Slashdot Mirror
The Public & The Internet: Open Forum
brent_clements writes "With the recent shootings in colorado, and other recent shootings around the country, I have been seeing articles such as this one, touting that these kids used the "internet", played games such as DOOM or Duke Nukem and were general geeks who were picked on in school. The articles that I am reading give me the impression that by using the internet or playing these games the kids were somehow provoked by them. " I'm overstepping my usual bounds a bit, posting what's sort of an AskSlashdot, but given the constant coverage, here in the US of the Colorado Massacre, and the fact that the murderers are being styled as geeks and hardcore Internet people, I'm wondering what everyone thinks. Is the perception of this prevasive? Or, more honestly, does the Internet make things like this easier for people? What about socialization of people? Let 'er rip folks-because geeks are getting blasted out there right now.
It still, somehow, amazes me that all the 'pundits' (oy) come up every imaginable wrong answer there is. I should know better by now.
They encourage the 'good sport' and 'sportsmanship' which is the greatest load of crap to ever be foisted on folks. The jock-gang and their ilk do what for any better term I'll call charging the capacitor of hate. Were theses kids filled with hate? Yep. But they didn't get it from the media, at least not enough to be the main cause. The people right around them dumped the hate in by the bucketfull. (Yes, I've been there and I *do* know WTF I speak of, tyvm) The charge keeps building... and people now wonder why a spark jumped the gap? Clueless.
This is a very unpopular view, I'm sure. I can hear the replies of "You're blaming the victims!"
No, I'm recognizing what happened. Was it right?
Certainly not. Was it understandable? Very.
What happened was simple - two people were driven to the point where they felt they no longer had anything to lose and the spark jumped the gap, the hate that was built up, put there by the 'good sports', discharged.
Folks will keep asking 'why?' and keep coming with wrong but comfortable answers and keep failing to realize that more than two of the wounds were self-inflicted, just not as obviously directly as the two always said.
I spent 11 years as a professional military officer, and while I was so employed I was constantly researching and studying my trade.
One of the books I picked up was called "On Killing", written by a Army Colonel with a PHd in Phsch, an absolutely facinating study into what it meant, on a personal level, to kill someone.
One of the subjects in the book was on the training of soldiers to kill. Humans have a powerful, innate aversion to killing people and getting people to overcome this aversion is very difficult. It's also the prime purpose of any Army training cadre.
In WWII, a study showed that a very small percentage of soldiers in a given battle actually fired their weapons, and an even smaller percentage of those soldiers fired aimed shots.
One of the changes made was to replace the standard Army "bullseye" rifle practice target with a man-shaped target. Thus conditioned to shoot at man -shapes (rifle engagements take place between 400 and 100 metres, so you can't make out faces etc.) the percentage of men who shot went up dramatically - by Vietnam, most men were actually firing aimed shots.
An interesting side note is that cases of post-tramatic stress syndrome increased at the same rate - those who would not normally have killed were now killing - and suffering the consequences after the fact.
Now I certainly don't think that DOOM or Quake turned these kids into monsters, but it is entirely possible that the game helped to desensitise and condition them to be able to overcome the natural aversion to killing. DOOM didn't get them to bring all those guns and ammo to school, but once the shooting started DOOM _may_ have helped keep it going.
Incidently, on the gun control issue, there's no issue that tears me (as a retired military professional) harder in two directions. On the one hand, I have lived around high-power firearms for most of my life, I have been in possible-live-shoot situations before, and I know when to shoot, and when not to. I trust myself with a firearm, because I'm highly trained, and I know that I won't use one except in the direst of situations. I would like to be able to carry a gun. Not some monster cannon, just a standard frame 9mm loaded with a "safty round" like a Glaser that does not shoot through people and is frangible (so no ricohets). Ammo capacity is not an issue - if I need more than 3 rounds, there's bigger trouble afoot than I should be involved in.
However, I DON'T trust Joe Public. I have no assurances that anyone holding a gun really understands what it is he's holding. Cops do, soldiers do, but I don't think guys like ESR do - and that scares me.
I'm not sure which is worse - people like me without a gun, or people not like me with one.
DG
Asking to government to ban this, that, or the other thing to prevent these acts of voilence won't solve the REAL problem: unbalanced kids with no parents or positive role models in their lives. Banning the guns might help, but there's still 1001 potential murder weapons in every kitchen in America. If children aren't raised to respect life, separate FICTION and ENTERTAINMENT from REALITY, and obey the laws of the land in which they live, the problem will never totally disappear, only keep changing shape. The only way kids will learn to do these things is if parents teach them to. The government just doesn't have the reach/power/ability/right to teach morals and such - it's got to start in the home.
If parents would raise their children right, teach them the difference between "real life" and "lets pretend", take them to church, and be role models instead of babysitters, we'd all be much better off. It's easy - if you don't want your children looking at porn, teach them it's wrong and disrespectful to women. If you don't want them building bombs, teach them life is to be respected. If you want them to grow up to be mature responsible adults, TEACH THEM. Don't ask the government to do it, or the school system, or anyone else. Parents should be the biggest influence in a child's life. End of story.
--
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Just lurking, thanks!
Only problem with this, is that if you take the guns away from everybody (legigimate people), then thier will still be guns avaliable...just iligaly... And, it probably wouldn't be much harder to get ahold of one if you realy wanted to than buying a pould of dope.
