Columbine

Cullen provides an outline for Harris and Klebold’s plan-of-attack for Columbine High. He suggests that it would be “a safe bet that Eric and Dylan watched the carnage of Waco and Oklahoma City on television,” and that “those atrocities were particularly prominent in [their] region,” due in part to “McVeigh [being] tried in federal court in downtown Denver” (32).

Cullen notes that Harris and Klebold referred to the day they would attack Columbine as “Judgment Day,” and that the school “would erupt with an explosion,” with Eric having designed “at least seven big bombs, working off [a copy of] The Anarchist Cookbook he found on the Web.” Harris chose what Cullen refers to as the “barbecue design”: “standard propane tanks…packing some twenty pounds of highly explosive gas” (32).

Step one of the attack was to plant a decoy bomb three miles from the high school. This would be done to distract police from the attack on the high school itself. Cullen adds that Eric Harris’s possible other motive for this being the first step in the attack was that his accomplice, Klebold, “had been wavering” about carrying the attack out, and “the decoy would help ease him in” (32).