Columbine Massacre Research Articles

The American Beserk. Young Terrorists as Archetypes in Contemporary American Culture

AbstractFrom Philip Roth’s characater Merry Levov in American Pastoral to real-life figures such as the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, the young domestic terrorist has become the archetype of a dramatic and unpredictable social and political climate. This paper intends to explore the real and fictional avatars of this contemporary anti-hero, its dynamics and specific place in contemporary imagination.

A Comparative Study on the Representation of Reality in Animated Documentary and Documentary Game

Since the origins of documentary film, there has been much discussion over its treatment of ‘reality’. These considerations become increasingly more complicated in the scholarly work on animated documentaries and documentary games, two types of hybrid media that aim to document their subject matter but that have faced some resistance regarding their documentary value. Animated documentaries and documentary games represent reality in their own imaginative manner, being flexible and changing the possibilities of how the public may perceive certain events. Through animation, creators are able to show thoughts, feelings and even dreams, and through gameplay, game designers can engage their players using introspection. Both types, specially animated documentaries, have been studied closely and discussed at length thus far. This article aims to expand on the discussion of each form of media and to explore the links that exist between them with regard to their representations of reality, while also correlating their nuances with live-action documentaries. To this end, the productions Chicago 10 in 2007, Super Columbine Massacre! In 2005 and Waltz with Bashir in 2008 will be analyzed here while specifically focusing on their different representations of reality.

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

Playing with history: collective memory, national trauma, and dark tourism in virtual reality docugames

Over a decade after the controversial docugames Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (Danny Ledonne, 2005) – a game that turned the 1999 Columbine High School shootings into an interactive quest from the ...

Dreaming of Columbine: exploring an offender’s preoccupation with the Columbine Massacre

In 1999, two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Kleobold, armed with guns and explosives killed 12 peers, one teacher and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives. Since that date, society has sought to understand what drove these young men to commit such an act of hate and violence as well as the copycat school shootings, cult fascination and fandom associated with the perpetrators. In this paper, I discuss an offender on licence in the community who developed an obsession with the perpetrators and narrative of the Columbine Massacre alongside expressing an interest in participating in violent Islamist extremism – the use of violent tactics for achieving perceived Islamic goals. Furthermore, I explore my counter-transference as a psychotherapist conducting a risk-focused therapeutic intervention with this personality-disordered man. This paper will highlight the importance of using a psychoanalytic perspective to explore the link between an individual’s psychopathology and their fascination with the Columbine Massacre. It will also provide useful reflections for understanding the unconscious appeal of violent extremist narratives and ideologies.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

This essay offers a counter-reading of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a controversial video game about the infamous school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 in which players adopt the roles of the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod. Focusing on the game’s unique procedural rhetoric, we argue that SCMRPG! juxtaposes interactive, non-realistic violence–reflected in a campy nineties video game aesthetic–with photographic evidence, extant dialogue, and a detailed narrative of the tragic events at Columbine to promote critical thought about gun violence generally and school shootings in particular. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the vital that role video games can play in critical pedagogy.

“Faggots, Fame and Firepower”: Teenage Masculinity, School Shootings, and the Pursuit of Fame

This study of novels, films, and music dating from the late 1970s to the new millennium examines fictional and pop-culture presentations of school shootings, including the 1999 Columbine Massacre. The article also investigates notions of masculinity, normative heterosexuality, fame/infamy, homophobia, and violence within American culture. The fragility and uncertainty of proper masculine self-expression is unpacked and reimagined across a variety of texts, demonstrating how various authors have negotiated with the notions of teenage masculinity, belonging, isolation, and rage.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! and Grand Theft Autoethnography

Here, I use autoethnography, media accounts, and work in sociology to consider the popular video game series Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its abstraction of violence and social relations, and the formation of my Self. I also consider the video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (or Role Playing Game) as a deconstruction of cause and effect arguments concerning links between video game violence and real-world violence. I consider such games as sites for ideological reproduction, particularly of sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as for critical thinking about the social worlds we want.

A nation challenged: The impact of foreign threat on America's tolerance for diversity.

