Book Reviews: Comprehending Columbine

It is nearly a decade since the massacre at Columbine High, which took place in April 1999. Since then there have been several others, most recently in Finland. The research on the massacre, and on the media coverage of it, is already extensive: much larger than that on the massacre of women in 1987 at the University of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique (27 were shot, 14 died). The death total was the same in each case (15 including the killers who shot themselves), yet Columbine is famous and Montreal forgotten. Larkin does not mention Montreal at all, but he does provide a clear account of Columbine, its community and its consequences, drawn from published sources and interviews. The only relevant social science contribution he unaccountably omits is Ortner's (2003) thoughtful work, a retrospective study, on her New Jersey high school.

Larkin sets the Columbine shootings into a context under four main themes:

In this short review the focus is on the latter two themes.

In Friday Night Lights, Bissinger (1990) exposed the negative consequences for the American high school of the total lack of any local professional, semi-professional or good amateur sporting teams in most of the USA. Whereas in any other advanced nation people, especially men, in small towns would play sport themselves, and watch local teams of adult men who have lives outside sport, in the USA the high school teams become the obsessive focus of towns without colleges. Bissinger showed the negative consequences for the American football team at Permian High, who raped women, took steroids, cheated at their school work and found life beyond Permian High too hard to cope with. As the very successful school team in an economically depressed small town everyone had colluded to build them up into demi-gods with serious consequences for their morals, their long term health, their education and their mental stability, as well as letting them endanger their school fellows mentally and physically. Larkin's research shows the same happened at Columbine High. Star athletes were encouraged by staff to bully and harass other students, especially those thought to lack ‘school spirit’ or be anti-evangelical ‘sinners’. Larkin reports a chillingly familiar picture of the hierarchical cliques, the intolerance of diversity, and the relentless pressure exercised by the ‘leading crowd’ on everyone else in the American high school. Taken in the context of Ortner's work, which shows how American high schools have been like that for at least fifty years, it is surprising that more adolescents have not taken guns into their cafeterias and libraries.

In Columbine before the massacre one female pupil had taken out a restraining order to stop a footballer stalking her, and the school decided she should stay at home and the boy continue in the school. The boy, and some teachers, then labelled her as a devious liar. He was allowed to go to a university and play football there because the school told the university the matter was trivial. The parents of a Jewish student had to go to the police before the school stopped Rocky Wayne Hoffschneider, who was state wrestling champion at the time, and his friends, physically attacking the Jewish boy while making comments about ‘another Jew in the oven’ (p. 106). Larkin is describing a ‘jock-centred’ culture that is unimaginable in any other industrialised country.

The Larkin account of Columbine will be familiar to any sociologist of education. Perhaps less recognisable to non-American readers will be Larkin's other core theme: the rapid evangelical canonisation of Cassie Bernall. She was initially reported to have died testifying her belief in Jesus, and to have been shot because she was a born-again Christian. Her parents wrote a book – She Said Yes – which has sold over a million copies, and she is widely believed in evangelical circles to have been a martyr, shot by Satanists. The evidence is clear that in fact she died without speaking and that the two killers did not know her or her religious beliefs, and therefore did not target her as an evangelical.

Larkin has unearthed and set out a series of tensions between extremist evangelical protestant sects, other Christian churches, and those of other religions or none, both inside Columbine before the shooting, and, much more publically after it.

Everything Larkin has discovered about the tensions between evangelicals and others in Columbine suggests that among those who walked tall in the school proclaiming and enforcing their particular brand of intolerant Protestantism there was a good deal of hypocrisy. The evangelical in-crowd Young Life included ‘heavy partiers, drinkers, dope-smokers and sexual players’ (p. 105) as well as genuinely pious teenagers. Overall Larkin is convinced that by hijacking the massacre as an attack on themselves the evangelicals impeded any serious attempts to understand what, at Columbine, had provoked it.

Larkin's book is interesting, and he has succeeded in tracing many survivors and getting them to talk about the school and its culture. His location of the issues in ‘post-modern America’ seems odd. Larkin (p. 179) suggests that the American Hinterlands have produced a backlash against post-modern culture from those who are ‘rural, unhip and unsophisticated’. It is surely not a backlash? Those sectors of American society have never embraced the Enlightenment Project; have never accepted science, rationality or evidence. That is, they have never been modern, and certainly have no intellectual basis upon which to be post-modern. This sector of American society has been opposed to the elite culture of the east coast for two hundred years, rejecting its values when it was committed to the enlightenment project. The term ‘backlash’ suggests a changed response, but the people Larkin interviewed around Columbine have been in consistent and constant opposition to all aspects of the habitus of a coastal elite who live in a different America. Columbine is in an America which believes that Satan was embodied in those two school boys, and that only three of the dead (the born again evangelicals) went to heaven.