WHY?

James Holmes

I watched an interview with Dave Cullen on the news this morning. Cullen wrote the book on Columbine. After 10 years of research following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado, Cullen had this to say this morning:

“We know these two kids were loners, outcasts, members of the trench coat mafia who had been bullied for several years by jocks, and were acting out a huge revenge fantasy against those jocks... that's what we know, but every single one of those things is wrong.”

What Cullen discovered, mostly from personal journals, was that Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren't loners at all, and that most of the speculations about them reported on in those first few days after the shootings painted a very inaccurate picture. But by the time the real truth about the two had emerged, it was too late to correct the public perception. The early work done by reporters trying desperately to piece together a narrative of these two young men as “angry loners who hated jocks” was now “embedded in the public consciousness” and remains so today.

What Cullen is doing now, following the horrible shootings in Aurora, Colorado this past weekend, is urging journalists, and the public, not to jump to conclusions, rushing to explain the situation and the mind of James Holmes and why he would, and how he could, perpetrate such unthinkable acts of senseless violence, killing and wounding all those innocent people.   

It is certainly good advice not to jump to conclusions. That’s for sure. So why do we do it? One could argue that we do it because we are so desperate to understand and to know why. As the old saying goes, “desperate people do desperate things”, and that would include jumping to conclusions.

But I believe there’s more to it than that. We are desperate, but we are not just desperate to know why. We are desperate to come up with a ‘why’ that makes us feel better. We want people who do these kinds of horrible acts to be loners and misfits because we don’t want them to be like us. Can we be honest? We don’t watch the news just to find out what’s going on in the world. We want to know how wicked or how stupid someone else is. If I can confirm how messed up other people are, then maybe I won’t feel so bad about the stupid things I do or the wicked thoughts I have. I might not be perfect but compared to that guy, I’m a saint.

I’m not saying this is our total motivation, only part of it, but a part. We’re trying to escape being indicted ourselves by our own conscience. We’re in it for the validation! So we have to find something out about these people that separates them from us so that we don’t have to own them or their depravity. There has to be something that will put distance between us and them, and the farther the better.

But, that is not what the research shows. Here is what Cullen’s research showed him…

“This is what the mind of a mass murderer typically looks like... a deeply depressed kid who is conflicted, has a lot of love in his heart but also a lot of anger, a lot of self-loathing and is torn apart by this and doesn't know what to do with it and eventually plans and enacts some horrific act, sort of lashing out at the world.”

That doesn’t sound like a monster. It sounds more like a broken person living in a broken world. It sounds more like me! What am I saying? I’m not saying that people who commit such acts shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I believe James Holmes, if found guilty, should forfeit his life. What I am saying, though, is that such horrible acts should leave us with less a sense of personal judgment and more a sense of our own need to repent, because we don’t just live in a messed up world, we’re part of it. God help us.