Here’s a sentence I never wanted to write. You can buy replicas of the shirts Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wore on the day they murdered 13 people at Columbine from about half a dozen of the biggest online marketplaces on the planet.

According to a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which WIRED covered this week, “Wrath” and “Natural Selection” tees are being sold on TikTok Shop, Redbubble, Temu, Etsy, AliExpress, and Walmart. Another slogan beloved by this crowd, “Humanity Is Overrated,” turned up on a few of those same sites. Nobody had to dig through the dark web to find any of it, because it was sitting right there between the phone cases and the novelty socks.

When WIRED came knocking, the usual corporate script kicked in. TikTok said discriminatory and offensive products are prohibited and will be removed, Redbubble pulled the listings that were flagged and pointed to its ban on content that glorifies violence, and Walmart yanked a shirt under its third-party seller rules.

Everyone else apparently had nothing to say. You’ll notice the common thread here is that the listings came down once a journalist asked about them, and not one minute before. ISD’s Katherine Keneally put it plainly: if these companies actually enforced the safety policies they already have on the books, most of this stuff would be gone.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Wherever there’s a demand, some greedy, unscrupulous vendor is going to rush in to fill the niche and sell a print-on-demand shirt that costs next to nothing to produce. The seller doesn’t care what the slogan means as long as the order goes through, and the marketplace doesn’t care as long as it gets its cut.

Of course, as they have since time immemorial, the kids buying this merch are conning their own parents. ISD found teens swapping tips on how to get Mom and Dad to pay for the “Natural Selection” shirt, and the advice is to claim it’s the name of a movie, a video game, or a clothing brand. One commenter bragged that their parents don’t even know what the TCC is, so buying the shirt is no problem at all.

For those who still may not know, the so-called True Crime Community, or TCC, has nothing to do with people who enjoy a documentary on a cold case. It’s an online fandom built around an obsession with mass killers and school shooters. TCC adherents will pick apart the tiniest details of an attacker’s life, right down to what they ate the morning of the massacre, and they treat the whole thing like gospel.

The label is newer than you might think, but the phenomenon isn’t. The Columbine fandom, formerly known as Columbiners, started forming practically the day after the 1999 attack. They have gone by one name or another ever since, picking up a new coat of paint and a new platform every few years. Regular readers will remember that I wrote about the San Diego mosque shooters back in May as TCC copycats, and that’s exactly the pipeline I’m talking about. And that’s just one of many examples I’ve covered in the past 26 years.

The TCC has been known to groom other kids into killers. A kid who’s isolated, angry, and steeped in self-contrived grievances can wander into one of these spaces and find the first group in their life that seems to get them. Then the group tells that kid that the people who committed these massacres were misunderstood, or powerful, or heroic, and that the way to finally matter is to become the next name on the list. A shirt is a membership badge in that world. It lets a kid signal belonging to the in-group while everyone outside it remains none the wiser.

None of this is new on the do-it-yourself end, either, which tells you how deep the demand runs. In September 2025, a 16-year-old at Evergreen High School in Colorado, in the same county as Columbine, wounded two students before shooting himself. In the days before the attack, he posted a selfie in a “Wrath” shirt he had made himself, with the lettering done in red paint. He didn’t need a marketplace to get the costume, because a bit of paint and some determination did the job. What’s changed is that nobody has to be crafty anymore, since a credit card and a parent who doesn’t know any better will do it for them.

My fear is that these phrases will go mainstream like those in the incel world already have. A few years ago, words like “looksmaxxing” and “mogging” were confined to forums most people had never heard of, and now they’re part of everyday teenage slang. Plenty of kids use them with no idea where they came from or what rotten worldview sits underneath. If the TCC’s vocabulary and aesthetic seep into the zeitgeist the same way, the camouflage gets better and the warning signs get harder to read. A subculture that celebrates mass murder doesn’t need to be popular to cause harm, but it sure helps its recruiting when everyone else shrugs.

So what can a parent actually do? Start by learning what these shirts reference, and if your kid asks for one with a vague explanation, look the slogan up before you pay for it. Ask where they came across it and who they’re talking to online, and keep your voice curious rather than accusatory, because a kid who gets shamed will just get better at hiding.

Pay attention if they’re fixated on the details of real attackers, using TCC lingo, praising shooters, or getting secretive about new online friends. Above all, ask yourself whether there’s an unsecured gun in your home, because a shirt is a lot less worrying when there’s no weapon within reach. If you see this kind of interest alongside talk of violence or access to firearms, get them to see a mental health professional. Would you rather have a kid in therapy or in the headlines, or possibly the morgue?

A teenager in a “Wrath” shirt doesn’t automatically make them a school shooter. However, a kid who’s wearing that shirt is one step closer to being one. And it would be a huge mistake just to shrug it off.

Don’t be that parent.

(Source)

• You Can Buy T-Shirts Glorifying Mass Shootings Almost Anywhere Online