Why can’t people blame those that are truely responsible for a tragedy, instead of going after the people that they wish were responsible?
Oh yeah, because then they may have to look in a mirror. And there’s also the money.
Note: the link is required reading.
The thread title should have read ‘Cashing in on Junior’s death, or “Let’s sue everyone!”’.
Everything after and including the first quote was cut off.
People sue for money, because the system makes it available.
Also, it’t the lawyers who make a living out of these lawsuits. And, it’s the judges (other lawyers) who have structured the common law to make this possible.
Actually, a fine exposition how our tort system got where it is can be found in "Liability : The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences " by Peter William Huber (Paperback - July 1990) I highly recommend this book.
december wrote:
Not that I can see. When presented with a “sob story” about how violent video games killed the plaintiff’s poor, innocent son, and how a whole bunch of money will make things better, judges’ eyes tend to narrow and say, “Uh huh. Riiiiiiight.” They’ve heard it all before.
Juries, on the other hand, can easily be convinced by a sob story. They haven’t seen many trials before, except on court TV. They don’t know how often money-grubbers pitch a sob story in an attempt to win. It is the juries that are responsible for the sue-everybody morass we’re in now.
Tracer, I agree with you. However, the LEGAL STRUCTURE that permits these suits is relatively new, having been created in the USA during only the last 40 years or so. And, this structure was indeed created by judges, through the so-called “common law,” a phrase that means “law made by judges.” Following are some excerpts of reviews of Huber’s book (from Amazon), which describe this history:
Synopsis
This controversial book describes the transformation of modern tort law since the 1960s, and shows how the dramatic increase in liability lawsuits has had an adverse effect on safety, health, the cost of insurance, and individual rights.
Huber’s book is brilliant, provocative, original, and iconoclastic. It should be read by everyone interested in (or appalled by) our legal system." - Paul M. Bator, University of Chicago Law School
“Remarkable…Cites some hair-raising examples of a legal system spinning dangerously out of control…Shows convincingly how the expanding tort liability system is raising the cost of living and, even worse, is threatening our international competitiveness.” - Ronald Bailey, Forbes
“A well-written and very serious study of a problem that affects everyone.” - Renee Wayne Golden, San Francisco Chronicle
The look in a mirror jab seems to imply that in most of these cases the parents are somehow at fault. I am going to argue with you there: There are many tragic things that happen in this world that are no one’s fault–in a nutshell, shit happens. I think that as a culture we really value the idea of individual responsibility. And while that is overall a good thing, it tends to encourage the idea that everything is sombody’s responsibility, and thus everything is somebody’s fault. And that is what encourages lawsuits even in the face of freak accidents, let alone terrible tragedies like this.
I think the above should read as such:
Then it would be true.
I’m sorry but if anyone is to be blamed beyond Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold then it would have to be their parent’s. To say that the media pushed them to it or our schools failed or lack of religion are the causes it all comes back to the parents. Parents may not be able to watch their kids 24/7 but the parents set the tone. Many many kids do just fine and play DOOM and watch Basketball Diaries and what have you without being violent in any way.
If there is finger pointing to be done than it is at the parents of Eric and Dylan who somehow managed to allow two monsters to grow under their roof. I won’t lay 100% blame on them but I’ll put it there before I place it at the media’s doorstep.
The vast majority of kids exposed to all of the vagaries of the media do NOT go to school and kill. A few kids (out of several million) go nuts and the rest of the country is expected to pay for it? No thanks.
The only winners in class action lawsuits are the attorney’s who walk away with 33% (at least) of the settlement. So, $1.5 billion(+) to the attorney(s). I have no idea how the class is defined and who can collect on the other $3.5 billion. If we say society as a whole suffered and everyone in the US is a member of the damaged class than that comes to about $13 for every man, woman and child. Oooo Boy! Sign me up! (Note the article specifies damages to specific parties in the range of $5,000 - 10 million as being in addition to the $5 billion lawsuit).
The whole thing is crap and nothing but a money grab on the part of the aggreived families and their attorneys. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s parents have been sued (and just recently settled) so now they are looking for some deeper pockets.
