Columbine's Most Wanted: What

the Mainstream Media Failed to Tell

After April 20, 1999
By Mark Ames ( editor@exile.ru )

This issue is printing up on April 20th. For over 50 years this day was notorious as
the anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birthday. It was one of those days that made the
Normals nervous, while a faction of nerdoids could be counted on to celebrate it, as
if by celebrating Hitler's birthday, they would acquire some of his anti-nerdoid,
mega-evil powers.

Seven years ago, something far more powerful and seductive gave this day new
meaning: Columbine. On April 20, 1999, students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
attacked their high school, slaughtering twelve students and a teacher, wounding
20 more, before finally committing suicide. They'd armed themselves for a much
wider assault - along with a TEC-9, a Hi-Point 9-millimeter carbine and two
shotguns, they rigged up 95 explosive devices - enough firepower to wipe out their
school and slaughter hundreds of students, had they gone off. Among the bombs
were forty-eight carbon dioxide bombs, or "crickets," twenty-seven pipe bombs,
eleven 1 1/2-gallon propane containers, seven incendiary devices with 40-plus
gallons of flammable liquid, and two duffel bag bombs with 20-pound liquefied-
petroleum gas tanks. Had they survived, they planned to hijack a plane and crash it
into New York City, "firing all the way down."

Every fake attempt to understand "why" Columbine happened has always turned
into an act of willful self-deception. At first their parents were blamed. But then we
learned that both grew up in two-parent homes, and both openly loved their
parents, even apologizing to them in video diaries. As Harris noted, quoting
Shakespeare's The Tempest, "Good wombs hath borne bad sons." Then the Internet
was blamed, Doom was blamed, violent movies, the NRA, lack of religion:
everything was blamed except the most obvious cause of the attack: Columbine
High School.

And what a horrible place it was - and is. After the massacre, numerous parent,
students, and ex-students went public about the school's "toxic" culture of brutality.
Students were routinely beaten, assaulted and humiliated right in front of the
teachers and administration, whose jock-principal not only tolerated it but loved the
bullies. As one jock from the Columbine High football team bragged after the
massacre, "Sure we teased them: If you want to get rid of someone, usually you
tease 'em. So the whole school would call them homos."

Officially, Columbine is not a suspect in the crime. Yet it has continued to see
unprecedented white upper-middle-class violence. A year after the massacre, two
Columbine students were killed across the street from the school in a Subway
Sandwich shop; a boy on the basketball team committed suicide (as did one of the
victims' mothers); and two students were caught a couple of years ago with a list
they'd drawn up of Columbine students they were planning to massacre.

Indeed on forums around the web, Harris and Klebold are literally heroes to
thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American kids. There have also been
numerous school massacres and planned massacres since 1999 where the
perpetrators referenced Columbine as their model. Every year, as April 20th
approaches, the number of plots exposed soars. Recently, school massacre plots
were uncovered in Reno; Platte City, Missouri; and Tacoma, Washington, among
others.

All major crimes, particularly unusual crime waves like school and office massacres,
have a larger socio-political context, although we're still at the stage where we
refuse to recognize this possibility in white middle-class schoolyard massacres (and
office massacres).

But just blaming "the schools" is like blaming "the System." All crimes also have
human villains as well, and we owe it to them to out these villains.

Today is the seventh anniversary of Columbine, and I think it's time we honor this
day by doing something constructive, something positive. It's time to seek justice.
And that means naming these villains, the willing little Nazis who destroyed Klebold
and Harris, and whose viciousness eventually led to a massacre.

I present to you the swine of swine, former Columbine wrestling champion Rocky
"Dusty" Hoffschneider. Harris and Klebold's hatred of Hoffschneider was obsessive -
indeed most kids there hated him. But he was popular and a state champion. Which
meant that when, for example, he shoved his girlfriend into a locker right in front of
a teacher, the teacher looked away and let it slide. He also tormented a Jewish
student, singing pro-Hitler songs and yelling out "another Jew in the oven!" every
time the student scored a basket during PE. He pinned the kid to the ground and
gave him "twisters," bruising his body. And then he started threatening to burn the
kid alive. The student's father complained, to no avail - the PE teacher was also
Hoffschneider's wrestling coach. Eventually the Jewish kid transferred to another
school, the parents blaming the administration for shielding their star jock, while
Hoffschneider continued bullying his way up the social ladder.

Hoffschneider enrolled in Columbine in 1996 after he'd been thrown out of a private
school for fighting. He had a previous criminal record: an arrest for criminal mischief
in 1992, and another arrest in 1995 relating to a "missing person," the details of
which are sealed.

Now remember, in the aftermath of Columbine, Klebold and Harris have been
repeatedly compared to Hitler (even though Harris explicity denounced racism and
Nazis), while Hoffschneider, a violent, cruel, girlfriend-smacking, anti-Semitic fuck,
has gone on to become a successful jock at Wyoming University, pampered all the
way by a society that loves its spirted Nazis, and hates those who "have no school
spirit," as one Columbine wrestler's father put it, explaining why Klebold and Harris
were justifiably tormented as students.

Today, Hoffschneider is a top NCAA wrestler who was ranked as high as #11 a
couple of years ago, before injuring his shoulder (hint-hint!). If you click on this web
site, http://wyomingathletics.cs tv.com/sports/m-
wrestl/mtt/hoffschneider_dusty00.html you can see the pig as he is: a neckless Bush
Country meathead. His bio says that he's majoring in Sociology, that ol' refuge for
the very stupidest of the most mentally-challenged jocks. Oddly, the biography
leaves out his greatest achievement: "Incited worst high school massacre in
American history."

Rocky Hoffschneider may be a symptom of some larger evil, but he is also a

perpetrator, a willing, enthusiastic executioner. We have given you his name and
his general whereabouts. Now I'm asking readers to hunt him down and find out
where he lives, so that we can publish his address here in the eXile. If you do, you'll
get a very sweet prize from us, I assure you.

I'd also like to ask readers to consider what justice would be appropriate, and send
in your entries. I can't call for something like physical harm or property damage,
although I would certainly UNDERSTAND it. Remember, Rocky is a big, mean hog,
but he's also an incredibly stupid, evil piece of shit. That means he's got
vulnerabilities wider than the Maginot Line which you can exploit. The goal is
justice. Let's ride the fucker straight to alcoholism and anti-depressants. That is the
best way to mark April 20th.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From
Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, published by Soft Skull
Press.