IMHO, every amarican should carry a firearm, it keeps those who would use them for evil reasons from acting out, or, if they do, something can be done about it quickly.
http://www.xpurple.com
You've got two kids... Who are in what boils down to a gang.
/your/ kids.
You've got a society with no moral standards -- that has, in essence, told these kids to find themselves as the ultimate morality.
You've got parents who are absent enough not to notice that their kids are making dozens of pipe bombs. ("Wow johnny... We're so glad to see your interest in gardening! Could you put some of that fertilizer on the petunias? And plumbing too!")
You've got a total demise of common courtesy, to the point that these kids are mercilessly harassed without anyone in authority making any attempt to protect them.
Finally, they are presented, daily, in every media, with graphic violence, sexual depravity, and moral degeneracy.
And we blame the Internet? Or guns?
The problem is that:
1) Parents are pursuing self-fulfillment instead of raising their kids. I know it makes people happy to have a job -- great. Have one. But don't neglect your kids. If you can't have self esteem without a job, then don't have kids!
2) Society has trashed all moral standards in favor of a bunch of feel-good psycho-babble.
3) Children are taught that truth is relative.
4) The schools neither teach nor discipline.
5) Moral degeneracy has taken over everything people see and here. We are continually being assaulted with sex and violence -- in the bassest possible form.
Get a clue people. And don't do this to
This is only the start people -- our schools are going to be war-zones until we turn around. And all the gun control or warning labels in the world won't change that.
-- Slashdot sucks.
People have always felt the need to segregate those who do horrible things from themselves. In the publicized cases over the last couple of years there have been a few common characteristics of the people behind the murders:
This to the public is the definition of a geek. It lets society get off the hook of delving into the real problems. Instead the symptoms get labeled as the problems. What does this mean? Rather than looking at why they preferred gaming so much, gaming is seen as the problem. "Censor computer games!" cries the public. "While you're at it, ban death metal!" shouts the clergy. This is much easier than having "What caused these people to be ostricized by their 'peers' in the first place?" as your battle cry. That would require real work and real thought.
There are very few journalists left in media, be it television, print or radio. For the most part they've all become socially acceptable versions of Geraldo Rivera and will carefully repeat what the public wants to hear. Nobody does interviews with youths seen as outsiders to let society see why they've become outsiders, instead they interview friends of the victims who just label them as outsiders. So they reinforce the myth or misdiagnosis.
Chances are a large section of the slashdot readership at one time or another has been labeled as an outsider. A better editorial interjection on the part of Hemos would have been "were you ever seen as an outsider, and if so why?"
Haven't these absolute idiots in the media ever heard of kids playing Cowboys & Indians? Cops & Robbers? Since when have little boys not had toy guns growing up?
As someone who writes computer games, I find this extremely scary.
IMO, the biggest impact the internet has in terms of socialisation is that it strongly reduces the influcence your physical location (e.g. the country you grow up in) on your culture. It allows you to communicate with kindred spirits all over the globe.
But this isn't the global village where we're all in the same vanilla culture. It's a bazaar in which just about everyone can find the cultural niches they belong to (SF fandom, taoism, wicca, Linux, cartoons, bikers, classical philosophy etc. etc.)
This can be a great thing, but it can also be very bad, as a means of spreading memes like racism, self-destructive religious cultism etc.
The internet is a technology that is changing communication. It is not inherently good, nor inherently evil. It is not "the medium is the message". It is the medium in which all messages can be found.
It is our individual responsibility to learn and to teach how to use this technology for good.
I think we need to spend some time figuring out why these school shootings keep happening. It's important that we gain an understanding. I'm just gonna give my thoughts and then come what may:
As a little background, I'm a 30 year old software engineer (a programmer who thinks about it first), I'm married, and I do plan to have children. My wife is a school teacher in a school district on the edge of Philadelphia. Her district has a very wide range of income levels, so I hear about the whole range of wierd student and parent behaviours that teachers have to deal with.
When I refer to 'our parents' I'm refering to those folks in their 50's and 60's like my parents. When I refer to 'kids' I'm talking about anyone under 18.
Speed of change: These kids are growing up in a world that's changing on an almost daily basis. If you are a little slow learning how to fit in, then by the time you get a clue, the rules have changed.
Over-stimulation: The way kids play today is a LOT different from when our parents grew up. TV provides a rapidly changing series of loud, attention-grabbing scenes. The stories behind much of what's on TV revolve around someone beating someone else up for some reason. Games for dedicated game machines and computers are mostly about violence in one way or another, and like TV they provide rapid, loud stimulation, and everything is resolved by violence.
Parental over-work - The TV and Game machines probably wouldn't be so bad, but many parents are working longer and longer days. They don't get home until late, so the kids watch TV till mom and dad come home, and when they do come home, they don't want to yell at the kids, so they let the kids do whatever they want (I've seen this with my cousin's children). Alternately, they don't want to be bothered with the kids, so they plop them down in front of the TV. Either way, the kid is getting more TV time than parent time, so where do you think they are going to pick up their outlook on life? And if a parent is over-worked, how are they going to notice that little Bobby seems depressed?
Responsibility - Many parents simply don't want to be responsible for raising their children. They don't discipline the children at home, so by the time the kids get to school, they have no respect for authority of any kind. Or they put so much pressure on the kids to do well and get into honors programs that the kids break down when they don't make it. Or when the kid gets a bad grade, instead of working on making sure Johnny does his homework, they call and yell at the teacher!
