ABSTRACT
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered their school, Columbine High in Jefferson County, Colorado, and shot to death 12 students and one teacher, while injuring 24 other students. Moments like Columbine, as the massacre has come to be called, can be turning points for cultures, with the responses to a disaster sometimes more significant than the disaster itself. Condemning Klebold and Harris as an anomaly made them the scapegoats for an unconscious feeling in the country that it is not standing on the moral high ground it has always wanted to believe it occupies. This is a theme that runs through modernity's plague of random shootings and random terrorist actions. There is considerable evidence bullying was a problem at Columbine High before the massacre. Marginalized masculinity appears to be a factor in the outbreak of school and other random shootings in the US. At the core of a cultural complex is an unconscious archetypal identity.
