Maybe the media ignored some details, or maybe I wasn't paying attention, but there's apparently a lot I didn't know about Columbine.
The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.I forget which blog pointed me to this piece... sorry.
I don't know about you, but I found a pointer to it on Real Live Preacher, a blog well worth checking out!
I read this somewhere else and then I read another article about how Eric Harris was probably a true psychopath and Dylan Klebold, had he not hung around Harris, probably would have gone on to live a normal life - that he was a follower who hung out with the wrong crowd. What I wonder is how none of their parents ever picked up on any of this? Harris admitted in a journal entry that he lied to his parents about making bombs but if I even suspected my kids were thinking about something like that, I'd have them in a mental hospital in minutes. How as a parent do you not know your kid well enough to know he or she is capable of this?
Btw, my mom had the very uncanny knack of knowing everything we did without us ever telling her. I don't know how she was able to know that much but it kept me scared enough to stay out of trouble!