This week has marked the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. As it turns out, much of what we thought happened didn’t.

They weren’t goths or loners.

The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School...weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied—in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

A decade after Harris and Klebold made Columbine a synonym for rage, new information—including several books that analyze the tragedy through diaries, e-mails, appointment books, videotape, police affidavits and interviews with witnesses, friends and survivors—indicate that much of what the public has been told about the shootings is wrong.

People on both the left and the right projected a lot of their own fears about teenage subcultures and gun violence onto these two. Columbine became one of the touchstones in the “Culture War”, mostly for all the wrong reasons. The plain fact of the matter was that these two were psychopaths who needed little outside influence to do what they did. The lesson of Columbine? It can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.