Looks like I made it to the end. Only 36 minutes over.

This has really been a pleasure. Maybe I should have said this before, but I’ve got a lot more material on my website, here: http://davecullen.com/columbine.htm

This has been the most energized I’ve been all week. Thanks to everyone for being so engaged. And thanks to Bev for setting all this up and Chad for being a wonderful host.

Bye.

I would love to talk to both sets of parents when they’re ready.

Hopefully this is already obvious without me saying it, but I love talking to students. They keep you on your toes! That’s a good place to be. I always come out of the experience enriched.

(Speaking of which–I hope this was as energizing for you all as it was for me. I’m getting hungry, but I’ve really enjoyed this afternoon.)

Columbine is one of those historic / emotional events that if you say the word – everyone knows what it means; but represents different things to everyone.

Thanks again,
Bev

A lot of the discussion of this book inevitably swings to the killers, which is understandable, because we really want to understand what caused this.

I felt that, too, and spent half the book on them. But the other half is about the victims and particularly the survivors. Eight of the ten main storylines are about the survivors. There is a great deal of hope in these stories, and redemption.

The past couple months, I’ve heard a lot of people asking whether the book is too tough to read, and I’ve been relieved to hear other readers responding. There is murder in this book, but there is also Mr. D. There is Patrick Ireland, tumbling out the second-story window on live national television with a shotgun pellet burrowed six inches into his school you made an amazing recovery–and who forgave the boys who shot him. That’s what got me through writing the book.

I think part of the problem here is terminology–which varies within subfields. While it is true that “anti-social personality disorder” is the diagnosis in the DSM-IV, and there is no official term for psychopath in there (for complicated reasons), all the leaders in the research of psychopathy who I spoke to strongly disagree with equating the two, and make a strong case.

Psychopathy is a tiny subset of ASPD.

I think you are correct that diagnosing Eric as ASPD is rather useless–indeed, many criticize ASPD as being a useless diagnosis.

When you look at the much more specific 20 criteria of The Psychopathy Checklist, it’s all Eric.