I'm not saying that any of these things have to do with the latest shooting (I don't know that much about the families involved). But I will say that NONE of these things ALONE would be enough to send someone over the deep edge. But taken in combination with a hundred different things I haven't mentioned...
Thanks for reading.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
"...the jocks get away with doing worse.". Wow. I think you are over generalizing here a bit.
I too was a geek in High School. I too got beat up, made fun of, etc. But I don't recall that it was just jocks, and certainly not all jocks, to the contrary. In fact I don't recall any jocks being involved.
The solution?
Well, sounds rather coy but...it starts with you and me. First I have to let go, forgive, what others did to me in my past. Throw it all into the "sea of forgetfullness". Second I have to learn to put others before myself. I have to hold the rights of others above my own. I have to care for others more than for myself.
Now I have to teach that to my children and their children. I have to live it out before them EVERY SINGLE day. I have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
Is that going to solve the worlds problems? No. But it will help those around me. And in the process make me a better person, even though the goal is to make others better persons.
So we can continue to argue who is at fault. We can continue to lobby for gun laws, shut down the internet. But until we love or fellow person and respect their rights more than our own it will be a fruitless struggle against an evil we continue to be entagled in ourselves.
A child is walking along the beach at low tide. The beach is covered with thousands of star fish stuck up on the sand as the tide moved out. The child walks along, picking up one star fish at a time and tossing it out into the ocean. An old man comes along and says. "What are you doing, you can't possibly save them all. You are wasting your time. What you are doing doesn't matter". The child with joy in his face picks up another star fish, throws it into the ocean and says, "It matters to that one."
Don't know where that parable comes from. But it seems to fit...somehow.
....Sociopaths and Psychopaths will be sociopaths and psychopaths, no matter if they are geeks, farmers, politicians, terrorists, Ordinary Joe Bloggs, that "nice quiet man a few doors down", yer uncle/aunt, or whoever.
How can you _possibly_ blame Doom for these two characters doing what they did? I play Doom etc. but I'm not going around spraying bullets.
No. There are too many factors involved with what these people did, ranging from America's "achievement culture" - whereby if you're not good at sports/science/anyhting else, you're no good at all, to America's Gun culture - "It's in the Constitution, Son!", to lack of parental care/education, and a WHOLE lot more. Pinning this one on the fact someone may be a geek, play Doom or whatever is just Plain Nuts.
Silly Media!
Sorry, I accidentally hit submit prematurely.
... I'm struggling for a point here. While I don't think it's fair to claim that this is bad out of hand, I do think that parents should be worried if their children are growing up in an environment like this. In combination with other factors, I think that this can certainly be detrimental to their well being.
To continue with my rant, I think that violence in media is something that needs to be looked at, but not in isolation. In combination with other factors, children are being left to their own devices, with very little guidance from responsible adults. When they are faced with messages like the one I mentioned above, well, I don't think it causes them to become killers, but I don't think it's healthy, either. Certainly it's easy to just claim that portrayed violence is the sole cause, which isn't fair, but isn't it slightly ludicrous to claim that it has no effect whatsoever?
Regarding the `Goth' scene -- I'll be the first to admit that I know relatively little of what is actually entailed in being a Goth. However, from what I have seen, it seems to focus or dwell on death, depression, pain
Hmm. It's early, and I didn't sleep last night, so this is coming out a lot more ranty than I'd like. I guess my main point is this -- yes, the media is being narrow minded to try to blame this tragedy on one cause, but we would be equally narrow minded not to consider the effects of portrayed violence on our youth.
--
Ian Peters
I realize this probably won't be the most popular opinion you'll read attached to this article, but I'm going to step out on a limb. There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction going on here, on two counts. First, the media, for seizing on violent computer games and the internet as a possible `cause' of this tragic event, but also, the slashdot community for dismissing this possibility out of hand.
Several of the (few) posts at this point make the following argument -- "I play violent video games, and I've never killed anyone, so that theory must be wrong!" This is a fundamental logical flaw. If the statement were "violent video games turn everyone into killers", then a simple counter example would be sufficient. However, merely stating that violent video games have no effect on you doesn't disprove a relationship. I'm not necessarily claiming that there is one; just that this argument is flawed.
Now, to claim that there is a relationship. Several people have pointed out that violence predates the internet and computer games by a large margin. This is certainly true. I could sit here and make the argument that violence has never been this realistic, but I don't think that's the point. I do think that mindless violence, which is being portrayed more and more, in many different forums, is problematic. I was recently playing Quake Team Fortress the other day. As I entered the game, I was greeted with the message "Kill, Kill, Kill!"
--
Ian Peters
But the problem is that most kids now *don't* have good parenting....most kids now are brought up in daycare centers either private or state-owned. Beause of the nature of my job and location, I'm able to keep my children at home and educate them myself. There is a big difference between their behavior and that of my friends' kids who attend public schools or daycare centers. BTW, I live in an Asian country where guns are completely illegal (always have been here) and the murder rate is actually slightly higher than that of the US. The difference is that here they use poison, baseball bats, gasoline, knives, acid, etc.
Society doesn't like this. It gives Society a bad name.
Society tries to do whatever possible to convince itself that these Bad People(tm) were never a part of Society to begin with.
