BUY The Book
PeaceJam
How Young People Can Make Peace in Their Schools and Communities(Book Excerpt)
By Darcy Gifford
As a Columbine survivor, Richard Castaldo is forever linked with one of America’s worst tragedies. The media glare that remains consumed by all things Columbine sucked him up in its vacuum. Type in his name on the search engine Google, and thirty-six hundred Internet references instantly appear. He has been interviewed and photographed more times than he can remember. It’s a notoriety he never wished for but now can’t wash away.
One interview, however, proved to be quite interesting. The shooting left people grasping for reasons why it happened. Everyone wanted a clear-cut cause and effect. Early versions of the Columbine blame game was like a police lineup of popular culture culprits:
The video game Doom
The movie The Basketball Diaries
Provocative shock rocker Marilyn Manson
Manson had been scheduled to headline a concert in Denver on April 30, 1999, just 10 days after the shooting. It was canceled. Two years later, on June 21, 2001, Manson was slated to play at Ozzfest at Denver’s Mile High Stadium despite a storm of protest.
“People thought Manson’s lyrics contributed to Columbine, but I thought that was all nonsense,” Richard said.
An avid Marilyn Manson fan, Richard attended the concert and as he has been so many times, he was interviewed about his thoughts. When his pro-Mason quote appeared in the newspaper, it caught the eye of filmmaker Michael Moore, who was in town to interview Manson while taping his Academy Award-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine. Moore immediately sought out Richard.
“He came to my house the next day, and we starting talking about gun control and about Kmart,” Richard said. “He asked me if I knew that they [Klebold and Harris] got their ammunition from Kmart.”He didn’t.
According to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Report, Klebold and Harris fired 188 rounds during their rampage; 151 were from 9-millimeter weapons, including a TEC-DC9 assault pistol. Their weapons were purchased at gun shows, but the ammunition was obtained from local stores. One hundred 9-millimeter rounds were purchased from Kmart on the eve of the shootings. A twenty-two-year-old friend made the buy.
Moore enlisted Richard, Mark Taylor (who was shot at Columbine) and the much-maligned Brooks Brown (a friend of Harris) 1 and took the group to a Kmart store in Troy, Michigan, not far from the company’s headquarters. Brooks and Richard waited outside while Mark, a bullet still lodged near his aorta, approached the counter and asked the clerk for ammunition. All of it. Mark, then eighteen years old, showed a student ID and bought the store’s entire stock of ammunition. He left with over seven hundred rounds (including .22 hollowpoints and 9-millimeter). No questions asked.
Confronted by this and the imagery of the Columbine victims, Kmart swiftly agreed to stop selling handgun ammunition in its twenty-one hundred stores.
Richard is not anti-gun, nor is he a vocal activist regarding gun control issues.
“I’m not real extreme in my view about gun control,” he said.
He understands that people hunt. But several of his bullet wounds came from the TEC-DC9. As far as he knows, the only people who use assault weapons to hunt are the animated kids on Comedy Central’s South Park. And that, of course, is a parody.
“I’ve always been weird about the subject of gun control,” he continued. “The point is, they bought hundreds of rounds of ammunition. I mean they [sales clerks] can ask something.”
He then goes into a mock conversation, playing both the fictional clerk and buyer.
“What are you planning to do with this ammunition?” he asks in his best stern voice.
“Well, I’m gonna shoot everybody.”
He shakes his head, then pauses for a moment. A scar from a bullet hole is clearly visible on his left arm.
“What if I went to Taco Bell and ordered a thousand tacos?” he asks.
Think of Richard, in his brown Chevy van, cruising up to the Taco Bell drive-through and placing an order for a thousand tacos. Do you think they’d ask, “Hard or soft shell?” or “Why do you need a thousand tacos?”
The absurdity is not lost on him.
“I just want to do it to see what their reaction is,” he says. “Somehow, I think asking for the bullets seems more normal than asking for the tacos. It blows my mind.”
© 2004 Jossey-Bass
1 Brooks Brown and Eric Harris were best friends in grade school. Brown was in the Columbine High School parking lot when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold arrived on April 20, and Harris instructed Brown to leave the school grounds. In the aftermath of the shooting, some people wrongly accused Brown of having knowledge of the killers’ plan.
