I know your all probably sick of hearing about and reading about all the school Shooting, but I’ve talked about this is friends and family and I’ve gotten many different opinions. At Columbine everyone was quick to blame music for the happening, Marilyn Manson especially. Soon the blame was aimed towards The National Rifle Association. Its easy to blame music for this because us teenagers fallow music with a passion now, but did the fault ever get placed on the parents? If you think about it, if a child comes from a loving home where the mother and father (or just mother or father) love their children and show it they are very likely to be brought up better. If the child is just talked to when they cross their paths then its understandable how the kid can be upset and angry. Who or what’s to blame? Why blame that? I just want to see what people’s opinions are out there.
Blame Canada!
Blame Canada!
But seriously, and now look this is just a suggestion, and a very unfashionable one in these days of strictly no personal responsibility for anything under any circumstances, but how about blaming the evil little arseholes who pulled the trigger?
Legally, the person with the largest bank balance is to blame.
The shooters.
It’s not music, or video games, or movies or RPGs, or guns, or peers, or clothes, or any of that crap. It’s the person themselves. Now, them being semi-psychotic might be what -draws- them to some of those (Especially “violent” music, movies, and games, and guns), but none of those “cause” it. None of those turned me or any of my friends into school shooters.
As for parents… If I hadn’t seriously looked into the subject, I might agree, but it seems that parents of school shooters get railed on rather unfairly. What is considered normal for any other parent gets portrayed as twisted, negligent, or idiotic on the part of the parent. IMO, I don’t think the parents cause it, but they have to DEAL with it. They have to deal with kids who are twisted to begin with, and then THEY get railed on (Or even killed) for it. Even when they’re aware of the problem and trying to deal with it, anything they do that isn’t completely perfect with the hindsight after the event gets criticized.
I know people with much worse parents than any of the school shooters that I’ve heard of, and they’re incredibly well-adjusted, normal people, great guys. Yes, bad parents can contribute to the problem, but some blanket statement that it’s “the parent’s fault,” without regard to the specific situation, always irks me as much as the zero-tollerance laws do.
Don’t forget Doom. Those Columbine shooters were mentally disturbed from playing games that were violent, bloody, and horribly obsolete.
I just had one of those insights that only happens when you’ve been up a bit too long. It is this: it’s the government’s fault.
The logic is eminently sound. Every time some maladjusted freak embarasses themself by firing off several hundred shots and barely even nearing a double-digit kill number, there is the anguished plea, do something! Brave Joe Politician strides to the podium, face set in what a voting majority accepts as constituting thoughtfulness, reflection, and sadness, mostly because it is an expression that rarely appears on the face of their favorite pro wrestlers. Joe Politician announces he has put forth the motion for the SSSTOP! (Semiauto Schoolchildren Supporting Teachers Or Parents) Bill. This bill will surely ease the terrible problem by requiring live-in bureaucrats at the homes of anyone who purchases any handgun that a randomly-selected group of trophy housewives from a randomly-selected gated community would find “scary”. The SSSTOP! Bill has enthusiastic support from several celebrities, who speak glowingly of what a sensitive soul Joe Politician in between their e-meter and astrology consultations.
All well and good, certainly. The government is, by popular demand, doing something, and even more than that, they’re doing so FOR THE CHILDREN. No more false starts, SSSTOP! is precisely what needs to be done.
But why didn’t they before the bullets flew, hmm? They’ve displayed criminal inaction, directly responsible for Bob Q. Shooter spraying bullets around with even more reckless aim than the average urban police department.
I think it’s a pretty open-and-shut case.
Alternately, one could say that the person responsible for a bullet taking a life is the person who pulled the trigger, but that’s obviously just crazy talk.
Well no wonder they went on a shooting spree? They were playing Doom years after it was a state of the art game. If only we had gotten them Duke Nuke’em, Half-Life, or Unreal!!
Marc
Nah, that would have just made it worse. Doom was much, much better. See, I’ve come to the conclusion that, despite the media, Doom is really a very peacefull game!
How did come to that conclusion? My mom got addicted to Doom.
My “don’t-point-that-squirt-gun-at-your-brother” super-paranoid mom got addicted to Doom.
Clearly, it can’t be bad! 
For someone to be blamed, there has to be a problem to blame them for. And sorry, a handful of twisted little copycat psychos in a country with 100 million kids does not constitute a trend. These are random events.
