Have Columbine's lessons been learned?

Remember Columbine? Those of us who were living in Colorado at the time surely do. Robby Soave laments in Reason's Hit and Run blog that Columbine's lessons have not been learned.

The press, the public, and policymakers are often ignorant, and doing the wrong thing can be just as counterproductive as not doing anything. In the wake of Columbine, so-called experts completely misdiagnosed the causes of the crime, and they decided to implement "safety" policies that gravely undermined students' rights without making schools any safer.

On April 20, 1999, two teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, marched into Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, and murdered 12 students and one teacher. They had planned to use explosives to kill many, many more, but their bombs failed to detonate.

Desperate for answers, the media quickly seized on "bullying" as its preferred explanation: Harris and Klebold were unpopular kids who had been brutally mistreated by their classmates, until finally they snapped and decided to shoot up the school as an act of revenge.

The journalist Dave Cullen has done excellent work debunking this and other myths associated with Columbine. No, Harris and Klebold weren't notably victimized by bullying. No, they didn't want revenge on specific students—they didn't specifically target jocks, Christians, popular kids, or any other group of students during their rampage. No, they weren't part of a cult. Neither comic books nor violent video games nor goth culture were responsible for the attack.

Harris, according to Cullen, was a true psychopath: He enjoyed hurting people because he hated them and thought himself superior. Klebold was depressed and suicidal, and he largely followed Harris's lead. As Cullen wrote in Slate many years ago:

What [Harris] was really expressing was contempt.

He is disgusted with the morons around him. [His diaries] are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority.

Read more here.