Word: klebolds
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...narcissist could decide that his alienation should be underlined in the blood of strangers. The flamboyant nature of these crimes is like a neon sign pointing to the truth. Charles Whitman playing God in his Texas clock tower, James Huberty spraying lead in a California restaurant, Harris and Klebold in their theatrical trench coats--they're all stars in the cinema of their self-absorbed minds...
...explanation or Lasch's indictment, however, to see an immediate danger in the way we examine the lives of mass killers. Earnestly and honestly, detectives and journalists dig up apparent clues and weave them into a sort of explanation. In the days after Columbine, for example, Harris and Klebold emerged as alienated misfits in the jock culture of their suburban high school. We learned about their morbid taste in music and their violent video games. Largely missing, though, was the proper frame around the picture: the extreme narcissism that licensed these boys, in their minds, to murder their teachers...
There's a telling moment in Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine, in which singer Marilyn Manson dismisses the idea that listening to his lyrics contributed to the disintegration of Harris and Klebold. What the Columbine killers needed, Manson suggests, was for someone to listen to them. This is the narcissist's view of narcissism: everything would be fine if only he received more attention. The real problem can be found in the killer's mirror...
...these factors accumulate, killers in the making remain surprisingly cool, all the while strolling toward the edge. That is what makes mass murder especially chilling. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold planned the Columbine assault for months, buying guns, practicing their aim, even designing their own shabby bombs that were intended to blow up the building. Cho bought the first of the two pistols he used in his killings on March 13, then bought the second just days before the murders - decorously observing the 30-day waiting period the state of Virginia requires between handgun purchases...
...conducted entirely without feeling. For the killer, the powerlessness that came from a sense of victimization has been replaced by its perfect opposite - a heady experience that may produce an implacable serenity on the one hand, or the eerily jocular banter that surveillance tapes picked up between Harris and Klebold in Columbine on the other. Making the gunman calmer still is the fact that he has long since convinced himself that the world brought the carnage on itself. Because nobody is exempt from membership in that world, nobody's exempt from the line of fire either. "You forced me into...