I’m shocked that there haven’t been more school shootings. Just given the sheer numbers of kids out there who saw this stuff on TV, I would have expected a few more copycats.
100 million kids watch a couple of sick, twisted idiots go out in a blaze of glory and get their names plastered all over the national media, and only a couple out of them follow up on it? It sounds like our kids are actually pretty cool. So if you want to go looking for what makes our kids be so stable and essentially good and honest, great. But I’ll bet we don’t see anyone giving Eminem a medal for helping make 999,999,997 kids strong and emotionally healthy enough to watch this stuff and go on learning and playing like they’re supposed to, without shooting their friends.
School shootings are only a ‘problem’ in that we now have a huge chattering class of pundits on 24 hour news networks who take each story and analyze it to death and blow it up way out of proportion. Many parents think their schools are now very risky places for their kids to be. But their chance of dying by being hit by lightning on the way to school is greater than the chance of their dying in a school shooting.
But because it’s so overblown, we now have to suffer through zero-tolerance policies, a nonstop parade of children’s advocates telling us how messed up the kids are, etc. It’s sickening.
To steal from John Kovalic’s Dork Tower comic strip, if playing Doom makes people into psychotic killers, does playing Tiger Woods PGA Golf make them into Masters’ Tournament contenders?
Different Child said:
FYI, yes, it did, for a while. They basically shut themselves up in their house, and were looked at with a mixture of pity and disgust by their neighbors. The community definitely blamed them for a while. And then cooler heads prevailed, and everyone realized that the parents were pretty damn upset, too, with good reason.
The last I heard, no one really blamed the parents except for the families of the victims who decided that the only way to assuage their horrible pain was to get some money from them. IIRC, they sued, and the families settled out of court.
Add me to the personal responsibility side.
My little sister is going through some rough emotional stuff. I know this and I’m there for her, but if she decides the best way to fight off personal demons is to blow up her school, its her fault. Its not the fault of her flute teacher, or The Sims, or livejournal, or me. Your own actions are your own. The consequences are yours as are the benefits.
Outside influences can make a difference, but you are free to ignore any influence on your actions. Your actions remain your own, caused only and ultimately by you. situations and other people can only make actions more or less difficult, they can’t make you do or not do anything.
You have been LIED TO about the musical tastes of those two shitheads who killed 15 kids at Columbine. There is no evidence, nor has there ever been any, that the Columbine fuckwits (now six feet down - gee, your plan worked pretty good dumbasses) ever listened to Marlyn Manson. That is a lie that was splashed across the front pages because it was bound to generate controversy.
I repeat: YOU HAVE BEEN LIED TO. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE THEY LISTENED TO MARLYN MANSON, and there never was. What they did listen to a lot of was another totally different band that practically nobody has heard of, named “KMFDM.” The name is an acronym of a spoof of a German phrase: “Kein Mitleid Fur Die Meirheit” or, very roughly, “No Pity For The Masses”. (Full disclosure: I am a fan of KMFDM.) One of the assclowns even quoted lyrics from several different KMFDM songs in his web pages o’ hate. Look here for a duplicate copy of that web page: http://www.angelfire.com/ct2/chat/wbspage.html
This contains lyrics from the KMFDM songs “Waste”, “Leid und Eleid” and “Son of a Gun”.
Furthermore, one of the dickheads even left a suicide note in which he specifically said, “You will try and blame the music I listen to, the clothes I wear” etc, etc - but you’re wrong. It was “Your children who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me,” etc. But did you hear any of THAT in the media either? Nope. But you can read it here:
http://www.angelfire.com/ct2/chat/suicidenote.html
So why did the media lie to you? For the same reason they always do: to sell more magazines, newspapers, and make you watch more TV. Everyone knows who Marlyn Manson is - he’s this satanic shock-rocker that the media tells us all our kids listen to. Calling him into association with the Columbine murderers was a sure way to generate controversy and make get millions of eyeballs on their media. If the newspapers and TV had spread the word far and wide that those two fuckheads had liked an obscure industrial band, everyone would have yawned and flipped the channel. And we can’t have THAT - because then you won’t sit through “these messages” to hear more about it. And you wouldn’t buy a newspaper or magazine to read about it, either.
Don’t delude yourselves here folks. The media is AT LEAST as interested in making money as they are in reporting the truth. The reporters down at the ground level are very interested in fairness and accuracy. But the higher you go up the editorial chain, ultimately ending with the media moguls who are multi-millionaires, sometimes billionaires, the more this becomes a business to them. If you unabashedly trust everything you see on TV or read in the newspaper, you’re a fool. It’s never as simple as they make it out to be.
