The Trusty Servant

On Tuesday 20 April 1999, two pupils at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 fellow pupils and a teacher. They had made a large number of home-made bombs and started by planting two of them, but they failed to detonate. At 11:19am they started shooting with shot guns and semi-automatic carbines. The first cop arrived five minutes later, and had to call for reinforcements. A few minutes later they started throwing bombs, some of which exploded, but the deaths all seem to have been due to the guns. At 12:08pm they shot themselves dead shortly after the SWAT teams arrived. All their victims had been killed in the first 23 minutes.

By American standards it was not exceptional. It ranks after the 1927 Bath School disaster (45 dead), the 1966 University of Texas massacre (14 dead) and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (32 dead), although those were all at universities.

In March 2009 two UK pupils, Matthew Swift (18) and Ross McKnight (16) were arrested for conspiring to carry out a similar massacre on the tenth anniversary at their own school, Audenshaw, near Audenshaw reservoir at the junction of the M60 and M67 north of Stockport.

Little attempt was made to cover their tracks. Both plotters kept diaries with such gems as:

Unlike Columbine, my propane bomb will actually fucking explode and I will walk from classroom to classroom killing the fuck out of everybody, then maybe people will learn. [Swift]

72 + Swift + God and shitloads of dead people [McKnight, 72 was his own nickname]

McKnight also described the “Audenshaw Massacre” in a piece of “creative writing” for his GCSE homework, explaining how thousands would be injured and ten people killed.

The plot took shape over six months or so. Swift called it Operation Rainbow (for unclear reasons). He kept asking fellow pupils to help him buy ingredients for explosives over the internet. Periodically he would accost girl friends, or ring them in a drunken stupor, and tell them to stay away from the school on the big day.

Eventually one of these friends phoned the police and a major operation was launched. Their phones, email, instant messaging were all tapped. Eventually a month before the anniversary the police swooped. They found evidence galore:

*** a copy of the Turner Diaries (a 1978 novel by William Pierce about violent revolution in the US);

*** two DVD films about school shootings Elephant (2003) and Zero Day (2003).

*** a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook (a 1971 book by William Powell including recipes for making explosives, some workable, some not);

*** table tennis balls (a possible starting point for nitroglycerine), copper wire (another possible ingredient for explosives);

*** six mobile phone clips showing the plotters “experimenting with explosives”, including “detonating a pipe bomb” and failing to detonate a Molotov cocktail.

I did not follow this much until the jury acquitted the pair after a 45 minute discussion earlier this week. At that point I wondered whether they had been charged with one of the new terrorist “preparatory” offences. These are essentially designed to allow prosecution for thought crime. The concept is that it is too dangerous to allow a terrorist to carry out their plots, or even to get close. To protect the public, you have to arrest the plotters early, so early in fact that there may not be evidence of any crime in the traditional sense. So new thought crimes were invented.

The Crown Prosecution Service must have decided that this would not go down well in the case of two white British teenagers without any Islamic connections, so they opted for two traditional charges: conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions with intent to endanger life.

My attention, and perhaps the jury’s was caught by the video clips: “detonating a pipe bomb” turned out to mean setting a match to some powder extracted from a firework, and they must have been the only people in history who have failed to figure out how to ignite a bottle of petrol as it smashes.

Swift was old enough to spend 6 months in the highest security Category A prison awaiting trial, McKnight was confined in some kind of young offenders institution.

Clearly, they were somewhat disaffected teenagers, but we seem to be a strangely fearful society. Surely some combination of teachers and parents could have managed to deal with the problem in the early stages without involving the full state anti-terrorism apparatus. Interestingly, the jury managed to preserve their commonsense, even though the various authorities did not. I find that encouraging, even though I cannot help wondering what the outcome would have been if the pupils had been Moslems.