School shooters are my heroes

Great Debates
161

My s.o., imthjckaz, owns the Pearl Jam CD with “JEREMY” on it. He showed me the lyrics yesterday. I had not previously known them or heard the song.

This refers to his suicide, and blood spattered all over his classmates when he did this, in the video version. He was picked on in school and was driven to this action. I don’t know if the song was based on real events, but it easily could have been.

A man from my graduating class, whose name leant itself to a horrible nickname that was used against him in school, was unmercifully teased during high school (and possibly grade school; I didn’t live there then). At our twenty year reunion, he had changed his first and last names, and his manner of dress and posture. I believe he still was fighting some demons from high school, and that is what he chose to do to start a new life.

I don’t know why people target other people. I do believe that everyone does the best they can with the materials and resources available to them. It could be that people who target others either saw it at home or were themselves targeted by others (or some other reason others may know). I believe that is even evidenced in this thread, by people who attack you or urge you to suicide. Those people are also doing the best they can within their own limitations.

As I was typing this, I got notification of Ex-Tank’s post and think that he has some excellent advice.

I don’t know what will work for you. I hope you will find the resources and support to get beyond this point in your life where bullies who murder are your heroes. I hope you will find beauty and peace and friendship and love. And if you do not find these qualities for your life and feel compelled to act against others, I hope that you are in a safe place that can prevent that from ever happening.

Good luck to you in exorcising your demons.

162

Well, Dada, I somewhat agree that gun control-NOT banning, but CONTROL is needed. However, that and that alone won’t solve anything, which is my point.

163

Jeremy, I’ve read a good 98% of this thread with slackjawed fascination. Your theories and ideas seemed familiar to me, and yet damned if I could remember where. Then, as I settled down to work on my latest project, it all rushed at me.

It’s time for you to consider that while your therapists throw thousands of terms at you…you are basically, a Sadist.

The Marquis de Sade is mostly known for his sexual proclivities, but his basic philosophy of life is almost spot on with yours.

de Sade believes that all crimes are justified if they give the committer of the crime any pleasure whatsoever. He insisted that man can never really experience the real pleasures of life until he surrenders fully to the insticts that Nature has placed in him, mainly the instinct to destroy and conquer for one’s own gain.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold." – De Sade (I believe from 120 Days of Sodom) (emphasis mine)

In the book Justine (my favorite), Justine implores to one of her captors (Rodin) that one day he will learn that doing good and working for good will bring him joy in return. Rodin answers “at the cost of a million moments of pleasure for myself”.

Sadism actually boils down to the most extreme application of “Me First”.

You can read an interesting essay on De Sade’s philosophy here. You may enjoy his books as well, but as you read them, and take in all of these written horrors and ideas, keep this quote of his in mind:

Yes, I am a libertine, I admit it freely. I have dreamed of doing everything that it is possible to dream of in that line. But I have certainly not done all the things I have dreamt of and never shall. Libertine I may be, but I am not a criminal, I am not a murderer. – The Marquis de Sade

I wish you good luck in working through your pain.

jarbaby

164

Those who choose suicide negate life and deny it in its entirety. That’s their problem, suicide is an answer which hurts other people and ends their lives. Not only are these people denying the reality of life but society has made them soft [but desensitised], as if things oughtn’t be the way they are.

It’s unfortunate kids feel so powerless and belittled that they kill themselves but it’s even worse that they take other people’s lives - innocent or not.

It’s insensitive, but people should be bolstered up; teachers often describe classes where certain students are always out for “psychological” reasons and if this fashion continues, we’ll all be woody allens.

just imagine woody allen working for the post office and with a gun pointed at 21 year old daughters.

165

[The board is running slower than molasses today (like always…) so only quick comments for now:]

Okay, here’s the problem. If I suppress my homicidal urges and allow myself to live a long, miserable life, I have lost and the bullies have won. If I embrace these urges and lash out in unrestricted mayhem a la Santee, I have lost and the bullies have won. (Ignore for the moment that I consider such an action to be a victory, not a loss.)

So, it’s basically a lose-lose situation. What does it matter, then, which option I chose???

Yes, but…the truth cannot set you free if you are not aware of its existence! “Realizing the truth” isn’t like buying a candy bar at the corner store; something has to trigger it.

I can remember precisely the moment where I “rose above it all”, and yes, it involved standing up to a bully. I don’t know how it happened, except that all of a sudden, I realized I was (more or less) free of the “programming” and had options available that I never would have considered before. Specifically, the suicidal and homicidal urges that I’d had all my life suddenly became possible to act on, instead of some distant pipe dream. In one day, I went from a harmless nerd to a potential danger to society, and nobody on the outside was the wiser.