Three experiments investigated how perceived foreign threats to the United States can influence Americans' endorsement of assimilation and multiculturalism as models for foreign and domestic intergroup relations. The initial study, conducted during the 6-month anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (9/11), discovered that a diverse group of Americans preferred assimilation as a foreign policy and multiculturalism as a domestic policy. After reading that foreigners were supporting the dominant global status of the United States, however, Americans in Experiment 2 no longer expressed this preference for assimilation as a model for foreign intergroup relations. Experiment 3 discovered that Americans primed with 9/11 (i.e., a foreign threat) revealed higher levels of national identity than did those primed with the Columbine massacre (i.e., a domestic threat); moreover, level of national identity predicted support for multiculturalism as a domestic policy and assimilation as a foreign policy.

Application of Fad Theory to Copycat Crimes: Quantitative Data following the Columbine Massacre

Copycat crimes have traditionally proven to be hard to both identify and analyze, although it has long been known that they occur. The present study analyzed the copycat crimes that followed the Columbine massacre of 1999 in light of fad theory and found that a copycat crime is, essentially, a fad. The pattern of development followed a particular progression with variations on the initial incident and reached a peak, whereupon the number of copycat incidents dropped radically. This pattern allows for predictability of copycat crimes.

Extremity, Video Games and the Censors

Extremity, Video Games and the Censors

Lost boys: Why our sons turn violent and how we can save them

Violence such as that seen in Red Lake, Minnesota, USA, is an area in which many of us feel helpless, yet parents andothers may look to us for help in prevention – for ways to intervene early. Many of us have received little or no formaleducation about violence. Dr James Garbarino gave an outstanding talk at The Hospital for Sick Children in Torontofollowing the Columbine massacre and further provided Paediatrics & Child Health with his text for publication. With hispermission, it was adapted by Dr Haslam to provide an overview of Dr Garbarino’s keynote address. We hope to stimu-late you to learn more about violence and then work within your practice, your schools and your communities to helpsupport the “assets” for prevention that Dr Garbarino so eloquently spoke about.Drs Noni MacDonald and Elizabeth Ford-Jones, Co-Editors-in-ChiefDr James Garbarino currently holds the Maude C Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology at Loyola University Chicago.Previously, he held the Elizabeth Lee Vincent Professor of Human Development at Cornell University in New York.Dr Garbarino has served as consultant or advisor to a wide range of organizations, including the National Committeeto Prevent Child Abuse, the National Institute for Mental Health, the American Medical Association, the NationalBlack Child Development Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Resource Center for Children inPoverty, Childwatch International Research Network, the US Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, and theFederal Bureau of Investigation. In 1991, he undertook missions for the United Nations International Children’sEmergency Fund to assess the impact of the Gulf War on children in Kuwait and Iraq, and has served as a consultant forprograms serving Bosnian and Croatian children. In addition to his many other awards, the US National Conference onChild Abuse and Neglect honoured Dr Garbarino in 1985 with its first C Henry Kempe Award, in recognition of hisefforts on behalf of abused and neglected children. Among many books he has authored, edited or co-authored are AndWords Can Hurt Forever: How to Protect Adolescents from Bullying, Harassment and Emotional Violence (New York: The FreePress, 2003) and Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How we Can Save Them(New York: The Free Press, 1999).

An Unmitigated Disaster?

