Plenty of blame is going around in the aftermath of Harris and Klebold's rampage at Columbine, which left 12 students and a teacher dead. Police have blamed the parents. Some parents have blamed police and the school. And others are questioning a judicial system that saw nothing more than a pair of polite, contrite teen-agers. So much about Harris and Klebold is still unknown.
Problem is, no one saw it all.
When Harris and four others walked into Mel Bernstein's El Paso County gun shop in the first week of March, he sized them up as punks. We can't call the cops every two seconds on a hunch. Bernstein didn't know that Harris had been arrested with Klebold a year before, that they had just been released from their juvenile diversion program. When the diversion officer had looked at Harris' and Klebold's performance in their community service and counseling programs, he described the pair as bright young men likely to succeed. But the officer didn't know that Klebold's prom date had bought weapons at an Adams County gun show about four months before.