The first step is to find "obvious differences" between Society and the Bad People. Well, violent computer games and the goth subculture are in the limelight these days...let's use that!
(cue all those media shots of the items with the Doom logo in evidence bags)
Maybe this will make the "ins" realize the "outs" are human beings, and have breaking points. I'm sure these boys did what they did because they were sick and tired of being treated like shit. It's sad and terrible and tragic that peoples' sons and daughters are dead. But how many of them that died ever bothered for one second to treat the boys that did this like real human beings? I'd bet none. So be warned. If you don't treat your fellow human beings as equal, it could happen to you. And if you treat others like shit, whose to say you didn't deserve it? Maybe the jocks SHOULD be the ones afraid of the geeks, instead of the way it is now. Food for thought. If you don't like my opinion, get your own.
--- --- --- Don't just do something! Sit there!
The above posting clearly illustrates the exact though process that led to the Colorado murders. You can't pretend it doesn't feel bad when people loathe you--the issue is clearly that geeks/nerds do have negative feelings because the "cool people" don't like them.
As much as you want to deny it, we are all programmed (by advertising, peer opinion, even parental opinion) that cool is good. But being cool and being smart both require a major investment of time and attention; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult or impossible to do both at once.
So every student makes a choice; perhaps by temperament and capability; perhaps by chance; rarely, if ever, by conscious desire. This choice perpetuates itself: Having spent a lot of time becoming either smart or cool, it is much easier to remain what you are than to switch to the other side.
From the point of view of cool people, it must be true that uncool==bad. If investment in coolness is to pay dividends in social currency, then it is at least as important to make sure that uncool people don't get social reward as to make sure that cool people do. So the cool people (again, not necessarily consciously) loathe the smart people, and the smart people feel bad because nobody likes to be loathed.
The smart people have no such inherent need to loathe the cool people. The expected reward of an investment in coolness is social promotion; in order to receive it, it is necessary to force everyone into the "correct" social attitudes. But the reward that smart people expect to gain from their investment is intellectual accomplishment, eventual future money-making, and perhaps a sense of superiority. But this is all internal and does not really require anyone else to be forced to fit any particular pigeonhole.
The problem is, we all want social recognition. Even smart people. The environment is set up so that smart people don't get it because they can no longer afford to make the investment in being cool (ie, spending their time knowing what fashions are current, who's dating who this week, going to parties, never being seen near a computer, etc). So smart people are made to feel bad; in some cases, very bad indeed.
The most obvious way to deal with these bad feelings is to demonize those who cause them. How do you reconcile the cognitive dissonance between the belief that you are a good, worthwhile, useful person, and that they all think you are valueless? Well, they must be wrong. See the previous poster's choice of words: stupid, scared, mindless. People you don't even want to be involved with. People who don't like you and aren't liked by you. People who are so worthless that you don't even care if they think you're worthless. People so useless that 'subjecting yourself' to their company is a trial to be endured rather than an enjoyable experience.
And if they take such strong, destructive actions as loathing you based on what you see as a wrong-headed belief (ie, cool is better than smart), they must be bad people. And if they're bad people, why not kill them? You're doing the world a favor: Improving the collective IQ, as it were.
Needless to say, this is the wrong answer. For healing to occur, you must accept that these people loathe you, that it matters to you, try to understand their reasons, try to find ways to cope. This is very difficult and it would be a better world if it didn't have to happen. However, given the unpleasant choice as it has come to exist, better to grow up understanding that shallow people exist and posessing a few tools to deal with them succesfully, than to grow up with a kernel of hatred buried in your psyche and a twisted view that includes the [do I dare say it: evil] concept that permits you to value human beings as worthless.
The real tragedy is that these issues could easily, almost trivially, be addressed by the teachers, but the functional structure of the schools prevents it. By high school, courses are taught by subject, and the subjects are academic: history, science, math. There isn't a class in how to get along with people. Unlike elementary school, there isn't anyone specifically tasked to get to know the kids and oversee their cognitive and social development. It's easy to say that it's the parent's responsibility, but the parents rarely have any clear knowledge of what goes on in the school.
Home schooling is not the answer, because most parents can't stay home all day, aren't qualified as teachers anyway, and can't provide opportunities for social interaction; so all that happens is that their kids' social development pains are delayed until college instead of high school.
The real answer is to have a mandatory and participatory ethics/morals curriculum in the high schools, but of course it's very difficult to teach morals in a way that doesn't offend one or another fundamentalist religion. We've actually gotten to the point where you can't say "It is wrong to kill" in a classroom because it might be interpreted as religious in nature (not to mention then having to explain away the barbarity of state-sponsored execution). Now I'm not particularly religious myself, and I'd be generally against teaching specific dogmas in the schools, but I think high school is where moral grounding needs to be learned--and I think if the recent tragedy shows us anything, it's that we have to address this problem NOW.
cheers,
--
>My take on the firearms issue? Both positions
>have flaws: but on the whole I like the idea of
>banning public access to lethal weapons. People
>(in whatever groupings you choose) are just too
>irrational and, all too often, just plain stupid.
I have to disagree. There are millions of gun owning americans who've never shot anyone. And there are also many americans (say, thousands) who've been able to stop a crime because they own a gun.
Some people are irrational, yes. People drink themselves to death every year, people fall asleep at the wheel and kill minivan's full of kids, some people abuse there children, some people run with sharp things. Just because stupid people do stupid things, should we outlaw booze, cars, procreation, and sharp things? Lots of stupid people do stupid things, yes, but we can't let a few bad apples ruin the pie.