In other words, I was no longer a slave. (Or maybe I exchanged one narrow form of slavery for a wider, more complicated one, but that’s a little too existential for this debate.) My point is, the process of escaping my slavery was not a deliberately conscious one, but merely “something that happened.” It’s somewhat ingenuous to suggest that I was capable of doing that at any time in the past.

tsunamisurfer: You’re not the first person to suggest the novel/screenplay angle. In fact, I’m working on a novel right now that goes places most authors haven’t gone before. After 15 years, I’ve written…oh, about 30 pages. So it’s gonna be a while before Jeremy’s Evil Twin and the Meaning of Life hits the drug store bookshelves. :slight_smile:

Wabbit: Glad to see you had the intelligence and natural humor to escape the torment of bullies, but realize that you are a rare case and this option isn’t available to everyone.

SexyWriter/soulmurk: From I’ve read and/or seen on the news, while the overall crime rate is dropping, the crime rate for random acts of senseless violence is in fact on the rise. I seem to remember a news report from 1994 or thereabouts which announced that, for the first time in history, you were more likely to be killed by a stranger than by someone you know. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cite for that…

ExTank: Unless I’m misreading your post, I see a rather large hole in your argument. You say, “[T]he best revenge is to live your life with dignity,” and in the same paragraph say, “I revel in [my former tormentors’] misery.” Don’t those two statements contradict each other? (Other than that, I find the rest of your post remarkably sound.)

Spider Woman: Kudos for being the first to nail down the exact source of my nickname. :slight_smile:

jarbabyj: Marquis de Sade was a pussy.

J.E.T.

166

:rolleyes: Holy Schlamoly, that’s what I get for trying to see your point of view. I guess you’re right though, let me go throw out all of these books and research…a lot of people are usually impressed by the literary and philosophical classics, I should have known you’ve got it all figured out.

Ok, then, how about the philosophy of Archie Comics? Veronica and Reggie were expounding on how good it felt to scream and yell and stamp their feet when they were angry, and that the only way to get rid of anger was to act on it, and other people’s feelings didn’t matter.

Betty and Archie concluded this was nonsense and Ms. Grundy said,

“On the contrary, many leading doctors recommend this type of therapy to their patients.”

and Archie says, “What do the other doctor’s recommend?”

and Ms. Grundy says,

“GROWING UP.”

Ah Archie comics…is there anything they don’t know?

jarbaby

167

Just stopping by to provide some hard statistical
data re: murders in the US.

168

jarbabyj: Sorry about that, I was replying to several posts at once and when I came to yours, I was too brain-fried to come up with anything more insightful than a sarcastic quip. Let’s see what I can come up with instead…

Well, he’s got me beat. Despite my obvious lack of ethics, I do have a rather strong moral code. Some crimes that I find absolutely appaling involve lying to others for personal gain – for example, claiming that you were sexually molested by your parents, or that your spouse molested your kids (that whole Woody Allen thing). Also, the whole idea of putting forth the “illusion of trust” in order to get over on someone. From my perspective, these crimes are FAR WORSE than murder.

Regarding crimes of passion…well, let’s take Jeffrey Dahmer as an example. As humorous as his actions were, I can’t say they were in any way justifyable or even laudable. Inflicting pain on someone only becomes justifyable if they have done something to DESERVE that pain. Maybe in a Karmic sense, anything bad that happens to you is merely the Universe “evening the score”. But I wouldn’t put much weight in that philosophy if I ever wound up on the witness stand…

For the record, I’m not big on inflicting physical pain on anyone, even if they “deserve it.” Psychological pain is a different matter, however. But it’s not something I toss around randomly, as a rule.

**
Well, just about any severe pathology can be boiled down to simple narcissism. I’d point out, however, that human beings tend to be sadistic by nature. Just look at all the posts on this thread, for example, by other people who admitted that they take pleasure in witnessing the downfall of the bullies who tormented them.

Archies comics is not without its merits…but for real, insightful satire on the nature of modern society, you can’t beat The Simpsons. (Did you catch last night’s episode about “nerd sweat”? Maybe we should just spray all the kids in school with a mixture of camphor and vinegar, or whatever it was that Lisa came up with…)

J.E.T.

169

Although I’ve found this entire thread fascinating and disturbing (and terrifying, to tell you the truth), I just wanted to make a quick comment on LDG’s statements. I’m certainly not an expert on the Australian school system, having never been a student there, but your comments are the exact opposite of my husband’s opinions about his experiences in the Australian school system. According to him, there absolutely is a pecking order and he was terrified throughout much of his schooling. I don’t know where you are, or if maybe it’s different for girls (and I would say girls do have a different bullying experience than boys do even in the U.S.), but he went to school in Dubbo, then finished high school on the Central Coast. He has a million stories of the hell he was put through because he was small for his age, a good student, and middle-class.

