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‘Damaged masculinity’ may help explain Columbine and other mass shootings mike.rosenwald@washpost.com Follow @mikerosenwald View Archive RSS Feed April 20 at 6:34 AM Columbine High Schoolshooter, Eric Harris. (AP Photo/HO) Wednesday marks the 17th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre — the terrible day in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 and wounded dozens more before killing themselves in Colorado.In the strangely American phenomenon of mass shootings, Columbine comes up again and again. As I wrote last year: It was Columbine that changed everything…a horrifying event that occurred just as the Internet was taking root in the...

Full Headline ... "Mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold gives first TV interview since massacre: 'I had all those illusions that everything was OK'" The mother of one of the Columbine shooters still has trouble calling her son a "killer," nearly 17 years after the bloody high school massacre that left 13 people dead. "There is never a day that goes by where I don't think of the people that Dylan harmed," Sue Klebold told ABC's "20/20 Friday" in her first TV interview since her son's gun rampage. She then explained why she used the delicate term "harmed."

Schools create programs to help kids cope with and prevent bullying By Ilene Olson rep3@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Bullying can lead to anger and tears in the classroom, on the playground and even years later as adults recall being bullied as children. "It made me feel - I don't know how to say it - embarrassed, I guess." Even so, she chose to walk away without saying anything. "I just ignored them," she said. Candiracci and McMillion both advised her, "Don't believe anybody who says that." The three sixth-graders were among the students who watched a performance at...

LANCASTER - "When I'm God, everyone dies." Those words, scribbled in a 15-year-old boy's notebook, were part of the evidence on display Friday at the Lancaster Sheriff's Station. That notebook was accompanied by a three-ring binder featuring pictures of Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Oklahoma City bomber and white supremacist Timothy McVeigh and the infamous Charles Manson. The 15-year-old, a Quartz Hill resident, and a 17-year-old Lancaster resident were arrested Thursday for allegedly planning a "Columbine-style" attack on Quartz Hill High School. Their target date was next Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, 2006, a date selected from...

After I wrote a column a few weeks ago about the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, I got e-mail from Tom Klebold, the father of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters. Tom objected to the column, but the striking thing about his note was that while acknowledging the horrible crime his son had committed, Tom was still fiercely loyal toward him. Which prompts this question: If your child commits a crime like that, what do you do with the rest of your life? Tom and Susan Klebold have not really spoken to the press about all this. But the...

Five years ago, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School. Now it's clear that much of what we thought about that horror was wrong. In the weeks following the killings, commentators and psychologists filled the air with theories about what on earth could have caused those teenagers to lash out as they did. The main one was that Harris and Klebold were the victims of brutal high school bullies. They were social outcasts, persecuted by the jocks and the popular kids. But there were other theories afloat: they'd fallen in with a sick Goth subculture; they were...

In a remarkable book, Harvard and the Unabomber, about Ted Kacyznski, its author, Alston Chase, says, "The anger that motivated Kacyznski bears an uncanny resemblance to the rage that drove the schoolboys who in recent years have gone berserk, shooting classmates. Like Kacyznski, the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were motivated by rage, not only against those they saw despoiling the environment but also against the dominant school culture that ridiculed them." "Meanwhile," Chase noted, "high schools are even less dedicated to learning than they were, choosing instead to ensure that students conform to the canons...