My son, the Columbine high school shooter: ‘a mother is supposed to know’


Sue Klebold - A Mother's Reckoning

I was hearing an NPR podcast on Forgiveness. Sue Klebold’s son Dylan and his friend were responsible for the Columbine massacre. Sue has been living with this tragedy for the last 18 years. In her book A Mother’s Reckoning, she talks about being judged as a bad parent, trying to find why her son did what he did and how has the 1999 incident affected her.

The most controversial element of the memoir, however, is what it asks readers to do with their notions of Dylan. At the time of the shooting, Sue Klebold worked in the same building as a parole office, and often felt alienated and frightened getting in the elevator with ex-convicts. After Columbine, she writes, “I felt that they were just like my son. That they were just people who, for some reason, had made an awful choice and were thrown into a terrible, despairing situation. When I hear about terrorists in the news, I think, ‘That’s somebody’s kid.’”

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Emma Brockes — The Guardian

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How school shootings catch on


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An article by Malcolm Gladwell on school shootings.

School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

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Malcolm Gladwell

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