According to today’s Inquirer report, Dillon Cossey (the overweight bullied kid I posted about before) has confessed to plotting a Columbine style attack:
A troubled 14-year-old admitted yesterday to plotting a detailed, Columbine-style assault on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School.
Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor said Dillon Cossey confessed he planned to use chains to secure the high school doors so occupants could not escape, fire a rocket launcher – which he did not own – and use a car as an “ammo dump,” an idea gleaned from a Columbine video on YouTube.
Cossey, who named his rifle “Reb” to honor Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, admitted in Montgomery County juvenile court yesterday to criminal solicitation to commit murder, risking a catastrophe, and possessing instruments of crime.
The plan was apparently to kill bullies at school, and what I find most disturbing about this case is not so much that Cossey admired Harris and Klebold, but his attorney’s claim that the psychotic Columbine pair are “heroes” to other bullied kids:
Although police did not find ammunition for the firearms Cossey possessed, his “severe social maladjustment” resulted in a frightening plan that could have ultimately been implemented, Castor said.
Castor said Cossey, who will now get the help he needs, admitted telling friends that he wanted to “kill bullies” at the Plymouth Meeting high school, but the teen told authorities he could remember only three times that he was victimized.
Farrell said his interviews revealed that Cossey was subjected to “protracted peer abuse,” something most victims are reluctant to admit.
“Klebold and Harris are heroes to kids who are bullied,” Farrell said, adding that such thinking is fueled by violent Internet postings. Dylan Klebold joined Harris in the Columbine massacre that left 13 people dead. Cossey created “a fantasy that was beginning to cross the line,” Farrell said.
“He’s very remorseful,” Farrell added.
Cossey waived the 20-day period for his disposition hearing to allow time for mental and physical evaluations that will assist the judge in selecting an appropriate rehabilitative program.
Tressler explained that the length of treatment will depend on Cossey’s progress.
I’m hoping the claim that Harris and Klebold are “heroes” to bullied kids is overwrought hype by the kid’s attorney, because if they are developing a cultlike status, it’s a disturbing development.
That’s because, if you think about it, on what basis is this Columbine hero cult to be condemned? Because they were murderers? And murder is bad?
Well, what about the Cult of Che Guevara? Klebold and Harris killed twelve people, while Guevara killed nearly 2000, including the witnessed killing of a 14 year old boy. And how about the Cult of Mumia?
I’m having trouble understanding how Che and Mumia can be heroes, but not Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
Not that everybody considers Che and Mumia to be heroes. Far from it. Fortunately, these are fringe cults.
But don’t they have a certain legitimacy? Put yourself in the position of a school principal, and suppose some admirer of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (yes there are groups like these) decided to wear a t-shirt with one of their pictures. Everyone would be horrified, right? The school would ban the t-shirts, right? But would they ban the Che t-shirts and the Cult of Che?
This is not a new problem. Oleg Atbashian wrote a great Pajamas Media piece about it, and included this:
Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?
In a twisted way, there’s a certain logic to it.
MORE: It’s probably worth adding that young people are not being taught that Che Guevara is a murderer. Far from it. They are being taught that he was a victim. Who only “wanted to help people“:
Annoying as the Che adulation is, a recent comment by a 14-year-old on an online movie message board was truly disturbing: “I just saw The Motorcycle Diaries, which further made me question: Why is communism bad? . . . Young people are told how bad communism is, but we are not told why. . . . The Motorcycle Diaries showed me how Ernesto Guevara wanted to help people. . . . But this did not explain why he was such a ‘bad’ person and apparently deserved to be murdered by the U.S.”
MORE: In a different context, Clayton Cramer argues that “hero” is “a devalued word in the news media.”
It’s a pity. But when villains are turned into heroes, when anti-heroes become heroes, heroes and heroism are annihilated.
UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and a warm welcome to all!
UPDATE (10/29/07): President Bush visited the Philadelphia area today for a fund raiser, and while here he also honored the 14 year old who blew the whistle on Dillon Cossey’s Columbine plan:
Lew Bennett III was credited by Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce Castor with helping to avert a potential tragedy after he told police on Oct. 10 that Dillon Cossey, 14, had acquired a semiautomatic rifle from his mother to use in a planned attacked on Plymouth Whitemarsh High School.
Bennett was in a line receiving Bush at the airport. They shook hands and Bush was seen putting his arm around the youth.
Castor said he gave Bennett’s name to Sen. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.), who apparently made the arrangements with the White House for Bennett and his parents, Lew Bennett Jr. and Terry Bennett, to meet the President.
“I told Sen. Specter that it would be a good idea if the president could recognize the young man, as a way to send a message throughout the country that it is a good thing to come forward to avert a tragedy,” said Castor. “I would hope others would step forward.”
I’m glad to see the kid getting official recognition for what he did.
Comments
16 responses to “when murderers are heroes”
On the other hand, Eric, I would submit that the one sub-issue in all these “bully-motivated” school assaults is the bully culture itself.
Yes, yes, we all know that committing a massacre is a bad thing, but if you want to look for motivating justifications, look to a school culture that thinks – and acts – as if the application of force by bullies is excusable. In that sort of milieu, why wouldn’t the victims make the deduction that greater force in response would be equally logical?
Sadly, sometimes teachers are not just enablers but participants in bullying activity – even if not physical.
The collapse of our educational institutions at all levels and the perversity of the MSM is just intolerable. For once in a very long time, there are plenty of heroes. Paul Smith, Jason Dunham and Michael Murphy should be household names, but there are many, many others. That this is not the case signals, at least to me, a serious decline, as in “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
For todays kids, especially the ones trapped in the dreary miasma of the endless suburbs, the option of throwing off the shackles of their present situation by going down and signing up is such a huge waste. The fact that for many kids, it is, apparently, a lesser evil to be a mass murderer than it is to be one of BusHitler’s minions speaks volumes.
