Columbine by Dave Cullen, Chapters 1–19

I chose to read “Columbine” by Dave Cullen because I was curious to know what really happened on April 20,1999. As I began reading I was struck by how normal Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold seemed.I found it hard to belive that two normal kids who did well in school and had lots of friends could carry out such atrocious acts of violence. When I had heard about the Columbine shootings before, people would describe Eric and Dylan as “out casts” or “goths” or say they were a part of the “trench coat mafia.” These descriptions of the killers are among many of the misconceptions surrounding the incident. April 17,1999 was Columbine High School’s prom. Chapter Six of the book describes the night of the prom Dylan’s friend Nate Dykeman recalled that on the night of the prom there were “no hints whatsoever that anything could possibly be wrong” (27). I find it odd that Eric and Dylan could act so normal while knowing what would happen the following Tuesday. Columbine wasn’t a successful shooting, it was a failed bombing. Eric made bombs using propane tanks and planned to kill “several hundred” or “at least four hundred” people. Chapter Eight: Maximum Human Density describes Eric and Dylan’s detailed plan to kill as many people as possible. This was a very difficult chapter to read because we see how comfortable Eric and Dylan are with killing such a massive amount of people. They started planning the deadly massacre over a year before it happened which means that they woke up every day for a year knowing that they would kill as many people as they could out of cold blood.

At 11:19am on Tuesday April 20,1999 Eric Harris opened fire. At 12:08 Eric and Dylan committed suicide. In that forty-nine minute period twenty-four people were shot and thirteen of them would die. The SWAT teams didn’t know what really happened until 3:15 which was more than three hours after Eric and Dylan committed suicide. It’s hard to know that if the SWAT teams had acted sooner maybe Dave Sanders wouldn’t have bled to death in Science Room 3.

This section of the book was the hardest to read and even harder to write about. It was really difficult to read about what these kids went through and even harder to think that this happened to normal kids at a normal high school.