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
I think that in some ways you make a descent argument here but I don't think you really go far enough with it. The fundamental flaw here was not that these kids played Doom, or listened to Marilyn Manson, or dressed in black trenchcoats. The fundamental issue was that these kids were left alone with these things and never really connected to anything outside of that. The parents probly did the best they knew how but were they really there from the tiem their kids were born with the love and support that they needed? Or did they go about their daily business and ignore the various signs that were there saying that their kid was screaming out for help? I seriously doubt that these parents were attachemnt oriented and thought their kids love and connection on a daily basis. I don't want to sound like I'm blaming it all on the parents, because there were definately more factors that that.
Lets through in the video games and the internet and Marilyn Manson though and look at the role they could have played. Violent Music, while a definate form of expression (and one that even I connect with, being a fan of MM) does not in and ov itself motivate one to kill. Nor does violent thought in and of itself. The videogames could very well have been active in breaking down the barriers between reality and fantasy, but why would that be possible. If all a person has to connect with is a violent video game, then perhaps that's all they will know. If all a person knows is a violent fantasy of killing before being killed, you can see that there is a potential problem without me pointing it out. And the internet... As we know the internet is a tool for communicating and gathering ideas and spreading them. But it is a tool moer than a media. It is what we make of it. I can go on the internet and for months at a tiem never have contact with another human being on it, it is my decision about how I use the tool that allows me to communicate with other people or shut them out completely. In my case I choose to share my thoughts but that does not mean that most of the flames I will recieve from posting this will have any bearing on my life. Because I choose to ingnore the input and seek my own agenda which is to not bother reading or writing to people who don't like my ideas or my input. Who's to say these kids were part of an internet propigated "gang," I'm not saying they weren't, but I think that the impact was way less than is being emphasised. In the end, I believe that it is too difficult to pidgeon hole someone into a course of behavior that is dictated by music and video games and the internet by themselves. No, there was more to it... I think that these kids were let down by their families first off, probly because the parents didn't know how to effectivly divy up thie time between work and family and still make ends meet without feeling very drained themselves. This is a feeling that is growing in America and will probly continue. Secondly I believe that the school let these kids down, because they had no outlet for these intelligent children that they wanted to take part in, and because they failed to make them feel comfortable in any social type setting. The community and other kids let these kids down for not breaking through and not connecting with these boys early on and giving them status in the social ranking of the community. It is important for children to feel a part of something even if it is something small. Other kids and other parents should have reached out to include these kids in something other than what they could devise on their own. Alienation doesn't go aware just because you ignore it, often times it comes back to bite you.
This is what is happening today, more and more parents are having children that they can't devote the time to because they are too worried about the lives they want to lead than the ones they do lead. They don't take the time on a daily basis from the childs earliest years to make them feel loved, to bring them in and make them a part of the family unit. They send them to school where the only thing that they can find to connect to are drugs, music, and games. The other kids make fun of them, only driving them farther away. Teachers and priciples look at them as troubled children and pidgeon hole them that way, driving them further into a hole. They go home and play quake and have fun, and listen to loud crunchy music and have fun, and escape their depression for a while, breaking down what's real for a while. And we're suprised when they start fantasizing about all those monsters in doom being the monsters that are keeping them in that hole. Go figure that we've created a ticking time bomb, look at how many times these kids have been labeled and criticised and let down before they ever got to that point. And when they fell so low and have they're boundaries torn down to such a point, and still people ridicule or even worse, ignore them. It makes perfect sense that as an eighteen year old with hormones pumping and real life closer than ever, they just wanted to explode.
Unfortunately I believe that this is only the beginning. It's not going to go away until on the most fundamental family layer, we start to deal with our children as what they are, human. Full of all the good that we are, and the bad. We need a social structure that allows us to spend time with our kids, a work environment that is more focused on family, and healthy workers than profit. And more schools that have less children, more teachers, and lots of active learning rather than lectures that bore and build discontent. And most importantly room for all children to learn to grow and connect with eachother, not to learn to create outcasts. This is the only way we can start to change this in a healthy and constructive manner.
Taking into account for human behavior, it's not possible to have a hippy dippy land that everyone is going to be idealic parents and we're going to have idealic schools where all the kids are nice to eachother and all the teachers are great at motivating their students to do something other than fantasize about something other than today's lecture. But it is definately time that we as a community (as all communitys that make up the US, and the world) start taking a real hard introspective look at what we do to perpetuate the current behaviors and start working on real ways to move closer to that ideal that we seek. Until then, acts like this will continue.
---------- Hot Rats!
As much as I hate to admit it, you are somehwhat right.
However, you fail to address the heart of the problem.
Do video games (of the violent flavor) affect children? The answer is they ***can***. If parents choose not to raise their children, more than likely they *will* (this is not always true, I've known children that were sit down in front of the TV all of their young lives and turned out fine, even after playing lots of Doom).
It isn't the TV or the Quake that hurts children. It is the replacement of a parent with these. That is what does it. It has nothing to do with lack of religion (or a "strange" religion), violence in a game, or anything like that. It has to do with the lack of a caring parent.
But that is just me.
This sig is false.
