NEW YORK – A play that is soon to open off Broadway in New York City about the Columbine killers has a limited engagement of only about a month.

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It’s likely not many people will see ‘The Erlkings,” a production about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the days before their killing spree took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999.

Of all of the infinite topics that Nathaniel Sam Shapiro could have used for the subject of a play, he chose this tragedy, which is still etched in the minds of many. Shapiro, a Brown University graduate who earned a master’s in play-writing from New York University in the spring, says he studied the killers’ chat-room logs, homework assignments and teacher’s notes and diaries to come to his conclusion that Harris and Klebold were just a couple of troubled teens, not the monsters that everybody thinks they were. Really?

In case you’ve forgotten, these two “troubled” teens shot and killed 12 of their fellow students and a teacher and wounded 24 others. I was a news director for a radio station about five miles from the school at the time the shootings took place and had access to a lot of information during and after the massacre. Additional information came out about the perpetrators for weeks following. I’ve come to the conclusion that those two were just evil.

Reports were that they were gleefully shooting people in the school library, laughing at the carnage they were creating. They wanted to kill as many as they could. They tried to explode a propane tank in the cafeteria, but thankfully that failed. Estimates are that another 300 could have perished if the tank had blown up. Police found roughly 30 bombs the killers had made and placed inside and outside the school. They had been planning and preparing for well over a year. As so many of these narcissistic killers do, they finally took their own lives in the school when they couldn’t find anyone else to shoot after the building had been evacuated. Not just a couple of troubled teens that somebody just needed to reach out and touch.

There’s not much information about playwright Shapiro online. That’s probably because he hasn’t been at it very long. But I didn’t see where he’s earned a degree in psychology. Yet, he’s come to the conclusion that, “The first step in dealing with this is in a larger social context is to acknowledge our kinship with these people.”

Cultural analyst Janice Crouse has studied and analyzed the radical left for 20 years. She tells EAGnews, based on his comments, Shapiro is asking the public to accept a radical, leftist ideology that, in a larger sense, wants to address society’s accountability, not anyone’s individual accountability, including Harris’ and Klebold’s.

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“If you do that, nobody has to accept blame for anything. It’s all society’s fault,” she said.

In his research, Shapiro said he found numerous moments when troubling actions or words from one of the boys might have prompted an adult to stop them.

“I’m going to show the audience that there were opportunities and the people shirked them,” he said. “It’s kind of incumbent upon us to swallow our pride or move past our own issues and try to reach out to these people. Learning about Eric and Dylan, one thing that sticks out is that I don’t think anyone reached out to them.”

See, it’s our fault—society’s fault for letting this happen. Crouse believes Shapiro represents the leftist ideology that wants to develop a utopia where “nobody’s accountable and bad never happens, where you can understand people’s faults. And no individuals are at fault for bad things. It’s all society’s fault. Radical leftists don’t want to blame individuals but society for the problems and that way everybody can feel good.”

The name ‘Erlkings’? It’s a German poem written by Johann von Goethe (1749-1832) found in a journal of one of the killers that depicts the death of a child assailed by supernatural beings called Erlkings. Is there supposed to be some connection between the poem and their rampage?

But the play could open up a whole new genre for Shapiro. Maybe next he could write about Sandy Hook mass murderer Adam Lanza who methodically shot and killed his mother, 20 young students and six adult staff members before turning the gun on himself. Or there’s the Aurora, Colorado theater shooter James Holmes who killed 12 and injured 70. Who knows?

What we do know is Shapiro would conclude that such tragedies are our fault. We shirked our duty by not reaching out to those two when we had the opportunities to do so.