TUESDAY, 20 April 1999, was the date of the infamous Columbine massacre. On Friday of that week, a teacher found a threatening letter in the computer room of Brazosport High School, which is in Freeport, Texas.1 School officials suspected that a particular student had left the letter. They also knew that the suspect spent idle time at a group of picnic tables in the school courtyard, where 14 other students tended to congregate. Although these students hung there for lunch and traveled in the same social circles, most of them were casual acquaintances rather than close friends. On Monday, April 26, after an investigation, the school officials had the primary suspect arrested and charged with making terrorist threats. On Tuesday, April 27, as a continuation of the investigation, officers from the local police department entered the high school, at the behest of the school administration. The police officers rounded up the 14 students, frisked them, handcuffed them, and led them out of the building. They placed the students in police cars and transported them to the municipal courthouse. Neither the police officers nor the school officials gave any reason for the action, but the officers allegedly directed profane language at the students on the way to the court. Moreover, they threatened to place the students in the municipal jail, where they would suffer mightily at the hands of the inmates. On arrival at the municipal building, the police ordered the students to remain in the empty courtroom, under threat of five-year prison terms if they left. These confrontations and the detention took place without a warrant. After the students spent more than an hour in the courtroom, the police told them to telephone their parents and have them come to the municipal building. Once they had all arrived, the police and the school's principal hastily lectured the parents and the students, who were then allowed to depart. There was one exception. The mother of one of the students, Jeremy D., insisted that she could not wait any longer in the courtroom and had to leave with her son. Before allowing them to leave, a detective interrogated Jeremy as to whether he knew how to make a bomb. Jeremy said no, whereupon the detective proceeded to explain how to do so. The detective went on to say that he knew Jeremy had done nothing wrong and that the entire exercise had been a show of force, intended to impress upon the students that the authorities were monitoring them. The next morning, the principal convened a schoolwide assembly to explain the prior day's happenings. At the assembly, he pronounced the school free of terrorists and assured the students that they were all safe. He further informed the student body that no one should bother the students who had been arrested the previous day, as they had done nothing wrong. This admonition apparently had little effect. Some of the detained students complained of harassment by other students, such as accusations that they were planning a Columbine-style incident at the school. Jeremy twice received in-school suspensions as a result of his efforts to exonerate himself before the students in his geometry class. Having experienced several sleepless nights, like his fellow detainees, Jeremy fell asleep in class, only to be aroused by a glass of water thrown at him by his teacher. This led to riotous laughter, causing him further humiliation and embarrassment. When his mother met with the principal to complain about this incident, he urged her to have him transferred to another school or to home school him. Although Jeremy stayed the course, one of his fellow detainees opted for home schooling rather than face the daily pressures brought on by her unrelenting peers. On 15 February 2000, Jeremy and two others from the detained group filed suit in federal court. They claimed, in their amended complaint, that the school and police officials had violated their Fourth and 14th Amendment rights. …

Threats of school violence in Pennsylvania after media coverage of the Columbine High School massacre: examining the role of imitation.

Following the April 20, 1999, massacre at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colo, school administrators, law enforcement officials, and the media reported a rash of successive bomb threats and threats of school violence that were attributed to imitation. To establish that the clustering of threats of school violence following the Columbine massacre was initiated by imitation. A database of threats of school violence reported to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, Harrisburg, during the 50 days following the Columbine incident was examined to determine the daily frequency of threats. To determine factors that predict the occurrence of these threats, counties and school districts in which threats occurred were noted. Pennsylvania school districts reported 354 threats of school violence during the 50 days after the Columbine massacre, far exceeding the 1 or 2 threats per year estimated by school administrators before 1999. The frequency of these threats over time demonstrated a crescendo-decrescendo pattern. Fifty-six percent of the threats were made on or before day 10 after the incident, and more than one third occurred on days 8, 9, and 10. Factors that predicted the likelihood of a school's receiving a threat after the massacre included a greater proportion of white students and larger school enrollment. Successive threats of violence follow a publicized act of school violence. The media should recognize that imitation threats can occur and craft their stories accordingly.

Child Guidance and the Democratization of Mother-Blaming

adults do wrong? These questions dominated the news after the 1999 Columbine massacre, when two teenage boys opened fire in their suburban high school and killed fifteen people, including themselves.1 As mounting concerns about playground bullies, computer game junkies, and schoolyard shooters lead to frenzied discussions about why children go bad and how society can save them, Kathleen Jones's elegant study of child guidance is a cautionary tale. Taming the Troublesome Child weaves together a cultural analysis of ideas about children, an intellectual history of child psychiatry, and a penetrating discussion of the day-to-day workings of one of the nation's premier child guidance clinics, Boston's Judge Baker Guidance Center, from 1920 to 1945. It is a compelling analysis of the rise and eventual triumph of an exclusively psychological paradigm for explaining children's misbehaviorand a convincing argument for the limits of that paradigm as a solution to juvenile crime and family troubles, both today and in the past. The history of child guidance, as the psycho-dynamic framework for assessing children's problems and preventing delinquency was called, is conventionally studied as part of the professionalization of the child sciences and helping professions, and the philanthropic efforts of the Commonwealth and Rockefeller Funds. While scholars have illuminated many of the class and status issues that guided the founders of child guidance, they have been relatively uninterested in the dynamics of gender and age. By contrast, Taming the Troublesome Child, reflecting the influence of recent scholarship on welfare and women's history, emphasizes the gendered dimensions of expert authority and the client's role in its construction. Focusing on the Judge Baker clinic, Jones describes the creation of child guidance as a collaborative process involving multiple interactions between psychiatrists and social workers, therapists and patients, and parents and children. She also revises the

Seen But Not Heard

Seen But Not Heard