What drove HAL crazy? Being programmed to tell
:) (and a high threshold for pain :(). But I accepted quite a bit of the grief that came my way because that was the way things were. If it had been pointed out to me that there were other ways for things to be, I wouldn't have been so quick to accept the hassle.
the truth and being told to lie.
Society on the Internet is *in general* a meritocracy. You're judged by your ability to communicate, by your intelligence. But then when you go to school, those attributes become irrelevant, or worse, are turned against you. You're ostracised for the very same things that are an advantage on the Internet. This does not lead to a stable mentality.
I didn't have too much trouble in my school, mostly because I was a sarcastic little bastard who'd verbally rip anyone to shreds who tried to mess with me - and I had biker friends
K.
-
--
To the extent that I wear skirts and cheap nylon slips, I've gone native.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
I think it is actually rather encouraging that the media point to FPS games as a reason for the Columbine killing. It shows that they are becoming mainstream and there is nothing anyone can do against it anymore. Just look at the past for more examples of this: the supposedly 'bad` influence of comics, the 'corrupting` influence of agressive action movies, even TV shows have been 'credited` as cause for rampant behaviour.
Ofcourse, no journalist would *dare* put the blame were it rightfully belongs: with the person responsible. Somehow it seems unacceptable to them that an 18-year-old can truly be a criminal.
On a last note: why do people think that ready availability of information on bomb-making (or drug-making for that matter) is all that's required for people to actually go out and make bombs (or drugs)? There *is* such a thing as availability of the physical means to do so, and it need not exist. Knowledge doesn't kill. Knowledge *cannot* even kill.
You've touched upon a whole different topic. The school system in the US is degrading. And I'm of the opinion that nothing will stop it although I do have several opinions on the reasons.
First, children today often don't have any sort of support system. Mom and dad both work if they are even both still around. They don't have much time to be a part of their child's life. Some try really hard, even fewer actually succeed. The unfortunate part is that even a little bit of listening can avert a tragedy like this one.
Second, school is a privilege. This may sound good on the surface but what this means is that each successive generation takes this a little more for granted. Even worse, kids that genuinely want to be in school are stuck in classes full of kids that don't want to be there. That statement contains so many problems that need to be fixed that it is a topic for another entire dicussion.
Third, society tends to view money as the answer. When confronted with this opinion I often hold up a dollar bill and ask if it's teaching anyone. When everyone says that it isn't, I then hold up two then three, etc.. The point is that money may be required to implement a solution, but it is not a solution in and of itself. In fact, in more densely populated areas an equal allotment of money is almost insignificant.
Add these three together and what you get is a downward spiral. Each successive generation of kids will be required to be and learn to be more independent. Schools will get more money and not know what to do with it. Each generation of kids will be more likely to take school for granted and not understand the future benefits. Schools will spend the increase in money on making sure that the students can't sneak away. As the reaction becomes more militant the gulf between the few students that really want to be there and the students that don't want to be there will widen.
Because the kids are more independent, they know the basics about how to function in society earlier. This means that they know how to find or purchase guns, explosives, knives, etc.. The internet and violent games only give them the extra experience needed to make the task easier.
The last nail in the coffin that is my downward spiral theory is that all of this adds up to mean that parents need to become even more involved than they already are. Parents that are barely able to tackle the problem now will become overwhelmed.
I fully expect to send my future children to a school where they aren't required to spell correctly until the 6th grade. I only hope that I'm in a position where I can keep my son or daughter out of public schools. I'd hate to have to send them somewhere they are expected to be medianly stupid just because classes are tailored around keeping a disgruntled group a little more interested.
Grrr! Few topics are as frustrating as this one.
-Paul (pspeed@progeeks.com)
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
I agree with this. Here in Atlanta, one of our local radio idiots was talking about the influence of Marilyn Manson on these devil worshippers, and how we would hear a lot more about the music and how it was to blame before this was all over. Keep in mind, he was saying this at a time when the exact identity of the shooters was not known. The police had not even secured the building. When I got home that night, CNN was showing the cover art to Rammstein and playing up the fact that these two spoke German to each other.
Then came the video of Doom. I noticed the player in Doom had the shotgun (may favorite weopon in Doom) and had not yet got the chain gun.
Of the 1800 students at Calumbine (sp?) High School, how many do you think have played Doom? How many have listened to Rammstein?
Certainly any male old enough to hold a joystick has played Doom. No mention is made of the total prevalence of Doom on personal computers. It's an immensely popular game.
The media looks for some trait in the personality of these kids that will help mark them as members of a counter culture, but the traits they come up with are mainstream.
Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Doom. Not all teenagers listen to these bands or play first person shoot-em-up video games, but they are not counter culture.
The fascination with Hitler is disturbing, but not uncommon in confused teenagers. Most grow out of it. The strange posts to AOL (if true) are disturbing, but AOL is a very mainstream outlet for kids to express their uninhibited thoughts in anonymous chat rooms. There is nothing unusual about doing this.
These two were disturbed, they needed help, but the media looks at normal, everyday trappings of teenage culture and places them on a stage as oddities. They are not oddities.
Questions that should be asked: How did these guys manufacture pipe bombs in their garage without their parents noticing? What legitimate warning signs were missed? (e.g. did they threaten someone verbally, had they tortured animals in the past, was there a history of non-lethal violence leading up to this.) But the media plays clips from "Du Hast" and shows 640x400 screens of monsters getting blown away with a shotgun.
There's no easy answer to this one, but it's difficult for me to believe that these kids were instilled with any morality or belief system.
School shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon and in a uniquely American way, pop culture will blame pop culture for the evils of our pop culture.
It seems everytime an unthinkable tragedy occures, the "I have a special agenda" people come out in full force to explain to us (in our shocked and upset state) that this whole tragedy could have been avoided if only their viewpoint was adopted and acted upon. See, video games really ARE bad, this proves it. There really IS too much violence on TV, see where it leads? This is all because of that evil music, etc.
I even saw one of the congressional representatives of Colorado on TV yesterday lamenting that the state never adopted a more strict weapons policy for the schools!!! I can see it now, two deranged teens prepare to enter the school and start executing people when the notice a "Gun Free School Zone" sign, and turn back, defeated.
Please, policies weren't going to prevent this. This was a result of kids ever growing lack of repsect for life, both their's and other's. When you feel your life is so meaningless that you plan to kill yourself anyway, it's probably not difficult to take other's lives. I for one would like to know why kids (not all, but more than ever before) no longer seem to respect life at all.
My $0.02
Fink
First of all, it is NOT every American's right to own a gun, only non-felons who are over 18 (or 21 for handguns and semi-automatics). I happen to own a gun and I don't plan to go on a shooting rampage anytime soon. I own a gun because there have been robberies, shootings and other crimes very near where I live and I would like to be able to protect my family and property if necessary. Anyone who tells me I shouldn't be able to do so can go live in DC where there is a gun ban. And of course, because of this, DC is the safest place to live because there are no guns right? funny...
I believe in gun control. You need limits on who can own what, and waiting periods are a good idea as well. However, you will NEVER remove guns from this country. There are simply too many in circulation. Cut off the supply lines and march around (as Hitler did) and attempt to disarm the public as much as you want. Then only the criminals will have and continue to get them. Plus they now have the added bonus of knowing that their victoms will probably be defenceless.
Oh, but wait, we have the honest and not-at-all corrupt police to protect us, right?
Fink
I am a senior at Arapahoe High School, in Littleton just 5 miles east of Columbine. They aren't our main rival, but I've watched two back-to-back state championship soccer games from the Arapahoe side of the field when it was down to us and the Columbine Rebels. As a result, there's been some real animosity between our two schools. Needless to say, that has been thankfully tossed aside as many of us went down there to offer help and support.
/. and user friendly for a bit of escape, and then seeing Iliad's message there and then later this (huge) thread on slashdot.
Also, I am a varsity wrestler (hence the handle i use) and i just recently competed in the regional championship which was held in the Columbine gym.
And as soon as I heard about the shootings, the first thing that came to mind was the time I was sitting in a bathroom stall in the Columbine boy's bathroom during the tournament. All 3 walls were covered with hate messages, swastikas, references to satan, and especially things to the effect of "All jocks must die!" And, like all those Columbine students, I thought that was kind of strange and then promptly dismissed it as I left the stall.
I don't personally know any of the victims, but it's been a hard last couple of days when I didn't know that fact. The coordinator of the gifted/talented program at Arapahoe (a good friend of mine) is the next door neighbor of a fatally wounded victim and has also known Dylan, one of the killers, since preschool. A fellow member of my track team is a friend of that kid everyone saw hanging out the window on the news. So its been a surreal week, and I don't think it's quite hit me yet.
When I first found out about the incident, it had only just started 15 minutes earlier, and for the next several hours I was under the impression that it was a minor shooting, with perhaps a few injuries. Then, I got home after practice and got the updated story, and couldn't believe it.
You've all probably seen on the news what they've been saying about Littleton, CO. Well its true. Practically every school here is a blue ribbon school, no gang activity, long honor roll lists with the bumper stickers to proove it, and plenty of soccer moms. Oh, and despite the name, its not little - thats just the name of the founder. It's a suburb of Denver, and nothing separates the two except a thin invisible line.
So I believe them when they say "If it can happen in Littleton, it can happen anywhere." -cross community upbringing off the list. And the more you read about the kids' parents, the more you will realize they were not "brought up wrong" or "mistreated". No, they both come from 2 parent households, and the neighbors feel strongly enough that the parents were good caring people (one mom works as a counselor for disabled people) that they wrote a note, signed by 19(?) of them expressing their support for the parents (although i admit that them not knowing about all that bomb building has me stumped) so I don't thing is parental upbringing. These two guys did little league sports and cub scouts, and the like, and Dylan attended a youth group with a friend of mine only last year. By his account, Dylan was normal.
Oh, and this "trenchcoat mafia" thing has also been blown out of proportion. This group (which was not a gang at all, and had no affiliates outside the school) was a geek type group that dressed different but had fun in their own way, and didn't harbout much more resentment than your average high schooler. They did, however, have a facination with guns. This is a description of that group as it stood last year, and they even took out a yearbook ad that show the group of geeks all smiles.
Things turned sour with the group late last year, from what I heard, when the jocks started picking on them. Then the hate started. They resented how the jocks seemed to run the school, and they were always picked on. A fight was arranged at a local baseball field after a big confrontation at the school. The trenchcoats showed up with brass knuckles and swords, so the jocks left.
I don't know for sure, but I believe that Eric and Dylan were drawn into the group through their interest in computers and weapons, and turned sour with the rest of the group from the run-ins with jocks. Their real flaw, I believe, was a combination of not knowing how to play the high school game and no effective method of dealing with hate. They channeled it into a long range plan, set in motion near the begining of this school year, to get revenge on the jocks and have the final say, so to speak.
