Did The Boys experience derealization during the shooting?

Somewhere between 11:19 and 11:23 AM

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The Boys had no hope of making those shots. Yet they wasted the ammunition (and risked the Tec-9 jamming) anyway. Their whooping and hollering during the shooting in general also speaks to not being in their right minds. I infer from this that they were derealized due to the adrenaline. The Boys felt like they were in a giant videogame or movie. It would have seemed dreamlike to them. I think that explains why they stopped killing, and just wandered around the school. It wore off and reality set in.

They were beyond out of their rational minds at that point.
Although I do admit that I don’t think Eric completely “come back” until he broke his nose in the library...
...but yes, to your point, by 4/20, they were completely checked out and there was no hope.
They knew they had to treat it like a movie and/or a video game, and that’s just what they did.
And then, once the adrenaline and excitement wore off, as they wandered about aimlessly, did they realize how truly horribly wrong the whole thing went, and that come crashing down on them like a ton of bricks.
Add that, along with everything else...they were gone.
I don’t know if I’d necessarily call it a dream like state, but they were definitely disconnected from reality and the real world.

Well, that doesn't logically follow to be considered an inference, doesn't explain why they stopped at exactly 11:35, nor the wandering, nor the cheering. It's also obviously making excuses for them, and happens to be completely unoriginal and said a thousand times. Planning for a year shows they were in their right minds, and having fun during at best says nothing about that (though it seems like they planned to have fun too, e. g. Dylan's notes).

It could easily be, for example, that they didn't know they wouldn't hit them, that they didn't care if they didn't hit them as long as it cleared the area after clearing the west entrance and the stairs, or Dylan test firing his TEC-9 (something of a mystery which shots were his. He ditched a magazine which presumably jammed in the grass to the west of the stairs if memory serves, and on the middle of the stairs nearby was one of his shell casings). Those are all a lot better than saying their hallucinogens kicked in and then wore off at 11:35.

That’s just it.
Nobody in their right mind is going to plan to kill themselves and everybody else for a year (or more, for all we know). Nobody in their right mind is going to plant bombs to blow up their school. Nobody in their right mind is going to gun down innocent children and hoot and holler and yahoo about it as they do it. Nobody in their right mind is going to want to cause that much destruction and death and devastation and die themselves while doing it.
Nobody having a rational thought is going to enjoy any of this — not even going to do it to begin with.
They were crazy.
Both of them.
It takes a special kind of crazy to want to pull it off — let alone pull it off, maybe not to the extent that you wanted it to, but pull any of it off.

That’s not rational thinking.

I don’t understand why people seem to have an aversion to the phrase “they were crazy” for.

Nothing about Columbine screams right minds...not a thing about it screams sanity.

I’m not going to believe they were in their right minds just because they planned it for a year, because that just makes the whole thing even more screwed up.

I’m not making excuses for them, or any other crazy person who does something like this. To this extent or worse.

Who cares why they stopped what time they stopped? It wasn’t fun anymore. The plan failed, they felt like bigger failures than they already did, and, I’m sure, by that point, all things considered, they wanted to just get it over with and end it. And, for that matter, they took the cowards way out. Yeah, I said it and I mean it. They should’ve stayed alive to suffer for the horrible atrocity that they had just committed.

But the worlds not perfect, what can I say?

I’m not going to say someone having fun killing is in their right mind. That would make me out of mine.

I will, however, give you that they had no clue what was going to hit them. None at all. That’s exactly why Eric treated it like a military mission and Dylan treated it like a movie — namely NBK. It was a game for them, and they realized that, hey, this isn’t a game after all and we really did all of this. Now what do we do?
So that one, I will 100% concede on.

Who said anything about hallucinogens? What in this world, or any other world, are you talking about??

FreeJust wrote:

They were beyond out of their rational minds at that point.
Although I do admit that I don’t think Eric completely “come back” until he broke his nose in the library...

So you mean to tell me after he "came back" to reality is the point where he decided to kill most of his victims?

You do realize that right? Eric killed more people after he broke his nose, not before.

QuestionMark wrote:

FreeJust wrote:

They were beyond out of their rational minds at that point.
Although I do admit that I don’t think Eric completely “come back” until he broke his nose in the library...

So you mean to tell me after he "came back" to reality is the point where he decided to kill most of his victims?

You do realize that right? Eric killed more people after he broke his nose, not before.

I stand by my statement.