In addition to just his stories, there just happens to be a bit of controversy about this topic that’s made the Sydney Morning Herald very recently. Here are some links (their archive only goes back to 2/12) about bullying at a prestigious private school in Australia:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/18/text/national5.html

http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/18/text/national4.html

While I’m at it, in case any English posters think England is immune to bullies ;), this little boy would probably beg to differ:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/18/text/world8.html

Bullying is a universal problem. If you’re not seeing it, I think it’s either because you’re not looking very hard or you really got lucky and ended up in one of the few schools in the world that doesn’t have any bullies. Don’t get too comfortable in that opinion - you may have a very rude awakening one day. It’s not like guns don’t exist in Australia, they’re just very regulated. In the same week that those bullying articles were printed, there was a shooting in Sydney of a 16 year-old. Authorities believe that the crime was committed by his fellow students (although they think it’s drug-related, not bullying-related). It could happen to you one day. Make very sure you’re doing what you can now to not let problems escalate.

My personal opinion is that bullying that results in shooting is a particularly American problem because of the gun culture here. I don’t want to get into a gun control debate, but I do think we need to address both the bullying and the gun problem (yes, I’m calling it a problem, but I’m one of those really liberal people that NRA-types hate :stuck_out_tongue: ).

170

Dahmer’s exploits were humorous?

:rolleyes:

No, I don’t mean supressing your homicidal urges-I mean, get help to get OVER them, get rid of them, and find peace within yourself? Letting go of it, and letting it wash away, is the best thing you can do…

171

J.E.T. says:

There’s nothing undignified, or even unhealthy, in a little schadenfreude every now and then.

By “living with dignity”, I’m talking about you turning out as normal as possible. Not being afraid of your own shadow, not having to go to therapy for years, not becoming a slave to a bottle of pills because the angst of your adolescense won’t let go. The old “don’t let the bastards get you down”.

Pharmaceutically corrected chemical imbalances are one thing; chronic depression because you developed a habit of living in fear is another.

172

KILLED AT COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL MASSACRE:

Cassie Bernall…(17)
Steven Curnow…(14)
Corey DePooter…(17)
Kelly Fleming…(16)
Matthew Kechter…(16)
Dan Mauser…(15)
Daniel Rohrbough…(15)
Rachel Scott…(17)
Isaiah Shoels…(18)
John Tomlin…(16)
Lauren Townsend…(18)
Kyle Velasquez…(16)
William “Dave” Sanders (47)

INJURED AT COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL MASSACRE:
Brian Anderson…(17)
Richard Castaldo…(17)
Jennifer Doyle…(17)
Stephen Eubanks…(17)
Nicholas Foss…(18)
Sean Graves…(15)
Makai Hall…(19)
Anne Hochhalter…(17)
Patrick Ireland…(17)
Joyce Jankowski…(45)
Michael Johnson…(15)
Mark Kintgen…(17)
Lance Kirklin…(16)
Lisa Kreutz…(18)
Adam Kyler…(16)
Stephanie Munson…(17)
Patricia Nielsen…(35)
Nicole Nowlen…(16)
These people are MY heroes. May they rest in peace.

173

Tsunamisurfer:

That’s quite touching. I was wondering what you could tell me about the particular heroic qualities displayed by Isaiah Shoels. What did he do to qualify as a hero in your eyes? What was he like.

I’m also wondering why you included the wounded in your “May they rest in peace.”

I wasn’t aware they had buried the survivors at Columbine, and I think we should do something about it.

174

JET:

Getting back to the slavery issue, and stuff:

So these shooters are held as slaves by their delusions from which they cannot break free, which inevitably force them to extreme measures like going on a killing spree.

I’ll go along with that.

We need to keep a couple of things in mind, though. The chains holding your shooters aren’t as strong as the chains that held actual slaves.

Actual slaves had the same kind of indoctrination into society, forcing them to conform to a role as your shooters did. Only worse. They received no education, and had no opportunity to learn on their own. On top of the psychological chains were physical ones. Yet most slaves hated their slavery and were very aware of the injustice of the role they played. They yearned for freedom, and frequently sought it at terrible cost to themselves.

Those slaves that went along with it, and accepted their lot in life, or worse actually cooperated with the whites in the repression of their fellow slaves were universally despised for their weakness, their betrayal of their own kind, their shortsitedness, and their rank stupidity. Indeed, they were hated worse than the slaveowners themselves.

