What Motivates School Shootings?

Dylan Klebold

While Harris filled his journal with furious condemnations of humanity, Dylan Klebold’s journal was full of poems and a deep longing for some type of human connection. “The world is the greatest punishment: life,” Klebold wrote in his journal. He’d been cutting himself to kill the pain that he blamed on his inability to get a steady girlfriend. To Klebold, love was the only path to a meaningful life. In a short poem, he wrote, “The true great person achieves happiness only when he has met his soulmate.”For all he craved human connection, though, Klebold didn’t see himself as human. He mused in his diary about when he “got covered up by this entity” that had taken over his body. In other entries, he called himself “a non-human” or a “god.” He was, he believed, “the God of Sadness.”He and Harris, Klebold said, were “conceived from ourselves and each other.” The rest of humanity were “zombies,” sent as “a test to see if our love was genuine.” “Time to die, time to be free,” Klebold wrote, days before the massacre. “Time to love.”