An ER doc indicated in an interview that just about all victims had been shot 3 or more time.
Too much TV.
Once shot, you are easy prey for a second bullet. W/out care in minutes, you are dead or as good as dead. Heck, one shot is enough given the circumstances and delay.
Soon you will hear about how many could have been saved, which implies their deaths were not immediate.
That, and from what I understand, he had them trapped in crowded classrooms and shot most of them at relatively close range (i.e., 10-15 feet). Quite literally like shooting fish in a barrel.
Also, I haven’t heard anything on what kind of ammunition he was using. There are plenty of perfectly legal rounds that do a shocking amount of damage to a person.
Or go through one person and into the next.
Oh, Og, thats morbid. Sorry…
I’m guessing most of these guys planned a suicide above all – the mass murder is just icing on the cake, so to speak.
If you think about suicide, it’s the ultimate unnatural act – a person must overcome the most basic, powerful human instinct – self preservation. I imagine once you’ve gotten to this point – once you’ve genuinely decided to end your life once and for all, it’s not a huge leap to commit murder – even mass murder. Suicide is essentially self murder.
I wonder if it’s because, once you’ve managed the fundamental disconnect that permits you to perceive it as OK to execute a bunch of random undeserving strangers, you might just not be in a fit state to sufficiently value your own life as something worth preserving. If it doesn’t matter that you’ve killed 30 people, why should it matter if you kill yourself?
Or maybe they’re just fucked up in the head and people who are fucked up in the head do fucked up things.
I’d say thats about as professional as I need to hear at this point. Seriously, he was fucked up…period.
I’m reading now about how macabre his writings were in his creative writing class. His teachers are not surprised at all. That in itself is telling.
One bit that really struck home with me is this:
Underlining is mine. It’s possible this is early sociopathic tendencies, and that coupled with his writings and behaviour makes this whole thing, “just plain not that difficult to believe.”
With some of the shooters we’ve seen, we have uncovered evidence of premeditation: what they’d say, where they’d want to go, which targets they’d choose, and so on. I’m morbidly curious if they had any particular plans after that.
Wikipedia says the Columbine killers had elaborate plans to blow up the school with explosives and then take their rampage into neighboring houses. They discussed ways and means of hijacking planes and escaping into Mexico. One of them reported to his psychiatrist that he had been having suicidal and homicidal thoughts, but if they had planned to commit suicide and go out in a blaze of glory, they don’t appear to have written that in their journals.
I say it’s because they are cowardly little bastards who can muster up the “courage” to shoot at unarmed and helpless victims but lose their nerve at the thought the police might arrive and shoot back.
I would think the murders are the culmination of total failure in the person’s life. I was surprised by the fact that he filed down the serial numbers on the guns. That would suggest that he planned on surviving the event and evading police. Or it might have been an indication that he was paranoid.
In some cases, I think turning the gun on themselves is one last power play: they’re denying society the right to exact justice/retribution.
Others have said that there was wild laughter that they assumed was coming from him. But you have to stop thinking that people who have lost touch with reality look like loonies from the movies. They look like regular human beings. If he showed no emotion (before laughing), it could well be that he was at a place where all his plans had come to fruition and he was ‘calm’ because he was able to carry them out. Apparently, once someone has made the final decision to end his life, he’s often calm or even happy because he sees an end to his troubles.
To use a really, really, really mundane example, I always sort of felt these things are (on some level) kind of like something that happened to me a few times when I first started working. I would get an assignment, and think “oh, I can do that really easily, I’ll just leave it until later.” Then later, I would think the same thing, and put it off a little longer. And then finally, the assignment was almost due and I hadn’t done it, and only THEN did I realize that on some level that it was completely obvious all along that it required more effort and there was no way I could complete it, and it wasn’t because I had made an innocent mistake, but rather that I had willfully convinced myself it was a smart move. And it was a little bewildering, like “How did I get to this point?”
So not so much “oh no, I’m so guilty, I can’t live with myself,” but more like being caught up in the thing and then at some point coming to the unavoidable realization that this is The End of the Road. Nothing reasonable (from the point of view of a sociopathic gunman) is going to come of this.
They’re too cowardly to get shot at so they shoot themselves. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The speculation I’ve heard was that he planned to commit a more traditional murder, presumably with some sort of getaway plan, of the first two people he killed. After the first killings he then apparently decided to go for broke and went to the next building and went nuts, but my guess is that he originally planned to get away and wanted to delay the time it would take to trace the guns to him.
Well that didn’t work too well. They traced both handguns back to the respective gun and pawn shops in less than 24 hours.
Yeah, because he had the receipt. I wonder about that. I read that Klebold and Harris left a lot of previously well-hidden bomb and gun stuff in plain sight in their rooms that day, presumably because they knew they were never coming back (alive or dead). So why would he file off the serial numbers, but keep the receipt? The receipt might actually have been easier to trace.
All I can figure is, he saw himself as a character in one of his stories. File off the serial numbers because that’s what they do on crime shows. But the crime shows don’t talk about receipts. Maybe. :dubious:
Seems like he had an awful lot of ammo for that scenario to be true. I think the kid was just psychotic, and paranoia comes with that. There probably wasn’t a rational reason for the serial numbers to be filed off.
That is probably the reason though.
The reason they hate the people around them is because they’re afraid of the world, and feel weak. Going on a murder rampage is a sort of “taking back control”, but once their done they’re back to being afraid and now they’re looking at what they have to look forward to for the rest of their life. They’ll have less control of their lives than they did before, even. And now that they know how easy it is to die…
The talk about raiding the community and hijacking a plane after blowing up the school was pretty much just that, daydreaming and idle chatter. They didn’t actually have any plans laid out for for it, unlike the bombing and the shooting, which was meticulously planned out (although luckily, poorly executed). Harris had studied the occupancy levels of the cafeteria they rigged with bombs with so that they would go off at maximum capacity, and timed their cars to explode right when they calculated the first responders would get there. The guns were to shoot survivors and responders, and when the bombs failed to explode they made up the school shooting as “Plan B” on the spot.
As far as being suicidal, they knew they weren’t going to survive, whether gunned down by police or by their own hands. In the so-called “Basement Tapes,” they made several references to their impending deaths: