while it's good that Cullen FINALLY retracted the Brenda Parker nonsense in the latest revision of his book, he decided to do this in 2016. We're only in the first weeks of 2017, so, for 7 years people have been reading the original print with all of that nonsense, and there were PLENTY of reasons to question, debate, and discuss it.

Columbine is still discussed and mentioned to this day in plenty of other "places" aside from this forum, albeit briefly in most cases.

lol

>And while it's good that Cullen FINALLY retracted the Brenda Parker nonsense in the latest revision of his book, he decided to do this in 2016. We're only in the first weeks of 2017, so, for 7 years people >have been reading the original print with all of that nonsense, and there were PLENTY of reasons to question, debate, and discuss it.

I was the one who mentioned the Cullen retraction, but now that I've picked up the 2016 version of the book (it was the 2009 one that I'd already read), it looks like he didn't actually delete *all* of it. His apology is in the foreword ("Her testimony has proven dubious, and I have deleted the passages referring to her, about three hundred words") but in the earlier part of the book he does mention something like "Eric had scored with a twenty-three year old girl" and that much is still there. I can get an exact quote if you guys want.

As for that article that the OP posted, it does come up FIRST if you Google "Columbine forum" which is how I found this place.

Quoted from the First Edition 2009:

A few weeks later, Eric made it with a real woman. Brenda was almost twenty-three. She had no idea he was sixteen. “He acted a lot older,” she said. When he told her he was in school, she took it to mean college. They met at the mall, and he drove to her house. They started going out: bowling, drag racing, driving into the mountains to get drunk. He taught her about the computer, he told her how great she looked, and she could not have been more charmed. She described it to reporters later as “a friendship but more than a friendship.” Sometimes Dylan would hang out with them. He was too shy to speak.

Eric’s twenty-three-year-old was dumping him because he was grounded all the time and could never see her. He kept working Brenda, but it didn’t look good.

Eric had not given up on the twenty-three-year-old. For months, he kept calling Brenda. She told him she had a new boyfriend, but he persisted. Late in the year, she met him at a Macaroni Grill. “He was really bummed out,” she said. She thought he was bummed because she’d dumped him. He denied it, but offered no explanation. She never saw him again.

Notes:

Brenda was almost twenty-three: Brenda Parker's account and quotes came from her police interview and her interviews with Denver papers.

First Edition 2009: Columbine is a non-fiction book written by Dave Cullen and published by Twelve on April 6, 2009.


Paperback Edition 2010: New disclosures from the killers' parents

The Columbine paperback edition (released in 2010) reveals four secret meetings involving all four parents of the killers. This unforeseen development provided the first real public insight into the mindsets of Wayne and Kathy Harris. The awkward encounters play out in the new "Afterword" added to the paperback. The Afterword also includes updates on two bereaved parents and one wounded survivor of the Columbine shooting, and their starkly different perspectives on "forgiveness". The three are Linda Mauser, Bob Curnow, and Valeen Schnurr, respectively.

The expanded paperback edition of 2010 also adds scans from the killers' journals, a diagram of the attack, and book club questions.