Thanks for the great discussion.

Will, I think you crystallized the problem with our public/media response to Columbine: Many of us shoehorned this tragedy into our existing agendas or preconceptions, consciously or not. We made it fit a model that explained something we needed explained, or accelarated the need for a solution to an existing problem.

By doing so, we whizzed right by the real drivers. What about teen depression? What about our criminally-poor understanding of psychopathy: what causes it, how to ID it, and how to treat it when we discover it? Psychopathy and depression were not the only factors in Columbine, but they were major factors, which have gone ignored.

As for The Basement Tapes, yes, I would love to see them. It used to frustrate me to no end that I had not, but I just had to let that go. (It also helped that those were well documented and Eric and Dylan made lots of other tapes, so I could still watch them.)

I'm not expected any Big Answers from seeing them, though. I'm expecting small nuances of understanding. I'm hoping, and expecting, that when I watch them, that here and there, some hazy elements of their personality will come into sharper view. That when I think about how Eric or Dylan respond to certain sorts of situations, I'll have a clearer example in my head. That's the most I expect to get. But you never know. Often I learn things in places I don't expect to, so the withholding of that information seems misguided.