As bad as he wanted this, do you think he was going to let a broken nose stop him?

Standing by it even when the evidence contradicts it is the problem. If he wanted to do it so bad, that also suggests he was in his right mind doing it. Yours is the position that a bloody nose stopped him from being of sound mind and changed the course of events, not QuestionMark's.

"Who said anything about hallucinogens?"
See "dream like". Nervous laugh harder. It's characterizing and paraphrasing the view that they went crazy for no reason rather than a quote, yeah.

Not a thing about it 'screams' "not in their right minds", and nothing which suggests that is cited for how it does. That's just a way to say there's no reasoning involved; replace "screams" with "feels in my tummy".  Planning for a year and keeping it secret would sink any attempt at the insanity defense were they to have lived.

cakeman wrote:

Standing by it even when the evidence contradicts it is the problem. If he wanted to do it so bad, that also suggests he was in his right mind doing it. Yours is the position that a bloody nose stopped him from being of sound mind and changed the course of events, not QuestionMark's.

"Who said anything about hallucinogens?"
See "dream like". Nervous laugh harder. It's characterizing and paraphrasing the view that they went crazy for no reason rather than a quote, yeah.

Not a thing about it 'screams' "not in their right minds", and nothing which suggests that is cited for how it does. That's just a way to say there's no reasoning involved; replace "screams" with "feels in my tummy".  Planning for a year and keeping it secret would sink any attempt at the insanity defense were they to have lived.

I didn’t mention dream like on my own. OP did. Just throwing that out there. ;)

Evidence doesn’t contradict these two lunatics were crazy. Again — why does everybody have an aversion to the phrase “they were crazy?” Sometimes crazy people doing something crazy because they’re crazy (and didn’t get help in time for being crazy, to be absolutely fair about it), is the only answer to the question of “why.”

You do not kill other humans and yourself if you are in a sane frame of mind. You do not plan to kill lots more if you are in a sane frame of mind. Not being able to admit these were two lunatics that should've gotten help but instead did something crazy, calling their crazy sane, no matter what direction you try to spin it, makes no sense and is, in and of itself, crazy.

So what if they wouldn’t have gotten an insanity plea?
They didn’t need one!
They should’ve suffered for the rest of their lives, had they lived.

But, with that in mind...just because you can’t legally plead insanity doesn’t make you sane.

The boys were smart. I give them that.

But they were still, at the end of the day, nothing more than troubled, crazy kids, who waved bye bye to reality...if not a long time before that, then the second that Eric (I believe it was Eric, anyway) said “Go! Go!” and the massacre started.

It takes a special kind of twisted to pull off such a thing.

And I refuse to call someone who does it sane.

But, here in 2019, I’m not scared of the word crazy, either.

cakeman wrote:

Standing by it even when the evidence contradicts it is the problem. If he wanted to do it so bad, that also suggests he was in his right mind doing it. Yours is the position that a bloody nose stopped him from being of sound mind and changed the course of events, not QuestionMark's.

He's contradicting himself too. I mean look at his reply:

FreeJust wrote:

As bad as he wanted this, do you think he was going to let a broken nose stop him?

Complete 180.

Yeah that's what my last sentence was saying. As if that were your problem and not his.

cakeman wrote:

Yeah that's what my last sentence was saying. As if that were your problem and not his.

Yeah, the mental gymnastics that were surely put into it baffles me.

FreeJust wrote:

QuestionMark wrote:

FreeJust wrote:

They were beyond out of their rational minds at that point.
Although I do admit that I don’t think Eric completely “come back” until he broke his nose in the library...

So you mean to tell me after he "came back" to reality is the point where he decided to kill most of his victims?

You do realize that right? Eric killed more people after he broke his nose, not before.

I stand by my statement.

As bad as he wanted this, do you think he was going to let a broken nose stop him?

That and it most likely pissed him off.

"That" being what? They just contradicted themselves. As for it angering Eric, there's no evidence of that of which I am aware and Dylan seemed to laugh about it. The psychotic detachment theory is simply a paradigm case of a just-so story, filling the cavernous gaps in the orthodox story (going to the stairs, stopping shooting at 11:35, wandering halls, etc) with the idea that they were the good guys who didn't know what they had gotten themselves into.  There's not even an attempt to make it a necessary condition on top of merely a sufficient condition. Yeah maybe psychotic detachment could explain it, but why think nothing else could? There won't be an answer.

