First Person Shooter

This past spring, I spent three days poring over Dave Cullen's account of the Columbine massacre. It became a bit of a guilty pleasure. I wasn't able to coerce many of my family and friends into reading it so that we could compare notes. I am not sure from whence my fascination came, but I know that even before that horrible April day in 1999 I have been interested in the psychology of the schoolyard killer.
This frustrates my wife to no end. She believes that we, as a society, owe it to ourselves to expunge the names and memories of these murderers from our collective conscious. She believes, and I think she may have a point, that any further attention paid to them and their ilk only serves to promote such behavior. The twisted notion of "outdoing Columbine" has become somewhat akin to breaking the school record for push-ups for sociopaths. And yet, each one of these sadly warped individuals was a child. Nobody thinks their baby will grow up to be a mass murderer.
Susan Klebold had "no inkling" her son was suicidal or depressed. She had no clue that her son was conspiring with another teenage case study to destroy their high school and everyone in it. At first, she feared Dylan had been shot at school, not that he was one of the perpetrators. After ten years, she writes in an essay published in this month's "O" magazine, she is still reckoning with what happened on that day. She had no way to reconcile the tortured and violent images in her son's journals. She says that first she had to deal with her son's suicide, and only then could she begin to contemplate how he could consider taking a dozen other lives.
I'm a parent, so maybe that's what keeps drawing me back. Or maybe it's because I was bullied in school, and wonder how these kids could have turned that rage outward to the degree they did. Perhaps I am a human being who can't understand how that switch gets flipped. The one that tells us killing is wrong. It's horrible when you're a grown-up, but exponentially worse when you are a kid. There is no reset button. It's game over.