Yet another reason to homeschool my child…
Unfortunately, home-schooling isn’t enough; the societal rot is everywhere.
Communism — directly responsible for the murder of unimaginably more people than the National Socialist Workers’ Party slaughtered in its 20-year existence — is still chic, hip and viable in a way Naziism is not.
From mainstream, major retailers like Barnes & Noble, to the streets of small-to-medium size American towns, teens to thirty-somethings sip lattes while sporting t-shirts emblazoned with the faces of communist thugs and mass murderers, and the symbols of the regime that fomented oppression and human rights abuses like the world hadn’t seen since the Dark Ages.
The pierced, tattooed and soul-patched moron who took my credit card had a hammer and sickle lapel-pin on his coat — just the kind of flair his managers wanted, I’m sure.
Oddly, neither he not his coworkers sported a swastika.
Strange, huh?
Listen carefully! Can you hear that? Nero is fiddling.
We’re doomed.
I’ve seen no evidence that Klebold and Harris were bullied. They’re not victims because others thought they were obnoxious. They WERE obnoxious. Dillon Cossey is a very obese boy who developed homicidal delusions. I’m sure he was rejected by other kids. But was he bullied? It would take a very mature teenager to pity and tolerate a boy like Cossey rather than treat him as a weirdo to be avoided.
Didn’t you know? After the Columbine killings, there were a rash of “tribute” Web sites created by other teenagers to Klebold and Harris, basically as heroes to all outcast kids.
Most of these sites have now gone away, but I will bet that if you looked, you could find some.
Definitely had to link to this post–especially since teachers at the school at which I teach sport Guevara t-shirts and hang his posters in their classrooms.
As someone who was bullied in 4th grade to the point of an attempted suicide, I can understand how the Columbine kids are heroes.
I don’t condone what they did, but I can understand it. And, sadly, it does make me happy when the popular kids get some payback.
Preferably a payback that mentally scars them as they scarred the bullied kids.
Also, it really should be remembered that often teachers aid the abuse.
All that said:
They are still murders.
If I was on their jury, I would have voted to convict them and probably for the death penalty too.
And I certainly don’t regard them as heroes. I regard them as stupid and foolish. Kids that strike back against their bullies are often punished for it, placed in jail, and then bullied and raped for years thereafter. At least they made sure they died, but they took an unnecessary chance.
But, I do understand what they did while disagreeing with it.
BTW, my parents moved me to a different school and the bullying stopped. But it did leave with an alienation and viciousness that my siblings don’t share.
Re bullying, Dan Savage wrote a column on Columbine titled “Clique…Clique…Bang!”
“Actually I had no problem fathoming Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s motives. While I didn’t suffer the extreme abuse some of my friends did, I was fucked with enough to spend four years fantasizing about blowing up my high school and everyone in it.”
Read the whole thing. (Your browser may complain about the security certificate.)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/247sww
Really? Really? You thought that he could get a rocket launcher, a car, chains and the ability to get them on clandestinely, ammunition, and an accomplice? Really? I’m starting to doubt that sanity of the police investigating this, much less their ability.
He was a weird kid who built plans to take over a school by force. I was a weird kid who built plans to take over a school by force. That doesn’t mean there was ever a danger of me doing it. Just getting accomplices was a non-starter, much less the helicopters, surveillance cameras and booby traps I thought I needed. On the other hand, it gave me the ability to look at things like Beslan and think rationally about it. (And yes, with even the possibility of teachers carrying concealed weapons, this sort of plot is a DOA.)
I don’t know if the kid is really unhinged one way or the other. I am certain the officials handling this are unhinged, though.
(I forgot the most important thing I was lacking in my plots: the will or desire to actually carry them out. It was a mental exercise. There were plenty of Red Dawn style exercises I ran through my melon too.)
“Cossey, who will now get the help he needs,”
Somehow I doubt that this “help” will involve protecting victims from bullies. It never did when I was in school.
There’s an elephant in the living room, and its name isn’t Cossey.
Important point: ideas are contagious and the idea of school killings is the problem. The media created anti-heroes of these turkeys, and its time that we recognised and rewarded their role in killings.
They have ackowledged the effect and now follw guidelines over suicide reporting; but the value in sensationalism makes them ultimately complicit in these killings.
And force multipliers for terrorists too!
I was an undersized kid, and I had problems with bullies in elementary and middle school. Then I entered high school and joined the wrestling team. That ended the problem, almost immediately. The most important lessons I learned were that predators exist, and that only I can protect myself from them.
Hence, I can sympathize with the kid’s hatred of his tormentors, but not with his plans for harming them. Daydreaming is one thing, gathering weapons and attempting to recruit accomplices is quite another. What kids need to learn about the Columbine killers is that their actions were wrong, and far disproportionate to whatever harm they suffered.
The real culprits here are Cossey’s parents. They’re both idiots of the first order for not finding a better solution than to pull him out of school, and for allowing him to have the weapons he had. I hope they both get the book thrown at them, and that their son gets the help he needs.
The true hero here is the potential accomplice who had the brains and nerve to report Cossey to the authorities, before any harm was done.
But aren’t most of our heroes murderers ? At least most of our nation builders are, right ? Washington, Lincoln and many others either killed in battle or ordered killings and battles. The main issues then become why they did it, who they killed, how they did it and whether they were for or against ‘us’ (however you define us).
I think Che Guevara is a reasonable hero, he seems to have had reasonable motives (you may or may not agree with those motives, but …)
I don’t think Klebold and Harris’s motives were good (revenge ?), who they killed (innocent students mostly, along with some bullies?), I think there are important differences.