You’re not doing this in your right mind. You’re a special kind of screwed up.
If you have the urge to kill, a broken nose won’t stop you. (May piss you off, but it won’t stop you).
If you want to kill as bad as these two lunatics did, you’d not let a thing on this planet stop you.
I refuse to say they were in their right minds. You don’t kill thirteen people and yourself/selves and be using rational thinking. You have to be GONE in your mental status to even consider it, let alone do it.
And if you’re that far gone...I don’t really think you’re going to much care about a broken nose.

Not counting the ones they wanted to kill but didn’t.
That takes someone who needs help, even though at that point, help may not make a difference.

You're just arguing with yourself again. Nobody said he cared about the bloody nose except you, saying it made him "come back" to his senses, despite that being the offered explanation for why they stopped killing, and the majority of the killing taking place after the bloody nose.

There's no evidence they were not in their right mind, and saying it over and over doesn't provide any. Worse, the claim isn't that they were lunatics, it's that they became lunatics at 11:19, and stopped being lunatics at 11:35, and that's what explains why they stopped shooting and wandered the halls. Why this and no other explanation? No reason given, ever. It's an article of faith.

Further, you don't plan for a year and do things in secret and live a normal life on the surface if you're a lunatic. That's why e. g. John Gacy or Jeff Dahmer were not ruled insane, and it's much easier to argue they were given they slept with corpses rather than simply committed murder.

Doesn’t mean they weren’t insane. Just means they weren’t found insane in court. A court isn’t always right. I say that in jest, but it’s got a bit of truth to it.

The evidence they weren’t in their right mind? “Columbine High School massacre. 13 dead, plus 2 gunmen.” Sure, they planned it for a year. Like I said earlier, they’re smart, I give them that. Not getting caught. They’re sneaky. Good for them. Still doesn’t mean they weren’t crazy though. If a gunman goes in a place and kills people and then themselves, especially (Dylan for sure) having the time of their life as they’re doing it...they’re not all there.

Like I said, maybe if they had gotten help...but, at the same time, after a certain point (probably when they officially got the guns), I don’t think help would have made a difference. Before they got the guns? Maybe.
But we will sadly never know.

Oh, no. The boys were definitely in a derealized/depersonalized state for most of the shooting. There's no doubt in my mind. On pg. 300, 446, and 567 of the 11k, witnesses report them saying words to the effect of "I can't believe I just did that" after shooting someone. The whooping, the shots toward students on the soccer field they had no hope of making. They were experiencing it in a dissassociated state of surrealism.

sympathyforEandD wrote:

Oh, no. The boys were definitely in a derealized/depersonalized state for most of the shooting. There's no doubt in my mind. On pg. 300, 446, and 567 of the 11k, witnesses report them saying words to the effect of "I can't believe I just did that" after shooting someone. The whooping, the shots toward students on the soccer field they had no hope of making. They were experiencing it in a dissassociated state of surrealism.

...this sounds like really reaching, maybe even outright cherry picking, with all due respect.

"I can't believe I just did that"   is a way of expressing excitement at what you just did, as is 'whooping', neither of which come with dissociation. Dissociation would mean you don't know what you just did, like when you drive from point A to point B but you forget how you got there. Cheering the turns you make or saying "I can't believe how fast I am going", would be the opposite of dissociation. And I already gave other explanations for the distant gun shots, meaning an intellectually honest person cannot just keep repeating that dissociation logically follows from that.

It's very, very obvious one is just starting with the assumption that they were good guys and filling any perceived gaps in the story with it.  Really, if that's the best you got, it's time to abandon this idea. If your theory requires psychotic detachment, it's been reduced to absurdity. It's not a sinking ship, it's a sunk ship.

And surrealism is an art movement. Experiencing surrealism is looking at a painting.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]: Now you're coming across like you're high on the smell of your own farts. Were you a fly on the wall at Columbine during the shooting? No. Are you privvy to more information than the rest of us? No. You can't tell me The Boys were not experiencing the shooting in a disassociated state when you weren't even there. Any more of this "I'm right, you're wrong" and I will consider you a bad faith debater and ignore your posts like most of the forum does.

You've been called out in the past for your unwarranted self-importance, and you're still laboring under the idea you're some sort of Columbine authority, here to blow our minds with your wisdom. Knock off the fartsniffing. Your opinion is no more "right" than anyone else's.

