“I hope you get an idea of what we’re implying here. “You guys will all die, and it will be f- soon!” he said. He addressed his kindred in the video “basement tapes” he and Klebold recorded before their massacre. Harris gained transcendent status because he spoke to a cohort whose existence he discerned from those earlier shootings. More shootings followed in Alaska, Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Oregon. school shootings that began in February 1996, when Barry Loukaitis, 14, killed a teacher and two students in Washington state. He found a willing subordinate in Klebold and drew inspiration from a cluster of U.S. Harris, Cho’s archetype slayer, was a formerly obscure, frail-looking kid from Littleton, Colo., who was apoplectic about the exalted status of athletes and preppies and, like most adolescents, chagrined at his own shortcomings.Įric Harris, left, and Dylan Klebold, carrying a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in the cafeteria at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, during their Apshooting rampage where they killed a teacher and 12 students. “We will raise hell on earth that the world has never witnessed,” he said. The mentally deranged Cho, who killed 32 in his 2007 rampage at Virginia Tech, was fixated on joining “martyrs like Eric and Dylan.” “Everyone knows that mass murderers are the cool kids.” The depth of this tribalism is spotlighted in a quip that Lanza made online in 2011, a year before his attack on a Connecticut elementary school. “It is their way of joining a subculture in which they are not only normal,” Langman writes, “but perhaps feel themselves to be special, apart from and above mainstream society.” Langman says most were socially inept misfits who “were raging against the conditions of their existence” in an “incomprehensible” world. The tally includes names both obscure and familiar: Pekka-Eric Auvinen, Alvaro Castillo, Seung-Hui Cho, Vester Flanagan, Kimveer Gill, Chris Harper-Mercer, Adam Lanza, Matti Saari, Robert Steinhäuser, Jeffrey Weise and others. They quote Harris, express admiration and copy his clothing, weapons, slogans and techniques. Many of these killers left a record of their own Columbine studies. Pennsylvania psychologist Peter Langman, who catalogs and analyzes school shootings, links Harris to some 35 incidents of school violence in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Finland and Germany. Solomon was obsessed with Columbine, which a prosecutor described as his “trigger.” 22-caliber rifle to shoot up his Conyers, Ga., high school, wounding six. The Columbiners began attracting dreamy admirers within days. “I’m in love with a dead school shooter,” chirped one young blogger. Randy Stair, a Pennsylvania mass shooter three years later, wrote, “I love you, Eric Harris, you da man!” Aaron Ybarra, who shot up a Washington state college campus in 2014, described Harris as “a master of all shooters.”įangirls also pay romantic homage to Harris.
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