Meanwhile, the architect of the Columbine killings, Eric Harris, was a classic psychopath. He was charming and manipulative.
He was a habitual lawbreaker: he stole, vandalized, bought guns illegally, set off homemade bombs, and at one point hacked into
his school’s computer system. He wrote “Ich bin Gott”—German for “I am God”—in his school planner. His journals were filled with
fantasies about rape and mutilation: “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my
hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to their heart.” A
school shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or someone who imagined that the world
brutally abused him or someone who wanted to brutally abuse the world himself.

The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected
and idiosyncratic. Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman), about
a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s “Liebestod”
aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of
Michael Carneal’s victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball Diaries.”

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of
shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their
“basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked
at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent
cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and
2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were
Columbine-inspired.