Author dispels myths around Columbine

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Ten years after the Columbine High School massacre and six months after the publication of his definitive book on the subject, Columbine, author Dave Cullen still carries around copies of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s journals in his backpack.

Columbine is the story that Cullen has found hard to leave. It is the most infamous school shooting massacre in recent memory – or, at least it was until the shooting spree at Virginia Tech in 2007 – and Cullen has spent a decade trying to decipher the truth and toss out the mythology around shooters Harris and Klebold. And, as his stories show, Cullen's own understanding of Columbine evolved over time.

Here, Cullen talks about his book and its lessons:

Cullen’s session at the Texas Book Festival was one of the best received, especially among those who have followed the facts surrounding the Columbine shooting. On an April day in 1999, Harris and Klebold attempted a massive terrorist plot to bomb their own high school, a plot that failed because the bombs did not go off. Before Harris and Klebold turned the guns on themselves, however, they had killed a dozen classmates and a teacher at their upscale suburban high school.

The event was so raw and painful in the minds of those close to it that it was seven years before security camera footage from inside the school's cafeteria was released. The library on the school campus, where most of the students were injured, was never used again. And it took a decade before Klebold’s mother made her own statement.

In the festival tent where he signed books, Cullen pulled a dog-eared copy of Harris and Klebold’s journals from his backpack, so a group of Dallas-area English teachers could decipher the scribblings of the shooters and talk to Cullen about the difficulty of determining whether a student’s journaling is simply self-exploration or something more. It's a subject that Cullen has explored in both his book and his own writing for various publications.

Cullen, who had just started writing for Salon when Columbine happened, was on the scene soon after the initial shootings and has published various updates and accounts in the last decade. As the stories began to accumulate, he told readers at his book signing, it was obvious the story would not be one he would leave. Even today, his book is being shopped for a potential movie, and Cullen anticipates participating in writing any screenplay.

The Columbine shootings, more than any other school violence incident, changed the landscape on school safety, pushing states like Texas to get serious about school safety. The Texas School Safety Center, on the Texas State University-San Marcos campus, for instance, was created in the wake of the Columbine shootings. Texas schools now are required to have school emergency plans, although the teachers at the book festival said a lack of knowledge and training still left many teachers ill-equipped to determine whether a student was an actual threat to his or her classmates.

Ten years after the fact, Cullen’s book discards many of the myths surrounding Columbine, from the early theorizing that the shooters were part of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia to the suspicion the two were targeting specific groups of students. Even the most popular myth of Columbine -- the Christian witness of Cassie Bernall before she was shot to death – was most likely false, Cullen uncovered in the reporting of the incident.

Cullen’s book was a New York Times bestseller published by TWELVE. Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor-in-chief at TWELVE, is the former editor-in-chief at Random House. TWELVE, which also published Edward Kennedy’s autobiography, focuses an intense marketing effort on only 12 books a year, one a month. Of the 30 hardcover books published by TWELVE, half have made the New York Times bestseller list.