For two decades, an iconic song and music video about teen suicide have been widely understood as a story of murder.

Sue Klebold’s memoir, “A Mother’s Reckoning,” begins with a public tragedy: “On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with guns and explosives and walked into Columbine High School.” It continues with a private one: “Dylan Klebold was my son.” Klebold’s project is to reconcile the private image of her son with the public one, to grasp how someone she so loved, someone by many accounts lovable, could have done something so horrifying. Seventeen years later, she still cannot generate an answer: there is Dyl, the boy she raised, and _Time _magazine’s “monster next door,” the boy she never knew.

The Dylan she never knew was, above all else, suicidal. Dwayne Fuselier, a clinical psychologist and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Columbine investigation, told her that Harris, whom analysts posthumously judged a psychopath, “went to the school to kill people and didn’t care if he died, while Dylan wanted to die and didn’t care if others died as well.” Klebold notes that roughly half of the nearly two hundred rampage shooters active in America between 1966 and 2000 were suicidal, citing a 2013 paper by the criminal-justice specialist Adam Lankford. “Truly suicidal or not, rampage shooters have less than a one-percent chance of escaping the consequences of their actions,” she writes. “To plan an event with such a disastrously low chance of escape or survival implies what Lankford calls ‘life indifference.’ ” Sometimes, it appears, children enter the cell of their teen-age years and find this indifference stored inside, fully fledged. And in the United States, a gun is never far away.

If most school shootings are also teen suicides, the potential for mass violence begins to seem ubiquitous. (As Klebold points out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ranked suicide the third leading cause of death among children between ten and fourteen years old, and the second leading cause among those between fifteen and twenty-four.) Klebold writes, “We know, without a doubt, that exposure to suicide or suicidal behavior can influence other vulnerable people to make an attempt.” She regrets the release of surveillance footage of her son and his accomplice during the massacre, and celebrates Jefferson County’s decision to keep private the so-called basement tapes, a series of threatening videos that the pair made before the murders. She also mentions Goethe’s 1774 novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” and the suicide of its lovelorn protagonist, which reportedly set off a battery of real-life copycats in much of Europe (a phenomenon codified, in 1974, by the sociologist David Phillips as the “Werther effect”). Although Klebold does not think of herself as “pro-censorship,” she believes that video games, for instance, are “likely particularly dangerous for vulnerable kids who are struggling with brain illness or other cofactors.” She adds, “In an act I greatly respect, the novelist Stephen King asked his publisher to withdraw his novel ‘Rage’ after a number of school shooters quoted from it.”

“Rage,” about a teen who shoots up his high school and takes his algebra class hostage, was a favorite of Barry Loukaitis. Twenty years ago this month, when Loukaitis was fourteen, he “walked into Frontier Middle School dressed in a black duster and carrying two handguns, seventy-eight rounds of ammunition, and a hunting rifle,” as Malcolm Gladwell put it, last October, in The New Yorker. (After killing three people, including his algebra teacher, Loukaitis was subdued.) Gladwell, writing shortly after a massacre at Umpqua Community College, in Oregon, argued that school shooters aren’t inherently deranged; instead, over decades, a riot logic has unfolded, with the truly disturbed throwing the first bricks, followed by those who have overcome higher natural barriers to violence. Killers like Eric Harris, who needed no encouragement to resort to murder, make it easier for the likes of Dylan Klebold to participate. The black coat of Loukaitis, the black coats of Klebold and Harris: these have become part of “the standard uniform for school shooters,” as Gladwell puts it, invoking the sociologist Ralph Larkin’s notion that Columbine “laid down the ‘cultural script’ for the next generation of shooters."

Each new shooting seems to cement Columbine’s place at the start of the line, but the script has a prehistory, too. When Loukaitis was tried, his defense team claimed that he’d taken inspiration from the music video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” from the group’s 1991 album, “Ten,” which describes a boy who imagines "mountaintops / with him on top” as “the dead lay in pools of maroon below.” The video, released the next year, alternates between clips of Pearl Jam's front man, Eddie Vedder, wide-eyed and greasy-haired, and visions of the teen-age Jeremy, tearing through his parents' home and a forest clearing before finally bringing a gun to school. It was immensely popular, getting repeated airplay on MTV and winning several of the network’s Video Music Awards. It was also, then as now, misunderstood: a song about the underpinnings of adolescent suicide was widely seen as the story of a school shooter.

“Jeremy” is based loosely on Jeremy Wade Delle, who, in January, 1991, brought a .357 revolver to his English class in Richardson, Texas, and killed himself in front of his teacher and his fellow-students. The song and its video inspired a cult following. One site devoted to Delle, The Jeremy Story, published a 2009 letter attributed to Delle’s father, recounting years' worth of trinkets and notes left at his son’s grave site, as well as calls and e-mails “from young teen-agers with some perverse idea that what he did was really cool.” The enthusiasm hasn’t entirely abated: the domain name for The Jeremy Story was registered in 2012, and just this month a new post went up on the Facebook page “R.I.P. Jeremy Wade Delle.” These obsessives might have appreciated a claim that a defense attorney made during Barry Loukaitis’s trial: “This boy is Jeremy.”

Pearl Jam did not intend to transform a suicide into a mass murder. MTV, however, excised a central image from the video’s final scene—of Jeremy raising the gun to his mouth. The censored version gives us Jeremy at the front of the classroom with the gun at his side, and then his classmates at their desks, hands raised, white shirts blood-spattered. Many viewers assumed the worst. I asked the director, Mark Pellington, who went on to direct many other videos and films, about this misreading of his work. He said that people were responding to a “Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox,” as the story was translated from life to song to screen.

One jarring moment: Jeremy standing at the edge of a growing forest fire with his “arms raised in a 'V,' ” as the song says. Nathalie E. Paton, a sociologist cited by Gladwell, has studied the self-produced videos of many post-Columbine shooters and identified an over-all “convergence of visual productions” that includes this spreading of one’s arms wide. Most famously, it’s the pose that the Virginia Tech shooter—Seung-Hui Cho, who in 2007 killed thirty-two people, and then himself—struck in his prerecorded video statement, made with a gun in each hand. Shortly after that shooting, the film critic Stephen Hunter wrote in the Washington Post that Inspector Pang, from John Woo’s 1992 film, “Hard-Boiled,” could have been a model for Cho. In the movie, Pang declares, “Give a guy a gun, he thinks he's Superman. Give him two and he thinks he's God.” Whatever the origin of the “V,” it made its way into the mind of twenty-three-year-old Wellington Oliveira, who in 2011 copied poses from Cho’s video before shooting twelve students and himself at his former middle school, in Rio de Janeiro.