No Easy Answers

The Columbine High School massacre was a school shooting and attempted bombing committed by two Columbine students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, on April 20, 1999. After smuggling a number of improvised explosives onto campus, most of which failed to operate, Harris and Klebold shot and killed twelve students and one teacher before turning the guns on themselves.[2][3] At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in American history.[4] The Columbine shooting had significant effects on education, policy, copycat crime,[5] and media and cultural portrayals of school violence.[6][7][8] Columbine impacted policy around school security,[9][10][11] active shooter response protocols,[12] anti-bullying policy,[13] and religion in schools.[14]

Brooks Brown, a fellow student at Columbine, had been close friends with Klebold since elementary school.[15][16] He was the son of a real estate agent who had purchased a house in the Jefferson County Public Schools district due to its good reputation. Brown and Klebold met in the first grade at Normandy Elementary School, where harrassment from a teacher inspired them to transfer to an academic acceleration program at a different school in the district; despite their parents' expectations, they faced more bullying at this school than their previous one. The Brown and Klebold families became close, and both boys spent much of their time with one another both in and out of school.[17] Brown and Harris became friends in their first year of high school, but their relationship was more chaotic; a temporary falling-out led to Harris making death threats towards Brown and his family. They repaired their friendship a short time before the shootings.[15]

Brown faced pervasive bullying throughout his school years.[18][19][20] He felt coverage of the shooting underrecognized the role which bullying played[15] and that others at Columbine were attempting to "rewrite history" by downplaying the hostility present at the school.[21] Brown also believed that the shooting was preventable, and that authorities had ignored warning signs. A year prior to the massacre, Brown's parents had reported threats made by Harris against their son to the Jefferson County sherrif's office. Though these threats were not investigated during Harris's lifetime, they were used as grounds to obtain a search warrant of his home following the shooting. No Easy Answers was co-written by Brown and Rob Merritt, then the editor of Marshalltown, Iowa's local newspaper.[15]

Columbine High School in 2008

No Easy Answers is divided into two sections of eleven and twelve chapters respectively. The first section, "Columbine", revolves around the background to the shooting. The second, "Aftermath", focuses on the event itself and the following investigation. Within chapters, the book switches between Brown's first-person narrative and Merritt's reporting of the facts which back it up; the latter sequences are in italics.

The book begins with the basics of the shooting, then the media response, which Brown posits presented it as "the work of two sick, deranged kids who represent nothing more than the work of the devil, or of violent video games, or just aberrations in an otherwise perfectly civilized high school".[22] He criticises responses to Columbine based around media violence or gun control, arguing that the former represents an existing demand for such works rather than producing one, while noting that Harris and Klebold were already unable to legally purchase weapons in Colorado. Brown then attacks coverage that focused on the shooters' parents, seguing into his family's relationship with the Klebolds.

Brown recounts his experiences growing up with Dylan Klebold. The two met in the first grade and became close friends through elementary school; though they eventually ended up at different schools, due to pervasive bullying that led the Browns to transfer their son, their families remained close. Brown draws particular attention to Klebold's mother's antipathy to violence; she prohibited her son from playing with toy guns, and was skeptical about letting him play violent video games. In middle school, Brown and Klebold drifted apart due to the structure of their school placing them in different classes. Both reportedly faced significant bullying, which Brown retells his first-hand experience of. He juxtaposes their reactions to bullying; though Brown rebelled openly against his parents and classmates, Klebold reportedly bottled up his emotions.

Brown met Harris, whom Klebold had befriended in middle school, after the three of them started high school at Columbine. He discusses the social environment at the school, which he felt "worshipped the athlete"[23] and created a strict hierarchy. Throughout No Easy Answers, Brown presents a narrative of extreme social hostility towards unpopular or nonconformist students. He proffers examples such as students openly beating up others in the locker room; racial and ethnic hostility, such as repeated Holocaust jokes against a Jewish student; and a practice where seniors would pour oil on the floor and push freshmen on it, which was ultimately prohibited after a girl broke her arm. In 1998, following attacks like the Thurston High School shooting, students at Columbine reportedly joked that their school would be "next" for a mass shooting due to the prevalence of bullying.[24]