I can understand their pain and loss but they are not righting some wrong or correcting an injustice here. If anything they are perpetrating another injustice for greed.
If not grammatically correct. Sigh, blah blah preview blah blah…please read it without the extra “'s” on the end of “somebody”.
I have to agree with Whack-a-Mole that the parents are partly to blame.
I think it’s the parent’s responsibility to monitor what their kids are doing whether it’s playing a (violent) video game or making bombs in the garage. If the parents of Klebold and Harris had taken an active interest in their kids lives, maybe this could have been avoided. You can’t tell me that they didn’t have a clue that something was going on with their kids.
If you think a video game is too violent for your kid, don’t buy it for them and don’t let them play it! If you think the news is too violent for your kids or you think a movie is too violent or is sending the wrong message… <gasp>, don’t let them fking watch it!** How hard is that? You’re a parent and you’re in control and you should be aware of what your kids are doing/watching/listening to, etc., etc.
I think Manda JO’s full statement is valid, but probably not for this case. In the case of Eric and Dylan, they were whacked out nutballs and I DO believe that somehow, their upbringing was a part of it. In the past twenty years or so there’s been this big push to tell children how wonderful and special and gifted and generally golden they are, telling them they can do anything! Be anything! The world is your oyster. Unfortunately, we forgot to tell them that it doesn’t give them eternal happiness or the right to shoot somebody.
But Manda JO is right…Shit DOES happen, and there will always be people in the world looking to blame someone, when really, you just can’t! I remember a few summers ago, it was like 104 degrees here in Chicago, and they were interviewing people on the street. One woman was absolutely irate and she asked “I’d like to know what Mayor Daley intends to do about this”.
WHAT? Mayor Daley? Is he going to ask the great sun god Apollo to accept these sacrifices and cool our cracked and suffering soil? Give everyone popscicles? It’s hot! Suck it up!
jarbaby
A childs behaviour is the end result of the parents ability (or lack of) to parent
I’m gonna have to argue with you there. I was raised with the feeling that I really can do anything that I want to, and I generally act with this belief in the back of my mind. Now, consciously, of course, I know that I can’t really do anything; I am not untouchable. But I still feel like that, and a gut reaction probably could lead me to a bizarre or rash action if I didn’t think things through.
Nevertheless, I do not derive my values or my psyche from my parents. I do not have the same values nor do I hold the same moral and ethical views. Yet I still have not gone and done some insane thing like those two did.
My point is that while parents may influence their children’s behavior, they do not define it. Those two were plenty old enough to understand that what they did was wrong regardless of how much their parents coddled them and cared for them. Hell, at that age I was grateful when my Mom didn’t bother with things like that. I stayed out of trouble for the most part, and had she busted me with questions, I just would have lied and receeded further from her.
“Children” of 16 or so are old enough to be responsible for their own actions. They may not have had the best parents, but the blame for their actions rests on them.
walrus, perhaps I should have been a little clearer. There’s a difference between raising your kids to feel good about themselves and with the belief that they can do anything and raising your kids with the ideal that they are an unstoppable force, who will not be criticized, punished, treated unfairly or perhaps restrained from having everything they want. I have an out of control cousin who I’m going to fear when he turns sixteen and gets surly because his parents believe in “letting him express every feeling how he sees fit”. If that means slapping me I have to “respond with questions, not harsh speech”. YIKES. If you don’t think this kid will think he’s allowed to shoot people, you’re crazy.
And actually, the point of my post WAS that Dylan and Eric SHOULD take responsibility for themselves (if they were still alive) and the parents shouldn’t waste any more time trying to find someone else to be responsible.
jarbaby
One of my responsibilities at work is co-ordinating with our lawyers. I’ve received several different claim forms for various class-action suits in which we might have been able to receive some compensation, and we never bothered because the rewards were paltry. The only people who make money, or receive any compensation on the scale of the apparent injustice are the lawyers, who walk away with 10-30% of a reward that’s typically in the hundreds of millions, owing to the class action nature of the suit.
One in which we might have made a claim involved Toshiba setting up a $450 million dollar fund for purchasers of certain Toshiba laptops that had a faulty CMOS for the floppy drive, which in some cases may have caused a bit to be dropped in data transfer, possibly resulting in corrupted data. We could have received $45 for every qualifying laptop, or a $99 gift certificate towards the purchase of a new Toshiba.