Your shooter/slave is under much less pressure to capitulate to his role both physically or mentally than any slave that ever picked cotton. He’s had more opportunity for independant thought and rational, and more freedom to choose.

Yet, he collapses under far less pressure, and performs far more heinous acts. Far less pressure than you were under as well, as to the best of my knowledge, none of these shooters suffered your particular brand of mental illness.

These shooters you call your heros didn’t even exhibit the strngth of character that you did in resisting their compulsions, while you had far more excuse to surrender.

How can your inferiors be your heroes?

At the very best your arguments turn shooters into unwitting tools.

How can a tool be the hero?

No, if your argument is right, and death is preferable to life in all circumstances than it is the hand that works the tool that is the hero, not the tool itself.

And what hand is it that works the tool?

Well, that would be the bully that taunts the shooter and drives him to the act, wouldn’t it.

So, if in fact your reasoning held up (and it doesn’t,) then it would be the bullies that are your heroes (and I’m quite sure that’s not what you meant.)
I think that’s checkmate.

175

Scylla: Nice try, but we were talking about “slaves” in regards to society as a whole, or in this case, about the “Breakfast Club” hierarchy of the school caste system. As I said in an earlier post:

In other words, once you recognize that you have options beyond putting up with what the world throws at you, the psychological chains of slavery are broken, whether you choose to stay in your hole or not. In my case, breaking the chains of psychological slavery is what freed me to consider homicidal revenge as a possible, achievable goal. Prior to that, there was ZERO chance of it happening.

It’s impossible to know what the thought process was in Andy Williams’s mind that lead to his rampage, but I can’t imagine that homicidal revenge was part of his original programming. Maybe, with the exponential increase of high school shooters these days, he might have thought, “This is what I’m supposed to do with my role,” much in the same way that bullies keep bullying and prom queens keep prom queening. But, more likely, it was just a case of “I’m not gonna take it anymore.” Hence, breaking the cycle of slavery.

You also suggest that my homicidal plan in high school was something I intentionally chose not to do. That is wrong – outside circumstances intervened to prevent it from happening. (I’m not going into details on this, so you’ll just have to trust me.) Hence, I was never given the opportunity to say, “Hmm, maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all.” For a long time, I was frustrated that I never did get the chance to do it. I still regret it now, sometimes. Which is why I call these people heroes – they managed to commit the acts which I wanted to do, but was kept from doing because of outside circumstances. (Think of it like an up-and-coming college quarterback whose professional career is ruined by a severe injury.)

Linking the shooter’s motivations to the bullies is just silly. Why not continue on to include the people & situations responsible for creating the bullies, and then the people & situations responsible for creating those situations, on and on and on until you get to atoms and electromagnetic waves and chemical reactions and the Big Bang. (Which wouldn’t be so illogical, really – I have far more admiration for Science and Nature than I do for high school shooters, which, let’s face it, are relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things.)

Tsunamisurfer: I’m curious. Could you explain your rationale for calling all these people heroes, when, from what I can tell, have not done anything notable except DIE, and in fact are people you have never known and never will? And would you consider them heroes if, say, they were all killed in a plane crash or something like that? It’s nice and warm and fuzzy and all that, but it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.

J.E.T. (who’s starting to think this thread has played itself out…)

176

ON the contrary, it’s very interesting.

But what qualifications did the school shooters have, to be reguarded as heroes? Other than that they were cowards?

177

JET:

Yeah, but these guys aren’t doing these things independantly. They’re shooting up the schools because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do.

That’s what the media is telling them is expected.

During the 1970s it would have been a bomb threat.

During the 1980s it would have been suicide.

During the 1990s it’s going on a killing spree that’s expected.

They’re not breaking out of slavery. Quite the contrary. They’re proving themselves slaves by a following a fashion as mindless as Pokemon, and letting it dictate their actions.

I mean, if you’re going to chuck your whole life away in a pointless gesture to prove you’re not a slave to THE GAME, it seems to me that it would have to be original, rather than the preprogrammed response.
“Oh another school shooting, yawn.”

Just sitting here I can think up 3 or 4 more sensational and original ideas than playing real life Doom. (For obvious reasons I ain’t going into them.)

Nope. The lack of originality and acceding to the programmed response means they’re still slaves when they do this, just tools.

A garden hoe isn’t heroic under any circumstances. Heroism requires independant and unusual or exceptional action. According to the whole paradigm we’ve built and you agreed with, following a role is unheroic.