In their junior year, Harris and Brown fell apart after Brown stopped driving Harris to school. Harris began scheming against his former friend, such as vandalising a mutual friend's house and claiming it was Brown's doing. He also made death threats against Brown on his personal website, which also discussed his homicidal ideations and attempts at building pipe bombs. Brown showed the website to his parents, who made a police report. While a search warrant was drafted for Harris' house, it was never submitted to a judge. Brown refers to this throughout the book, arguing that the shooting could have been prevented if the police had acted earlier. The two ultimately repaired their friendship in senior year, by which point Harris and Klebold had long established their plot. Brown juxtaposes this with the common focus on short-term warning signs, arguing that this was "too late"[25] to prevent the shooting, which had been mostly planned months before.

In the second part of the book, Brown recounts his experiences with the media and the police investigating the shootings. When talking to the media in the aftermath of the shooting, Brown focused on bullying and the degree to which he considered the school itself "responsible for creating Eric and Dylan".[26] He criticises commentators who downplayed the intensity of the school's environment and attempted to present the shootings as an outlier. Brown dedicates a chapter to Rachel Scott, another friend of his and the first student killed at Columbine. He describes the school's religious environment as hostile to non-Christians, including to his own Taoist leanings, but distinguishes Scott as "def[ying] every expectation [he] ever had of a Christian";[27] Brown castigates attempts to view Columbine through an ideological lens, such as Christian coverage of the deaths of Scott and Cassie Bernall, or accusations of racism in the shooting of the one black victim Isaiah Shoels.

No Easy Answers admonishes John Stone, the sheriff of Jefferson County at the time of the shootings. Stone presented Brown as a suspect, arguing that Harris and Klebold must have had help setting up bombs at the school; Brown felt this was an attempt to discredit his statements to the media, including his claims to have filed a police report against Harris. He draws attention to the disruption Stone's claims had on his life, including suspicion from people who already felt his friendship with Harris and Klebold implicated him. By May, Stone had stepped back from publicity amidst criticism about his "sometimes ill-considered"[29] statements. Three years after the shooting, evidence emerged that the Brown family's police report had been used as grounds to obtain a search warrant of the Harris family's home following the shooting. Though this exonerated Brown, it also revealed the report had been ignored during Harris's lifetime.

At the close of No Easy Answers, Brown overviews his life following the shootings and efforts to understand it. The book closes on the graduation for the Columbine class of 2002, the final cohort of students to have attended in 1999. He describes the path his life had taken to that point, along with the continued impact of Columbine on the local community. Though Brown criticises the community's and authorities' handling of the situation, he remains optimistic about the potential to move forward.

No Easy Answers presents bullying as the proximate cause of the Columbine shooting.[18][30][31] Brown criticises frameworks where the attack was spurred by cultural factors such as violent video games or media, as well as ideological interpretations such as the presentation of victims like Rachel Scott and Cassie Bernall as Christian martyrs.[32] The version of Columbine High School depicted in No Easy Answers is "nothing short of horrific", with severe and persistent bullying aided and abetted by authorities. Brown contrasts this with some statements by other students and teachers in the shooting's aftermath, who—from his point of view—downplayed bullying and depicted Columbine as a healthy social environment.[18][32]

Analysts of the book have compared Brown's statements with those by other students that admitted to and defended bullying. Evan Todd, a football player at Columbine who was wounded in the shooting, made a statement to Time Magazine that the school was a "clean, good place except for these rejects", who were "a bunch of homos, grabbing each other's private parts" and deserved bullying as subjects of "disgust". Todd presented bullying at Columbine as a positive, arguing that students who were queer-coded or socially nonconformist deserved mistreatment. Anne Mahler, a Ph.D. candidate at University College Cork, viewed Todd's statements as supporting Brown's thesis.[19]

