Armed with shotguns, rifles, and handguns, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold got to Columbine High on the morning of April 20, 1999, and planted 2 bombs in the school cafeteria. The bombs never went off, but then the boys began a shooting spree. In less than 30 minutes, the attack was over as both Harris and Klebold died by suicide in the school library. At the time, the shooting was one of the worst in US history and left long-lasting impressions on school safety and national conversations about gun violence, bullying, and mental health. Whereas most are not shocked or taken aback by a school shooting today because it has somewhat become normalized, what interests me most in this particular phenomenon of.Columbine was that there were 2 killers, doubling with murder. Planning and subsequently conducting a shooting by two best friends is an extremely exceptional concept among mass shootings. The partnership of Harris and Klebold was, in fact, the product of a doubling of their personalities, weaknesses, and frustrations. The idea of doubling in this case is connected with the understanding that two people.with complementary traits of psychology and motivation could merge into one destructive force, feeding each other’s dark impulses.
Whereas Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s personalities and emotional states contrasted with each other, in the run-up to the shooting they were deeply entangled. They were far more than best friends; they were mirrors for each other, reinforcing their own feelings of rejection, frustration, and anger. The doubling dynamic was at the core of how the attack unfolded.
Eric Harris was more dominant and aggressive than Dylan Klebold.
He was brilliant, manipulative, and had a deep sense of entitlement. He was a narcissist, and I would even say he was a sociopath if not a.psychopath. He was very sociopathic in persona, as reflected through his journal entries and other writings in which he speaks of despising society and humanity. He would swear allegiance to Nazi ideologies and go into graphic detail of how he wanted to sexually assault women he liked. He had an apparent agenda when shooting so as to leave behind a legacy of terror. In his writings, he was a mastermind and God-like. He idolized figures like Adolf Hitler and the OKC bomber. On the other hand, Dylan Klebold was an emotional person, sensitive, and was fighting depression. He had more friends than Eric; however, he still considered himself an outcast.
Of course, all these feelings of failure and self-esteem added to his inspiration for the attack. Indeed, according to both of the boy’s diaries, the idea to bomb the school as a method of his suicide was Dylan’s idea. He was fascinated with his own.death. Both Dylan and Eric knew they were not going to come out alive and initially intended for the school to explode with the propane bombs planted in the cafeteria, then eventually to die in an exchange of fire with the police. They fed each other’s dark fantasies and shared a sense of victimhood. It was a mutual hatred for the world around them, for societal expectations, and the people they perceived had rejected them that joined their identities in one single, destructive partnership.
This was likely Harris, as the ringleader, manipulating emotional fragility of Klebold into the act of a revenge plot while he searched for an outlet for his own anguish by succumbing to Harris’s intensity. This doubling process enabled them to create a plan that seemed nearly impossible for most people to fathom but was, to them, a cathartic release from their personal hells. The concept of doubling is good in understanding why Dylan and Eric were able to commit such an act together. In most shootings in schools, the perpetrators usually act alone, and their motives may be as varied as social struggles, mental health struggles, or a desire for notoriety.
However, in the case of Columbine, Eric and Dylan were in a partnership-their psychological factors intermingled with each other. Dylan’s despair and loneliness mixed well with Eric’s premeditated anger, and as their closeness increased, so did the determination to carry out the shooting. It was a perfect model of groupthink: the two radicalized as one, feeding each other’s sense of entitlement and violence. It partly was the shared bond and echo-chamber mentality that created the utter unlikelihood of this attack’s success. Shocking but most people would find it hard to plan, then actually carry out, a mass shooting. This doubling of Harris’ and Klebold’s personalities wasn’t just a catalyst for the attack but rather made the execution of their plan far more dangerous.
Most school shooters work alone. The logistics of carrying out such an attack as a lone individual already extraordinarily difficult. That includes coordinating how to get the weapons, planting the bombs, and the actual execution of the shooting-all.of these require a great deal of planning.