Indiana Library Shooting Was Meant to Be a School Shooting

18-year-old Emiliano Cuevas-Bravo didn’t just walk into a library with a shotgun. He walked in carrying the weight of a blueprint he had studied and admired. His plan wasn’t spontaneous or directionless. It was rooted in symbolism and mimicry, from the black clothing to the chosen date of April 30, Adolf Hitler’s death day. The real target was Seymour High School. The library only became the scene because something disrupted his original timeline. But make no mistake. His actions, planning, and mindset align with a dangerous subculture that has claimed too many lives already. Cuevas-Bravo is a textbook Columbiner.

On the morning of April 30, Cuevas-Bravo drove to his school with a loaded Mossberg 500A shotgun (there you go, gun nerds), 95 shells, and a homemade pipe bomb in his backpack. He parked near the athletic fields and waited. But when he saw a teacher he knew, he changed his mind. Instead, he went to the Jackson County Public Library, walked inside, and fired a single shot through the glass wall of the circulation desk. A clerk was hit in the arm by shotgun pellets. Another narrowly avoided being injured. The gun jammed after that. Cuevas-Bravo had loaded the shell backwards.

Too bad life isn’t like a Daffy Duck cartoon where after loading the shell backwards it would have fired in his face. But, I digress.

That jam was enough to buy the library a few precious seconds. Cuevas-Bravo gave up on trying to fix the jam and went upstairs, dousing the floor in motor oil with the apparent intent to set the place on fire. Before he could light anything, a library patron tackled him and held him until police arrived.

During questioning, Cuevas-Bravo told detectives he was depressed, lonely, and suicidal. But he also admitted he became fascinated with Columbine. He said he planned to ‘cap’ the SRO and ‘go wild.’ The pipe bomb, as amateur as it was, had all the hallmarks of someone trying to imitate what they had seen online. He had researched how to make it. There was also propane and a lithium battery in his car and bag.

This is the columbiner profile in full. A columbiner is someone who admires or is obsessed with the Columbine killers. Some see them as misunderstood outcasts. Others view them as icons of revenge. Either way, they are often drawn to the aesthetic, the writings, the gear, and the date of the massacre. And like others before him, Cuevas-Bravo wrapped himself in the mythology and tried to stage his own version of it.

But here’s what complicates things. It’s true that Cuevas-Bravo says he was depressed. He even claims to have attempted suicide before. But he didn’t just want to die. He wanted to take others with him. You don’t get to blame mass murder on mental health. Millions of people, including myself, suffer from depression and never pick up a gun or plan a massacre. The decision to turn suffering outward is not a symptom. It’s a choice.

So here we are again with the question no one wants to answer. Was it depression that led Cuevas-Bravo to Columbine? Or was it Columbine that deepened the depression and gave it a script to follow? Which came first, the hopelessness or the fantasy? The chicken or the egg?

Either way, this could have been far worse. He had a plan. He had a weapon. He had the will. The only thing that saved lives was his own incompetence and someone brave enough to act.

Let’s not kid ourselves. If you idolize mass shooters, dress like them, plan on killing like them, and follow their calendar, you’re not just depressed. You’re a columbiner. And people should take that seriously, before the next one actually gets the shotgun loaded right.

(Sources)