Now comes the projection and personal attacks instead of just admitting you're wrong. That I don't pretend I was inside their heads and know everything is why I don't say I know that they were dissociating and quadruple down without responding to a single point.  All you've said is "I'm right you're wrong".  There's a difference between just "I have an opinion; I'm right" (what you do) and "As best I call tell, this is what follows logically from the facts".  

Shooting at a far distance doesn't imply dissociation in the slightest. You could've picked any other random fact and pretended it was an inference. Being in Colorado proves they were dissociating just as much. Saying "I can't believe I just did that" expresses excitement and means you were conscious of what you just did, proving the opposite. When a sports announcer says "I don't believe what I just saw", that doesn't mean he literally thought he was asleep and hallucinating. That's not mind reading or being an expert; that's just not feigning ignorance of how English works when it goes against your pet theory.

Cheering proves the opposite. "This is what we've always wanted to do" proves the opposite. Planning for a year and bringing all the guns and bombs to school proves the opposite. They didn't just beat someone to death in a drunken haze and then wake up afterwards. That's nothing to do with me. That's nothing to do with being an authority. That's everything to do with you insisting on a theory no matter what. You just attack me when the facts aren't on your side.

"Columbine was planned primarily as a stabbing"
Well actually they never used their knives, here are the reasons that suggest it was primarily a bombing
"Oh you must know everything you were inside their heads huh? Just let me have my opinion! What's wrong with you!?"

That's just a coping mechanism of attacking the messenger, and everybody mildly intelligent knows that. Zero self awareness.

I hate to get negative, especially here, because everyone seems very cool and will discuss each others thoughts and opinions whether we agree or not.

However, Cakeman is nothing more than a Troll.

Some great threads have been ruined for me due to Cakemans bullshit.
Again, I'm so sorry to be negative.

Cakeman....I'm not trying to insult you or anything buddy, but please man.... stop being such a dick.

First, it's disappointing to see threads devolve into name calling just because people disagree with one another. We (at least most of us) are adults and should be able to express our dissent with others in a more productive manner.
Second, I've certainly had disagreements with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the past but I think that in this thread he's been pretty reasonable.

Lastly, I just jumped on to challenge the assertion that anyone who plans to and commits murder/suicide is insane.
The science doesn't back this up. Morally or ethically, we might think this is the case. At least that it should be the case. But people who study these criminals have found that it's not true.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(sorry, you have to make a free account to read the full article but I couldn't find the other article I've read that references the same work).

Here is the crux of the research:
It is true that severe mental illnesses are found more often among mass murderers. About one in five are likely psychotic or delusional, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of 350 mass killers going back more than a century. The figure for the general public is closer to 1 percent. But the rest of these murderers do not have any severe, diagnosable disorder.

Most mass murderers instead belong to a rogue’s gallery of the disgruntled and aggrieved, whose anger and intentions wax and wane over time, eventually curdling into violence in the wake of some perceived humiliation.

“In almost all high-end mass killings, the perpetrator’s thinking evolves,” said Kevin Cameron, executive director of the Canadian Center for Threat Assessment and Trauma Response. “They have a passing thought. They think about it more, they fantasize, they slowly build a justification. They prepare, and then when the right set of circumstances comes along, it unleashes the rage.”

This evolution proceeds rationally and logically, at least in the murderer’s mind. The unthinkable becomes thinkable, then inevitable.

Analyzing his database, Dr. Stone has concluded that about 65 percent of mass killers exhibited no evidence of a severe mental disorder; 22 percent likely had psychosis, the delusional thinking and hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia, or sometimes accompany mania and severe depression. (The remainder likely had depressive or antisocial traits.)

In a 2016 analysis of 71 lone-actor terrorists and 115 mass killers, researchers convened by the Department of Justice found the rate of psychotic disorders to be about what Dr. Stone had discovered: roughly 20 percent.

The overall rate of any psychiatric history among mass killers — including such probable diagnoses as depression, learning disabilities or A.D.H.D. — was 48 percent.

About two-thirds of this group had faced “long-term stress,” like trouble at school or keeping a job, failure in business, or disabling physical injuries from, say, a car accident.
Substance abuse was also common: More than 40 percent had problems with alcohol, marijuana or other drugs.
Looking at both studies, and using data from his own work, J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who consults with the F.B.I., has identified what he believes is a common thread: a “paranoid spectrum,” he calls it.