A large share of the book revolves around Brown's experiences with John Stone, the sheriff of Jefferson County, Colorado, who attempted to implicate Brown as an accomplice to the shooting. Although the sheriff's office was aware Brown had made a report against Harris in 1998, and had used that report to draft a search warrant for Harris's house, they claimed otherwise in public and "campaign[ed] to discredit" Brown's statements.[32] Terrance L. Peterson and John H. Hoover, respectively professors of educational psychology and special education at St. Cloud State University, argued in a review that the investigation "complicated [Brown's] ability to manage his anguish". They presented this focus as an attempt by Brown to transfer his feelings about the shooting from Klebold to Stone. Peterson and Hoover also posit that a generation gap complicated the investigation of Brown's report, with authorities failing to recognize the seriousness of Harris's online threats.[18]

As implied by the book's title, it ultimately does not ascribe a clear narrative to the shootings. The book is primarily reflective rather than focused on factual reporting; it focuses on Brown's and Klebold's lives, with Harris portrayed as more "shadowy" and "enigmatic". Peterson and Hoover describe No Easy Answers as "meaning-making", conceptualizing it as essentially part of a public grieving process rather than as an attempt to conclusively explain Columbine.[15][18][30]

No Easy Answers was co-written by Brown and Rob Merritt, then the editor of Marshalltown, Iowa's local newspaper. Merritt, who focused on education-related reporting, met Brown online after becoming "fascinated" with the Columbine shooting.[15] It was published in October 2002 through the nonprofit organization and publisher Lantern Books.[33][34]

Reviews following the book's release called attention to its content and style; a staff writer for Publishers Weekly compared Brown's conversational prose to "as if he were being questioned by a talk show host".[33] John Green at Booklist criticised the work's "fiber-hip slang and occasionally awkward phrasing", but nonetheless praised its "harrowing story",[31] a focus of many reviews. A number of critics referred to the title of No Easy Answers as an accurate summation of the book's contents,[18][32][35] with Peterson and Hoover in particular referring to the book as more of a process of grieving and "meaning-making" than an attempt to conclusively explain the Columbine shooting.[18]

Brown's focus on the prominence of bullying at Columbine was the subject of attention. The crime journalist Alan Prendergast, writing for Denver-based publication Westword, stated No Easy Answers "paints a grimmer picture" of the school's social environment than its teachers and authorities would admit to;[32] Peterson and Hoover called the book's description of the school "nothing short of horrific".[18] While reviewers made note of the prominence of bullying in No Easy Answers, several argued that it was insufficient as a full explanation. Violence prevention researcher Paul M. Kingery argued in Youth Today that Brown's narrative failed to address the role of politics in mass violence, believing that underfunding of social services, inaccurate monitoring of school violence, and a lack of recognition of students' rights to due process played underrecognized roles.[35] Peterson, who had worked with survivors of the 2003 Rocori High School shooting, felt the idea that bullying was the sole element of either Columbine or Rocori was an oversimplification of complex factors.[18]

No Easy Answers was one of the first books to analyze Columbine, later the subject of thousands of works.[36] It was published when Brown was 22 years old; at the time he was reportedly "struggling", having chosen not to attend university and experiencing difficulty holding down a stable job. Following the book's publication, Brown began speaking publicly about the Columbine shooting, including at conferences; he reportedly considered writing a second book.[15][20][32] No Easy Answers was the subject of significant early post-Columbine attention and is believed to have influenced later works on the subject.[36] It was recommended by Teen Newsbreak, a youth offshoot of the nationally popular Parade magazine.[37] In the mid-2000s, Brown stepped back from talking about Columbine.[38]

Since the release of No Easy Answers, many authors less directly linked to the Columbine shooting have written analyses of it. Peterson and Hoover, in their contemporary review, stated that "more detailed and certainly more detached" works on the event were necessary to come to a fuller understanding of why and how it happened.[18][36] The role No Easy Answers plays amongst works analysing Columbine is socially and subculturally dependent. Members of online communities for people with personal or sociological interests in the shooting, often referred to colloquially as "Columbiners", frequently deem No Easy Answers a superior explanation of the shooting to that offered by works such as Columbine by Dave Cullen. Reasons ascribed include the more personal connection offered by No Easy Answers, along with a belief in its greater factual accuracy.[39]