Crime manifests itself in various ways in society, and it is often difficult to pinpoint what drives people to commit certain actions. The Columbine shooting was a peculiar incident that ended in tears and suffering that has led to much research into what was going through the minds of these young people at the time of the shooting. Therefore, this article will specifically analyze the role of Akers-modified differential associative reinforcement in driving Dylan Klebold to commit such a heinous act, while also giving credit to Edwin Sutherland for first formulating the differential association framework. a middle-class family on September 11, 1981” (Dylan Klebold Biography, 2016). “His father, in addition to this overview, Sutherland outlines nine specific factors that can enhance one's ability to learn criminal behavior, but for the purposes of this article, three of the nine will be analyzed carefully; First, “criminal behavior must be learned through interaction with other people in the communication process” (Gongenvare & Dotter, 2007, 384). Furthermore, the idea of ​​communication is broken down into two forms, verbal and gestural. Sutherland indicates that through gestures the conversation elicits a stimulus that allows a response from each individual, by analyzing these responses it is possible to indicate attitudes towards the topic or object. Second, differential association varies based on the intensity, duration, frequency, priority, and timing of one's learning process. Through this notion, the individual's self is ignored and more emphasis is placed on extrinsic factors. Furthermore, “it is the individual's experiences and how the individual defines those experiences that constitute learning about criminality.” (Gongenvare & Dotter, 2007, In light of this, looking more deeply into Aker's alteration of this theory, he takes into consideration the three factors listed above but proposes that beyond that “behavior is learned based on principles of Skinner's operant conditioning with classical conditioning as a secondary factor” (Burgess & Akers, 1966, 137). This gives way to the idea of ​​reinforcement, according to which social reinforcement enhances the learning of criminal behavior So that this process can take flight Akers outlines the necessary components “the group/gang must have normative definitions of what it perceives as right or wrong, which will ultimately transform into discriminative stimuli” (Bartol, Curt, & Bartol, 2010, 97) which are transmitted signals by subcultural or peer groups to indicate whether certain actions should be rewarded or punished. In this regard, “the strength and probability of adopting these values ​​are indicative of the amount of reinforcement and its frequency” (Burgess & Akers)., 1966,