It’s funny how we have one thread where people argue that banging a falling-down barely coherent drunk chick at party is not assault, and another where spreading rumors and looking at someone funny are called assault.
Let’s see what evidence we have that this kid was “asking for it.”
[ul]
[li]looking at people funny[/li][li]making a smart-ass remark to a nosy teacher- one that if one of our co-workers said it we’d laugh[/li][li]spreading rumors[/li][li]staring at a crush[/li][/ul]
We are talking about high schoolers here. When I had a crush in early high school, I wrote elaborate novellas. I made alters to my one and only love with candles. I called and hung up just to hear his voice. I could have told you exactly what shirt he was wearing for the last week. From a 25 year old this would be sinister. For a 15 year old is about normal. Don’t you all read any Judy Blume?
Stalking would be going to his house, spying on his private time, making threats and phone calls, etc.
I mean, we spend our time debating if it is justified if a woman shoots a man who is beating her on a regular basis. And we give a “well, I understand…” to the guy who shoots a gay kid who looks at him funny?
I do think bullying needs to be controlled in a school setting (boys will be gay boys is just as repellent to me as boys will be boys) and I do think that this problem should have been addressed earlier. But the article seems to suggest that the problem would be solved by King being less obviously gay, which seems silly. The kids needed to be talked to and seperated just like any two students having problems.
How can people here be so delusional, or blind, or politically-correct, as to not see how the kid was threatened by King?
*
One student remembered that Larry would often walk up close to Brandon and stare at him. Larry had studied Brandon so well, he once knew when he had a scratch on his arm—Larry even claimed that he had given it to Brandon by mistake, when the two were together. Larry told one of his close friends that he and Brandon had dated but had broken up. He also said that he’d threatened to tell the entire school about them, if Brandon wasn’t nicer to him. Quest, Brandon’s defense attorney, says there was no relationship between Larry and Brandon, and one of Larry’s teachers says that Larry was probably lying to get attention.*
Jesus H. Christ. This is some fucked up shit the guy was doing. A 14 year old boy is just at the beginning stages of his sexual development and his discovery of his own sexual identity. Having a gay student (who was older than him) thrust upon him completely unwanted, disturbing sexual advances, is not threatening?
Certainly you’ve heard of guys lying to the whole school claiming they’ve had sex with a specific female student? Or receiving unwanted sexual attention as soon as they develop (or sometimes because they don’t)?
The argument could be made that the murderer had reason to fear that he’d be harassed if people thought he was gay, but it’s a bit of a circular argument if he’s the one who’d be doing the harassing. I don’t doubt that Larry was obnoxious, but I also don’t doubt that it was both as a result of harassment and as a bit of a preemptive strike. Sort of like overweight kids who make jokes before anyone else can.
Argent Towers - I agree that Larry’s beaviour was unpleasant and potentially intimidating for Brandon (not to mention highly embarrassing), and that his behaviour more generally is not what I would call well socially adjusted. However you are NEVER going to convince me that there is a justifiable connection between that and shooting the guy in the head. As I understand it killing someone else is only permitted when you are convinced that it is the only way to save your own life (self defence), and unless Brandon thought that Larry had eyes that fired death rays I don’t think that stands.
This isn’t a straw man, it wouldn’t matter to me one iota what the genders or sexualities of the two parties was, if the circumstances were the same IT WOULD STILL BE MURDER.
Happy Scrappy Hero Pup - point taken, and I wasn’t seriously saying that homosexual panic would fit this case for the reasons you’ve pointed out (regardless of whether the the case happened in California or not). However there is a fairly infamous case in the UK of someone who used to work for a gay man, was friends with him and (according to some of the people who knew them both) possibly having sex with him who used homosexual panic as a defence after killing him, and he was successful. With that particular travesty of justice burnt into my mind, you could forgive me for being quite cynical about how the law deals with the murder of homosexuals. I’ve not heard of any other minority-related panic disorders (black panic? woman panic? Jew panic?) so don’t quite understand why there is a homosexual one. Yet the fact that it still exists as a legitimate psychiatric disorder and indeed a viable defence method in crimes of violence suggests that there are people who still believe, on some level, that gays deserve what’s coming to them.
even sven, your assessment of the situation is extraordinarily one-sided.
There is no justification for shooting someone in the back of the head.
However, the assumption that King is an innocent in the events leading up to the shooting is so unfounded as to be laughable.
These two threads have nothing to do with one another. I don’t know what you’re getting at here, but it doesn’t bolster your point at all; in fact, it weakens it. Argent, relax.
Which is not what I’m trying to do. Which is why I find it hard to relax here, because I feel like my argument is getting misrepresented over and over.
There is no justifiable connection between him shooting the guy over the sexual bullying.
There is a connection between it.
It was not justified.
But they were connected.
I feel like I’ve said this three times already and nobody has listened to me.
Is anyone really arguing that they weren’t? I’m certainly not. Okay, so we accept that they were connected, now what? You’re very loudly claiming that you don’t think the connection implies justification, so what are you arguing exactly? Either the circumstances leading up to the shooting (i.e. Larry’s behaviour) was relevant to him being killed or it wasn’t, so which is it?
