Like blaming evil, the copycat rationale is so empty that it doesnt ev — Mark Ames

"Yet whats missing from Cullens explanation is a context for Harris rage attack on Columbine High School. Even Hitler is given a context by serious historians- the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of Weimar Germany- whereas rampage murderers, like slaves once before them, are portrayed as having killed without reason. Their murder sprees were and are explained as symptoms of the perpetrators innate evil, or of foreign forces, rather than as reactions to unbearable circumstances."

"I dont know a single useful lesson that I or anyone else ever learned from getting bullied- it only brought shame and debilitating memories. Getting bullied always leads you to wrong decisions and wrong conclusions. You compensate in all the wrong ways. You wind up looking for someone weaker to bully yourself, you lose confidence and hate your weakness, and you fear and distrust the wrong people, all of which are reasons why bullied kids overwhelmingly wind up as failures in the real world, according to recent studies. You have to have never been bullied to think that it teaches something valuable and necessary and makes you a stronger person. Dr. Tonja Nansel, who worked on a 1998 World Health Organization survey on Health Behavior in School-Aged Children, showed that both bullies and the bullied develop far greater problems later on in life- bullied kids particularly have difficulties making friends, and suffer from lifelong loneliness."

"Cruel and callous when on top, afraid and smiling all the way to the grave when not- that pretty much sums up the post-Reagan zeitgeist. And if youre not just as cheerful as the rest, "youve got some personal problems." Youre a weirdo if you complain. Its your own fault if youre traumatized by a massacre. Its your own fault if youre poor. Its your own fault if you get downsized, overworked, bullied, and fail. Get over it."

"Slates Dave Cullen thought he had solved the why riddle in his article, "The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It", published on April 20, 2004, the fifth anniversary of the massacre. Cullen wrote, "[Eric Harris] was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something worse." Cullens breakthrough, like the Richmond Enquirers, is essentially this: Eric Harris murdered because he was an evil murderer."

"Another journalist, Joanne Jacobs, summed it up even more simply: "Evil, not rage" inspired the Columbine killers, she wrote. Well, that settles that!"

"One reason why our society has failed to curb bullying is that we like bullies. Hell, we are bullies. Research has shown that bullies are not the anti-social misfits that adults, in their forced amnesia, want them to be. Rather, bullies are usually the most popular boys, second only on the clique-ranking to those described as friendly, outgoing, and self-confident. The Santana High kids and parents both felt that there was no point in complaining to the administration because they wouldnt have done anything anyway, a reflection of the fact that popular winners are treated better than losers. At Columbine, parents and students both felt that bullies were favored by teachers and administrators, and that complainers were often ignored or blamed. Indeed, losers pay for being losers twice over in our schools, taking both the punishment and the blame."