When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people in Columbine, Colorado, the American psyche received the sort of blunt trauma that psychologists love to learn from. Except: nobody was looking. The focus, instead, was on the parents that failed the two boys, or the bullies that fomented their rage, or the music that inspired them, or the gun industry that enabled them, or the support networks that were underfunded and unobservant.

In COLUMBINE, Dave Cullen explores each of these themes, but the true genius of the work is in its overall coverage of that damaged psyche by delving into our reaction, as witnesses, to this event. There are two human traits highlighted by the book that go largely unnoticed, possibly because they are so pervasive, but more probably because of what they conclude.

The behavioral sciences have a tendency of explaining the general by exploring the obscure, of understanding the operable by probing the broken. The instruments of this field are often as crude as the tamping rod driven clean through Phineas Gage's skull, or the hook of the lobotimist.

These rough methods are necessitated due to ethical considerations, but also because of the difficulty in teasing out specific observations of a data set that surrounds. Human behavior is everywhere and interacting, creating a foamy maelstrom that makes studying individual bubbles impossible.

One of these unspoken truths is the human affinity for causality, that all things happen for a reason. And whenever possible, these reasons are assigned to other humans. A growing body of research now suggests that this combination -- the desire to link correlating events while anthropomorphizing them -- could have been beneficial in times long past. This alloy shielded pre-scientific humans with the knee-jerk and conservative homilies of "better safe than sorry" and "be afraid, be very afraid."

As time and science progress, however, and these rough links of causation are found to be more tenuous, the same tendencies go from survival benefits to harmful superstition (perhaps even the biological foundation of every world religion). What was once a safety mechanism now becomes a tendency to cling to non-truths (or to just settle on the first, best guess).

This societal behavior was evident in the aftermath of COLUMBINE, as an entire country felt the need to assign blame, and quickly. The other harmful trait on display was the immediate need for reciprocity. And with the real culprits dead, and tragically (in that it undermines a culture's blood-lust) by their own hands, Americans were left with the urge to strike out at something else. Anything.

Action committees formed. Bullying needed to be squashed in American schools. Music should be banned. Parents driven out of neighborhoods as failures. Gun-makers sued. The same desire to lash out blindly, to hurt, seen in Eric and Dylan's own writings can later be found in the opinions of those who find their actions inexplicable. It's too frustrating and tragic to be ironic.

It's troubling that this facet of Cullen's work -- arguably his greatest contribution -- is missed by the few that critique it. Those that accuse Cullen of not seeking solutions are really complaining because his prescriptions do not match their misguided home remedies. If psycopathy is, as recent findings indicate, as innate as the tendency to alcoholism and just as hereditable, our current solutions are worthless. There's a better-than-even chance that society is bleeding a patient in the hopes of making him better.

By pointing out our misplaced blame (the result of our superstitious trait) and our quickness to judge (our vengeance trait), Cullen attempts to ground our remedies in fact, a bitter pill many are unwilling to swallow. The truth could be this: human behavior is no less susceptible to innate variation than eyesight, height, or hair color. More and more studies are finding that nature trumps nurture (and even those that cling to the "nature-via-nurture" compromise usually move to this stance from their "nurture-only" biases).

Just as humans can be born with an ability to create a particular hormone, or metabolize a particular substance, or possess a deficiency in some part of their metabolism, so too can they be born without empathy or compassion. The elements of our mystical "spirit" have been located, scanned, and mapped. They vary just as any other body part. Clinging to our need for blame and revenge means we ignore the increasingly obvious: some people are ill-equipped to function normally in our complex societies.

As the evidence mounts, it looks more and more like we're putting blind people behind steering wheels and wondering why they keep totaling their cars. Psychopaths and sociopaths may be just as biologically disadvantaged, and by not accepting this, learning how to medicate or treat the problem, and stop assigning blame to every correlation, the people that take umbrage to Cullen's findings exacerbate a problem they claim to abhor.

There is hope. Recently, the medical field has learned to view autism as a scale of innate brain dysfunction and one that can be understood and assisted. Soon, perhaps, excess cruelty or a decreased capacity for empathy will be seen as a biological malformation. Until then, the world will continue to endure much suffering as it attempts to diagnose with superstition and heal via blood-lust, rather than accepting the findings of modern science and moving forward with open, unclouded minds toward a viable solution.