The lawyers who successfully sued Toshiba received $150 million.
Whoever caused our current system to be in place, it’s now driven by lawyers who launch such suits for purely monetary reasons. I asked one of our corporate attorneys why they didn’t go after class-action suits, and he said that it’s a life of pushing often frivolous, usually long-shot cases through the courts in order to make that one big settlement that pays for the next ten tries. A large part of such suits is simply being such a pain in the ass to the company being sued that they get paid off just to go away.
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As for Eric and Dylan, your teenager is still more likely to be struck by lightning than to be injured in a school shooting. It’s inappropriate and a waste of time to be spreading blame for freak acts, especially when far more real threats to the health of teenagers exist.
I’ve yet to see any evidence for particularly bad parenting on the part of their parents; every attack on the parents in this thread so far has amounted to the posters being unable to imagine how the parents might not have known Eric and Dylan would do what they did. Did Eric’s dad teach him to make bombs? Did Dylan’s mother go into his room and sigh about how he left guns laying around all the time, and then clean it up? Did someone see the videotape they made and chuckle to themselves (“oh, those crazy kids!”)?
When your child turns out perfectly, in exactly the way you expect, call me so I can come over and give you a congratulatory hand job.
Whats your phone number then?
Seriously though. Nobody expects a perfect kid, but for Christs sakes, pay attention to the little monster and don’t just shove a TV in front of their face to keep them out of your hair. Parenting is still 99% of the job. You train your kid so he/she can make the right or at least an educated decision when the time comes that you can’t hold their hand.
I don’t know, bernse, sometimes people just come out broken. You can have six kids in a family and one tortures cats. Why is that? Sure, parents need to do the best they can, but when someone’s brain just isn’t right, the best meaning parents are sometimes pretty helpless. Sure, bad parents can screw up what oculd have been a good kid. But good parents can’t always save a bad one.
In this specific case, as hansel pointed out, we have absolutly zero information. We have no idea what kind of parents those kids had, and we have no idea what they did or did not do. To do anything other than reserve judgement is irrational.
Demise, you seem to be missing my point, which is that the very same protestant work ethic that makes many of us feel that we have to take our own responsibilites seriously is responsible for the idea that everything bad must be the result of someone not taking thier responsibilites seriously. The two attitudes are inseperable: if I feel guilty everytime anything in my life goes wrong, I am going to assume that someone is guilty anytime anything else goes wrong. America has always had this problem: Tocoqueville wrote about it in the 1830s. In fact, assuming that someone who blames another party unfairly must be displacing thier own guilt is the same fallacy–it assumes that guilt must exisit in someone, if only that someone is correctly identified.
That’s fine advice for parents, and most of the time probably makes a big difference in the kind of child who results. But it says nothing about what caused monsters like Kleybold and Harris, and even less about preventing Columbine.
Blaming their parents at all without specific evidence is just scapegoating. Understandable, perhaps, but nonetheless emotional and irrational, and not a precedent I’d like set. Locking your child up or putting them through toddler boot camp is no way to raise a society of well-adjusted, independent adults who make moral choices out of convictions they hold, rather than childhood habits. But if parents are held ultimately responsible for every act of their children, that’s just what will happen.
From the article:
I would just like to say…phooey!
Eric and Dylan’s parents are not to blame, nor should they have magically known what these kids were thinking and plotting. The makers of this game are not to blame. The makers of violent movies and TV shows are not to blame. Like somebody else has to be at fault for someone to strike out in response to inner pain. It’s as old a story as Cain and Able.
If the media has any responsibilty here, it’s that it allowed a forum for 2 socially inept losers to strike out and become famous, almost mythic villians. All for our entertainment.
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Blaming their parents at all without specific evidence is just scapegoating. Understandable, perhaps, but nonetheless emotional and irrational,
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And suing video game people and god knows who else is not?
I know where you are coming from, really, and in hindsight you’re right, blaming a parent is more or less scapgoating.
I will however still say though, that Parents have by far the largest responisbility and ability to mold their children.