One need only watch “A Clockwork Orange” to see how even such convervative staples as classical music can be abused by insane homicidal maniacs. Music does not cause anyone to do anything. Quite the other way around - people select the music they like based on feelings that were within them long before the music came around. The music a person listens to does not change their core being. It only shows you what’s already inside them.
Oh, and yes - all accounts quite strongly agree that they played a lot of Doom. But so did I, and so did all my fellow picked-on, computer-geek, social reject friends. And as much as we all hated high school, we never took a handgun and pipebombs and killed our classmates.
-Ben
{fixed bold. --Gaudere}
[Edited by Gaudere on 07-13-2001 at 05:51 PM]
Note to self: use Preview to make sure your bold tags match.
-Ben
DifferentChild wrote:
CHARLTON HESTON: “Guns don’t kill people!”
GEORGE W. BUSH: “They don’t?”
CHARLTON HESTON: “No! Bullets do! Guns just get them going really really fast.”
– That’s My Bush!
Considering that youth violence has declined considerably in recent years, shouldn’t we instead be asking whose to praise.
Now you may recall that after the Columbine shooting, it was decided that we should spend a buttload of federal money researching the causes of youth violence (even though it was declining). The result was this report from the Surgeon General. You can read the report for yourself a verify that our esteemed politicians have completly ignored everything that it said.
Blame the parents for being too busy with work to pay attention to their children, and notice the pain and torment they were hiding.
Blame the vicious students who attacked and taunted them and twisted them into the freaks they became.
Blame their teachers for not seeing their troubles sooner.
Blame the school system for not stopping the years of abuse.
Blame the gun sellers for selling guns to unstable minors.
Blame the bomb websites for instructing them how to make bombs.
Blame the shooters for their own actions, and make them take responsibility for them. Blame them for allowing themselves to become worse than their tormentors.
Go ahead, I’m sure any source you name could be to blame in some small amount. There’s more than enough blame to go around. But don’t target one thing. This didn’t happen in a box with controlled variables. This happened in life. Life gives a million chances, and each one is a chance to fuck up. Many people fucked up in this one. You can’t pick just one.
–Tim
Well… I agree with the -general- tone of that list, but there are a few I don’t agree with specifically, for various reasons…
First off, the parents. Bad parents can make a VERY bad kid… But they won’t be SURE to make a bad kid. Neither will good parents be sure to make a good kid. In most cases, the school shooters seem to have fairly decent parents. Some even had ones that -knew- of their son’s problem and were trying to deal with it. Unfortunatly, their lives get picked apart with every little detail that could possibly be “bad parenting” blown way out of proportion.
For students picking on them, and the school not doing anything about it… Yes, it’s bad behavior, and something that always ticks me off. Something -should- be done. However, there was obviously something wrong with them to begin with if it sets them off, when thousands upon thousands of other kids in the same situation get through it without trying to kill anyone. Not a high causing factor, but something that needs to be delt with anyway.
As for teachers… The class size is continuing to increase more and more. As it is, teachers don’t have much of any time to interact with the students individually to find out even the basics of their life, much less any deep-rooted problems. I definatly wouldn’t go laying the blame on the teachers, unless they are one of the ones encouraging the previously mentioned hostile atmosphere, like other students might. The greatest manifestation of negative behavior from teachers/faculty being, of course, those beloved zero-tolerance laws (gag).
As for guns? Oh boooooy. I’m not even going to get CLOSE to touching that one. :eek:
Bombs? Well, if you’re going to blame access to knowledge on explosives, better lay the blame on chemistry class. I learned more ways of making explosives there than I have in the rest of my life. But really, how hard can it be to figure out how to make a simple bomb? Pipe bomb: Insert gunpowder and fuse into pipe, seal. If the typical teen can figure out on his own how to make a picolo pete into a miniature M80, they should have no problem with a simple explosive like a pipe bomb.
And besides, using that knowledge shows that they’ve already gotten to the state that they’re going to do it. Same can be said for guns (Ack! And I said I wasn’t going to touch that! Okay, not again, then…)
Different Child:
I’m just curious as to the thought process that went into arriving at this conclusion.
I think it went something like: “guns were used in the shooting. NRA deals with guns a lot. The NRA is to blame!”
Kinda like “The people who shot the place up wore trenchcoats sometimes. Trenchcoats are to blame!”