At the extreme end is full-on psychosis of the Loughner variety. But the majority of people on this spectrum are not deeply ill; rather, they are injustice collectors. They are prone to perceive insults and failures as cumulative, and often to blame them on one person or one group.

“If you have this paranoid streak, this vigilance, this sense that others have been persecuting you for years, there’s an accumulation of maltreatment and an intense urge to stop that persecution,” Dr. Meloy said.

“That may never happen. The person may never act on the urge. But when they do, typically there’s a triggering event. It’s a loss in love or work — something that starts a clock ticking, that starts the planning.”

thelmar wrote:

Second, I've certainly had disagreements with [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the past but I think that in this thread, for the most part, he's been pretty reasonable.

I wouldn't call @cakeman's posts toward [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] "reasonable." They were "I'm right and you're wrong." And pretty much everyone is tired of his shit at this point.

I mean, it's pretty obvious we have a turd in the punchbowl here. Real talk? Nobody likes this dude and his sweaty rants. He's been caught redhanded spamming the reputation system when he gets salty: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (scroll down) Bad faith in the extreme.

I'm not defending or supporting any position or point by making this post, but I thought I'd share some food for thought:

It's impossible to determine if someone was "in their right mind" - it's a meaningless statement until it's established what it means for a person to be in their right mind.

A reasonable decision is a rational decision.
A rational decision is one made based on reason and logic.
Logic is reasoning according to strict principles of validity.
Validity is the quality of being factually sound.

Did Eric and Dylan make a rational decision to shoot up their school? Only if their reasoning was factually sound. Was it? Or was it an emotional decision?

It seems the decision was emotional, and therefore would not qualify as rational or logical in any form. Even if you understand why they did it (which many do), it is still not a rational decision.

The words "rational" "reasonable" and "logical" have been abused to the ends of the Earth. They don't mean what many people think they mean.

Now consider that in the justice system, only criminals who are found not criminally responsible for their crimes are considered to lack a rational mind, which is the main factor in that they are not held criminally responsible.

Eric and Dylan's actions were irrational, but they were not necessarily irrational people. Everyone makes both rational and irrational decisions all the time.

Was murder a rational decision? By default, no. It was an emotional decision that didn't appeal to logic at all.

I think at the end of the day, many people who don't understand why E&D would kill their classmates also presume anyone who does understand is making excuses for them when exploring the "why" of the matter. This presumption gets in the way of any kind of discussion.

It doesn't help that terms aren't clarified. It seems everyone has a different idea of what it means to be rational, logical, reasonable, etc. Almost to the point where the word "reasonable" has become a synonym for "moral" which completely destroys any hope of communicating with others who hold the true definition of "reasonable" in their minds.

It's hard to understand where someone is coming from when the only dialogue happening is back and forth arguments. If someone makes a claim - it's their duty to show the rest of us how that claim is true.

Someone can say E&D made a reasonable decision (or whatever the claim is) all day long, and argue over whether that's true, but that doesn't seem to be the real issue.

There are plenty of unanswered questions that get filled in with assumptions. We don't know why they were whooping and hollering. Maybe they were having a good time. Maybe they were putting on a show. Maybe it was a release of anger and not actually excitement. We don't know.

It's uncomfortable not knowing and so much easier to fill in the gaps by presuming we know the answer.
Maybe our answer would be correct in our lives, but who is to say it applied to E&D?

Also, to say they weren't "in their right mind" presupposes that a person "in their right mind" wouldn't shoot up their school. Well, what does it mean to be "in your right mind?" The dictionary pinpoints it as being able to think and reason clearly, being lucid, coherent, balanced.

A good example is that someone in their right mind would never climb into the lion's enclosure at the zoo. But that is predicated on the idea that a person would normally want to preserve their life. What if a person climbs into the lion's enclosure to save a child or because they just want to die? Those two scenarios are much different from some "crazy person" climbing into the enclosure for no apparent reason.

When a person acts unreasonably, not in their right mind, people cannot understand their line of reasoning. That's part of what makes them "not in their right mind." They aren't acting in an understandable way.

Here's the divide. Many people understand E&D's actions thoroughly, and it is understandable.
To others, it's not understandable and appears "insane" (wrong word usage) therefore the conclusion is they were out of their minds or not in their right minds.

However you see it is not indicative of whether "the boys" were in their right minds or not - it's only indicative of your level of understanding of their motives and choices.