Word: klebolds
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Adolescents are psychologically fragile, and mistreatment from schoolmates leaves deep wounds. Sometimes, says Augustana University education professor Larry Brendtro, "kids who feel powerless and rejected are capable of doing horrible things." Jason Sanchez, 15, a student at Phoenix's Mountain Pointe High School, understands why Harris and Klebold snapped: "If you go to school, and people make fun of you every day, and you don't have friends, it drives you to insanity...
...because they are long and black and what the kids call Gothic, but because they look alike; they conceal differences. People who are attracted to clans and cults seek to lose their individuality and discover power and pride in a group. As individuals, the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were vulnerable, taunted by the other tribes in school--the cliques, the athletes--as geeks and nerds. "He just put a gun to my head," a girl reported. "And he started laughing and saying it was all because people were mean to him last year...
...there is no way of calculating how much of a role was played by propaganda and video games in Harris and Dylan Klebold's killing spree. Quake and its ilk may have helped desensitize a generation--but you're blasting cyborgs, not classmates, and you're certainly not constructing pipe bombs. Harris' online essay on how to make these devices suggests that he made most of his discoveries through trial and error, not on the Net. The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers...
...initial assumption that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were Goths--simply because they wore black trench coats, painted their fingernails black and listened to Marilyn Manson music--got real Goths everywhere hot under the black leather collar. "Teenagers tend to go after the most powerful images they can," explains Seth Baker, a Los Angeles Goth. "They put together a lot of images." Real Goths have nothing to do with violence...
Still, if Klebold and Harris were wolves in Goth's clothing, there was plenty to identify with. "We romanticize the darkness of humanity," says Peter Stover, 21, a photography major at Chicago's Columbia College, who has midnight blue hair and regulation pale skin. "We're creatures of the night...