I’m not trying to bait you, I’m genuinely interested in what point you’re trying to make as you claim no-one is understanding it.
Nobody’s arguing that it isn’t murder. It’s certainly murder. I’m just saying it’s not a “hate crime.”
The defense is different in the UK, so I don’t understand your cynicism.
Again, you’re missing the base. It’s not “deserving what’s coming to you,” it’s an irrational fear that diminishes capacity. It still makes you guilty.
We’ll have to agree to differ on this one, but I don’t want to hijack this thread on a discussion of the legitimacy of homosexual panic when it’s not directly relevant to the topic, so I’ll shelve it for another time.
Ugh, what a sad mess. You take two kids who obviously had major problems of their own and throw in not only sexuality, which is perplexing enough in kids that age, but homosexuality, which is always going to make junior high school kids uncomfortable because it’s probably the number one teasing object.
Is this a hate crime? I’m leaning toward no. You can’t totally divorce sexuality from what happened, however, I think that’s obvious. A straight kid who gets hit on by a gay student is going to get embarrassed by his friends, and that’s not comparable to what would happen if a girl made the same kind of unwelcome advances.
Is this really debatable? I’m not faulting you for asking the question, but I really think we should all be able to acknowledge - without saying Larry King was responsible for his own death or deserved it - that his behavior clearly played a role in what happened, and further, that it was really inappropriate. He knew his behavior freaked people out and he got in their faces with it, either for attention or whatever other reason. That’s bullying. In the adult world it’d be sexual harrassment - and obviously most adults wouldn’t then make the whole thing worse by making the kid who got sexually harrassed the subject of further teasing, which helped push this whole thing toward an entirely avoidable conclusion. (Avoidable if the school had managed the issues of both kids and their interactions better, and oh yes, if Brandon’s father had hidden or locked away his gun better.)
I have no expertise in how gay panic defenses are used, but I don’t think that’s what the lawyer is going for and I don’t think it applies at all, since the “say goodbye” comment suggests he was thinking about shooting the kid a day or two ahead of time. You can’t dismiss an obviously premeditated act by saying you only did it because you were panicked.
I guess the main reason I thought it was debatable was because often, the mere suspicion that maybe the victim’s actions have to do with their death (especially in a case where the victim is gay and the killer is straight) seems at first blush to be a horribly offensive thing to say. Even before I read the whole article, I was assuming a simple case of homophobia/gay-bashing, but I don’t think it’s quite so simple. I’ve talked about it with others who assume that the mere thought that it could be anything less than a hate crime is wrong, and that bringing up the sexual harassment is just victim-blaming. I think the way you put it is pretty right on. I’m not sure it’s a hate crime just because the victim was gay–though that was part of it (obviously the kid, Brandon, isn’t going to go around killing all gay kids, just the ones who are threatening him in some way).
You know, about the only person in that article I had any sympathy for by the end was the dead kid’s little brother, who was being picked on because his flamboyant brother had to act out. The rest of 'em – killer, dead kid, parents on both sides, school officials, gossiping schoolkids, teasing schoolkids – were just a hot mess.
My point is not that this was all innocent games. More that the original article’s list of “sinister occurrences” includes so many things that are of dubious sinistracity that it makes it pretty clear what kind of picture the article was stretching to paint. It’s fun and easy to take everything you can think of doing and try to make it look evil. But it doesn’t really contribute to our understanding of the world.
Okay. You got me. I can see how somebody would be enraged to the point of murder by a boy chasing him around in high heels. And asking to sit down at lunch- even when he knew the guys were assholes- well I guess I can see how he was asking for a bullet to the head.
How many of the posters in this thread are girls? Sexual harassment on this level is a pretty common feature of female adolescence (except the perpetrator is often some creepy older guy, not a boy wearing blush.) It’s humiliating, yeah. It’s annoying as hell. It’s confusing and often painful.
But if I grabbed a gun and shot the kid who would whisper dirty stuff at me and stick his tongue in his fingers whenever I passed by to take role, I’d be played up in the media as a crazy girl who shot a guy for no good reason. There wouldn’t be any discussion. No soul searching by school administration. No experts. Just another school shooting.
I don’t doubt that King’s behavior/personality is connected to his death. I am opposed t this media portrayal of this as a story about how gay people should be allowed to be, instead of a school shooting story like any other. A kid was fairly annoying. Another kid did a very evil thing and murdered him. That’s it.
No, that’s not it. Because we ought to seek to gain, from any tragedy, a method of steering away from future tragedies. And if you reduce this to, “A kid was annoying, and another kid murdered him,” you gain absolutely no useful modeling information to assist you in dealing with the next sexually-tinted harrassment that sparks a murder.
You misunderstand the efforts to quantify and understand the root causes of what happened as efforts to justify the murder. Perhaps, in the wild world out there, many are seeking to excuse and justify the crime on that basis. But even if their motives are misplaced, the fact remains that the method is valid, and there are others who are seeking to use it with no hidden purpose at all.
Yep, it seems he had been harrassed and tormented since he was 10 over being perceived as gay, then coming out as actually gay. It sounds to me like he decided to fight back, but instead of physical assault like he been on the receiving end of he fought back by flirting.