Making Sense of the Senseless

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What is much less clear, though, was what or whom Harris and Klebold were really gunning for. A few days after the massacre, another rumor surfaced that the boys had a hit list, and that they singled out jocks, minorities, and Christians. Yet evidence to contradict this interpretation abounded. While they had indeed generated a hit list, they did not hit anyone on it. Harris' writings do include admiration for Hitler, but they also contain denunciations of racists. They taunted nearly all of their victims as they approached them--suggesting that the name-calling and asking the girls about God mainly served their overall project of becoming everyone's own worst nightmare.

What appears to have driven them was a blinding, unfocused hatred. Believing that Harris and Klebold were gunning for specific target group was easier for us to accept; we know about the rising activities of hate groups already, we know ways to teach tolerance to youth. What can we do for kids for whom nothing and no one truly matters--not even themselves? We don't the answer to that.

It was also rumored that Eric Harris had modified a computer video game for the boys to rehearse their massacre. This involved the redesigning of the "Doom" game's virtual interface, adding new "levels" to the game, to look like Columbine High's layout and replacing the target monsters with images of his classmates.

"Word is," a widely-forwarded e-mail text said, "that the levels are starting to be copied and spread." According to a debunking of this rumor at

, Harris was an avid Doom player and did formulate and share modified games over the Internet. However, none of his modifications mimicked Columbine or classmates, according to a number of reporters around the country, including those at

, who downloaded Harris' versions in the days after the shootings.

Barbara and David Mikkelson, editors of the Pages, also sought out other Doom aficionados across the country who had played and saved "the Harris Levels." None had even heard about such modifications. The widespread desire to see violent computer games as the cause of the rampage will no doubt feed this and other rumors that blame games, popular music, and trench coats for the ruination of young minds.

In the end, though, the reason for the massacre comes down to that strange-sounding word: anomie. The term was first used by French sociologist Emile Durkheim at the turn of the century to describe an increasingly impersonal and transient world where the social threads tethering humans to one another on a collective basis have slackened or disconnected altogether.

To face this problem in our youth is to face too daunting a task for many, as it denies simple answers. Each of these urban legends of Columbine, however, enable tired but comfortable shibboleths that merely delay us from facing a complex reality.