Newcomer here. Need some places to start learning about Columbine.

Hello. I'm rather new to this forum. I know a lot about Columbine but I feel like there's so much more I don't know about. What websites, books, and resources can I use to get a better glimpse of the event?

Books by Jeff Kass, Brooks Brown are good.
This board is very good place to learn about Columbine.

As Ligeya said, this forum is full of excellent resources, and there are lots of knowledgeable people who can point you in the right direction.

Dave Cullen's book is a good place to learn about Cullenbine, but it is a horrible place to learn about Columbine. Go ahead and read it, but keep in mind that Cullen's characterization of Eric as a swaggering ladies' man bears little resemblance to the reality. Eric was basically an incel before incels were cool.

As someone who has been struggling to understand the massacre since the day it happened, I have long since stopped looking for the single factor that drove Eric, Dylan, and 13 other people to their doom. Those who say that Eric and Dylan were two innocent boys who were bullied to death are just as wrong as Cullen, who claims that Eric was a bloodthirsty psychopath who wanted to kill while Dylan was just a sweet little emo who just got caught up in Eric's web.

My favorite quote about 4/20 comes from Alan Prendergast, a writer for Denver's Westword newspaper:

The carnage of April 20 is not a simple parable of humiliation and revenge, nor is it a cautionary tale of a permissive society gone mad. The mass homicide may have more to do with the special culture of Columbine, the world its students inhabited on a daily basis, than school officials will ever acknowledge. The high school that Klebold and Harris sought to destroy was a place of long-simmering resentments and pathology, wrapped in a bright lie of communal achievement and mutual respect. It's a place where teachers and parents were nominally involved but ultimately irrelevant, since adults were easy to fool or ignore. A place where teenagers were encouraged, even badgered, into straitjacketed notions of success, while others plunged into a realm of violent fantasy. A place where, as if by magic, what was considered cool and daring became unspeakably cruel and grotesque.

You're about to slide down a very deep rabbit hole. It will lead you in surprising directions. Just remember that there are people who have been poking around in the depths of NBK for over twenty years who still haven't made up their minds as to what really happened to those two boys.

Welcome to the forum!!

Welcome to the forum!! I can recommend several things, but I know you will learn a lot by reading the topics here, there are many people with knowledge and quite interesting topics.

I recommend the yotube channel of "Columbine archives" he talks very interesting things about the case, and Bill okcham also makes very interesting discoveries.


Of books I can recommend the book "A mother reckoning" a book written by Dylan Klebold's mother that gives an interesting testimony and narrates various events in the life of Dylan Klebold. I do not recommend "Columbine" by Dave Cullen, it has many fallacies and a wrong vision in my opinion of the case. I also recommend you read the 11-k which has basically all the information and testimonies about the case, and the page "School shotters info" also has a lot of information about Eric and Dylan and other shooters.

I suppose it depends what you want to know. It’s pretty easy to get in contact with people directly or indirectly with the case so if there are specifics you want to know you can in some cases go straight to the source.

Some people swear by Cullen, Brown, the 11k etc. They’ll pull say, Brooks Brown’s book apart because it doesn’t match with something in the 11k - even though they will write on another topic you come across that the 11k is full of shit too.

It’s very time consuming, can cost you quite a lot of money and over all I’d say it’s not worth the time and effort to look too much into it. Read a couple of books if you must and try to make your mind up from them and just let it go.

If you're going to get into this story be advised that the main reason people probably care about the case so much (as opposed to other major 90s crime stories which do not have the same appeal to young people, like the Oklahoma City bombing) is because it plays on their own miserable memories of being bullied or being losers in high school, which American culture plays up as the greatest days of your lives.

So if that doesn't appeal to you, don't.

If you end up reading the Cullen book, then hanging around here for awhile, what will happen is that you will probably not like the Cullen book very much and will end up reading it mostly for compare/contrast purposes. I'd say my major problem with it is that he lets the school off the hook entirely.

Read the forum threads here, there are thousands of threads and posts containing info to columbine which is interesting. Brooks Brown's book is my favorite on columbine and def a worthy read. acolumbinesite.com is also another great place for info on the case.

In The Columbine Killers documentary, Brooks Brown claims that Eric and Dylan were the two lowest status students in all of Columbine High School. Most of status in high school is determined by physical traits. Eric was average height. Dylan was 6'4". Neither Eric nor Dylan were freakishly short or freakishly ugly or grossly overweight or anything like that. Plus it's crystal clear that Eric and Dylan had several friends in the school such as Zach Heckler, Nate, Devon, Brooks Brown, etc. I'm sure that there were students at Columbine that were totally ostracized and sat totally alone at lunch at the corner of a lunch table. So I would take everything Brooks Brown says with a grain of salt.

beheadedromero wrote:

Hello. I'm rather new to this forum. I know a lot about Columbine but I feel like there's so much more I don't know about. What websites, books, and resources can I use to get a better glimpse of the event?

There's always only been 1 main discussion forum at a time really and its been this one for a while. You'd probably be fine with just here and the official reports. Most stuff should make its way here for discussion anyway.
acolumbinesite, as was mentioned. Its pretty good to as kind of an easier, more organized way to go through some highlights of the official reports, since just opening those up and reading them straight can be a little daunting.