Shit, even in The Breakfast Club, that kid brought a flare gun to school. Even in that shallow movie, the point of him doing so was because his lamp wouldn’t work, and he couldn’t get an A in shop because of it. His role that he was forced into says that he has to off himself with the gun as the penalty (80s, suicide, remember?.) If he’d done it, he’d have fulfilled his role, remaining a slave and providing THE GAME with the proper prescripted ending. (Fortunately Judd Nelson teaches him to smoke pot and be cool, so this is no longer necessary.)

Redo the film for the 90s and that same character brings in the gun to shoot up the school not himself.

No, the shooters are still slaves, playing a role, playing THE GAME, as well as unoriginal. Their tools.

Not heros.

In all seriousness, by actually attmpting to address the whole issue here, and shedding light on the real circumstances surrrounding these incidents, and by forcing people to realize that it’s not the neat little prepackaged story that the media presents, you’re being far more heroic, than some mindless twit who shoots up the school because he figures that’s what he’s supposed to do next.

But you are wrong about them being heroes by your own reasoning. I do hope you see that.

It’s possible that you might still argue that the results of the shootings are good, but the people doing them aren’t doing so for heroic reasons, just programming. By your own logic.

178

I don’t think it is so silly (and silly is an opinion rather than truly descriptive, in this case). You agreed previously when I likened the abuse that you received from bullies in school to terrorism. And that is what the high school shooters do: become terrorist bullies and become something more monstrous than the original bullies.

Perhaps you could put your admiration about Science and Nature to use by researching violent and abusive behavior and its origins. There is lots of material out there, and probably research currently going on.

What you said about this thread having played itself out is probably true. But hang out here at the SDMB for a while, and you will probably meet lots of people who were and/or are outcasts, or were victimized, or just didn’t fit in with the everyday madding crowd. While some who fear your anger may lash out at you, there are others who will listen, and you can perhaps listen to others and relate more of your life’s experiences. Take care, and stay safe, to yourself and others.

179

Some children who are bullied kill themselves and some shoot their tormentors. This is hardly rocket science.

Remove the label of “bullying” and you will find leakage from a capacity for psychological violence which will damage the future children of the bully - but only when their children have been “naughty” of course. Neat trick huh?.

In other words school bullies are child abusers who are in the process of learning their trade.

Jorolat

180

Good point, but a bit of an overgeneralization.

Sigh. I give up. We’ve run into a problem with basic definitions here, and I can’t see any way past that. If I were to concede the point, it would only be on the basis that ALL people are programmed, be it Mother Theresa or Ted Bundy, no one is capable of doing anything outside what their programming allows, and the whole “breaking the chains of slavery” analogy is just an illusion. In other words, no Free Will exists, everything since the Big Bang (and maybe before it) is preordained and cannot be altered in anyway, and thus the debate comes to a crashing halt.

Maybe Andy Williams, Kip Kinkel, et al were merely reacting to the media’s portrayal of the lone school shooter as their role, but…what about the FIRST kid who took up arms against his classmates? There was a time when school shooters didn’t exist at all, or at least weren’t hyped up on the news. Somebody had to come up with the idea.

And then there’s the Columbine massacre, which, though arguably reacting to the “programming” logic you put forth, at least has the distinction of never being done on such a BIG scale before. Elvis Presley, for example, was not the first rock star, but does that mean his legendary status was somehow “programmed”? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’ll finish by stating again why I consider these shooters “heroes”: 1) They fulfilled a desire I was never able to achieve, 2) They were (in my opinion) fully justified in their actions, and 3) They left their mark on society. #3 is the big one. Maybe it would be more “heroic” for them to avoid the murderous path and “live a dignified life”, as ExTank suggested…but I would not consider them my personal heroes in that case, for the mere fact that I would not be aware of their existence.

This thread has indeed been fascinating (and my shrink & I had a very long talk about it yesterday) – I don’t recall what I was expecting when I first posted it, but the breadth of emotions expressed was surprising nonetheless. I should have expected that some people would react with outright horror and/or denial. But I certainly didn’t expect anyone to react with sympathy and logical debate, at least not in the manner of those who did.

Yes, the SDMB is a unique place. I can’t think of any place that harbors such an amazing cross-section of viewpoints, as well as a large population of compassionate, open-minded, and (most importantly) intelligent people. Can you imagine if I’d posted the OP on, say, the Pearl Jam Mailing List? HA!!! I’d be marched right out.

I’m also impressed that this thread is currently #1 in Views of any active thread on GD (although there are a couple threads on page 2 which have 3000+ views.) Man, do I know how to make a grand entrance. :slight_smile: See you all around on GQ, MPSIMS, etc…

J.E.T.