In every way, they thought of the whole matter as a war. They developed a fascination for war (WWII and in particular) and Hitler, and went around annoying people by marching around the school with precise 90 degree turns like soldiers.
Here is where the part about DOOM comes in. They were so consumed by their big plan, that they played DOOM head to head over their modems for hours upon hours. This was not for fun or relaxation or to try to beat each other or any of the normal reasons a person would play DOOM. They took it seriously and considered it training. They also played paintball a lot, and for the same reason. The important thing to stress here is, that while those 1st person shooters may or may not contribute to this kind of thing, in this case the plan came first and the "training" second.
All of this is kind of overwhelming when you are so close to it. Its kind of funny that, even after I knew that it had made world news and forced "Littleton, CO" into the same breath as the likes of "Jonesburo, AK", the thing that really drove it home for me was logging onto
If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading my thoughts and impressions on the matter, and I wish only the best of health and peace to all of you.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
The traditional news media's market share is being clobbered by the personal computer and the internet. They are desperate to hold on to their ratings to keep the advertisers happy, so they are using their still considerable reach to go after all the things they feel threatened by. They are, in one fell swoop, going after all the weirdos: Goths, computer geeks, net nerds, and other assorted outcasts who don't fit profiles compiled by the ad men.
I wouldn't be surprised if they next went after Apple for promoting non-conformity with their "Think Different" Campaign ("Here's to the crazy ones...the misfits; the rebels; the troublemakers; the round pegs in the square holes...").
The music is not in the piano -Clement Mok
You know I was at my library the other day. I cant belive we allow our children in that place! Books about guns, war, The Catcher in the Rye, Mein Kampf, even The Communist Manifesto!!
As Americans we cant let our youth be corrupted by this kind of evil. Get out the matches it's book-burning time!
(For the sarcasm impaired, It's important to note that the Internet is not the only source of information on the planet, just the most hyped. For every web site these killers visited I'm sure there's many more paper related publications in the Littleton Public Library)
I was cynical at first. I read the stories in the paper, on the web, and watched on TV. I wondered aloud if the parents were a factor. Then I remember a link from Slashdot: an article about kids in Idaho written for Rolling Stone. I realized that people of all ages make decisions on their own. Sometimes these decisions are well reasoned and sometimes not, as evidenced by this week's tragedy.
I talked to a friend of mine at lunch yesterday about Colorado and the killings. He and I agreed that the problem was communication. The kids (the shooters) had something to say and, they thought, no one to listen. How many times have you been hurt emotionally and felt "too whipped" to say anything to anyone. A friend or loved one says, "Hey, how are you doin'?"; is your standard reply "Fine" or are you willing to open up when you need to.
The shooters expressed themselves in a way which they believed everyone would (finally) understand. Don't blame the internet or parents. Let's let them take some of the blame themselves. Ozzy Ozbourne, DOOM, computers, and Bill Clinton aren't to blame for your behavior. You are.
If your
But guns are only part of the issue. Culture is the issue being discussed. I think culture is to blame, but not the "Goth, D&D, internet" culture. American culture. A culture which allows the popular to spit on the unpopular. Which creates outcasts. Which makes kids feel like they have no reason to care about the world around them. The internet, D&D, and Goth allow people to have friends who support them. Quite the opposite of what most articles are implying, this is healthy. It is healthy to know someone is there for you. But in a society where popular kids are encouraged to exclude others and make them feel like they don't belong or are worthless, it is inevitable that some will revolt against this in violent ways. Years of torture can twist your mind, and while you may have been a good kid 8 yrs ago, you can be perfectly evil now.
kmj
kmj
The only reason I keep my ms-dos partition is so I can mount it like the b*tch it is.
Great response. Knee jerk defences just don't have a place in dicussions of events like this.
:-)
It is interesting that you bring up the goth element. In my younger years I certainly considered myself a goth and although aged almost 30 now, I still hang out in 'goth' clubs. There is a strong thread linking most people who are into the goth thing and you would be surprised at how many parallels there are to the video / fantasy / wargaming community.
My experience of the goth scene is that ther are many people who are attracted to it through their day to day troubles and in finding people who share a slightly 'bleaker' outlook on life. When I was 16, I was surprised at how many of my friends were people who were victimised at school.
However (and here's the kicker!) we were also all pretty well adjusted kids overall. Sure, there was a predisposal to listen to dark music, wear dark clothes, play Dungeons and Dragons and read 2000AD - but that was pretty much it. Personally, I do much the same today, except you can swap D&D for 'fiddle with Linux' and reading 2000AD for reading Slashdot.
So, is there a point I'm making? Yup, I guess there is. Those kids grew up in a society bounded by community values on the one side and surrounded by death and criminal behaviour on the other. There have been maladjusted people at almost every point in our history as far as I can work out, nowadays though, the maladjusted have an extreme range of different views of the world they can choose from, plus access to some startling amounts of firepower. To put the blame on any one aspect of our society is useless. I could blame those kid's parents, or the jocks who bullied them in school, or the laws of America which made guns available to them, or their teachers for not noticing how marginalised these kids were. But I'm not a journalist
I would say that all these aspects, pushed the kids to rebel. Once you begin to rebel against your parents, teachers etc, then you tend to gravitate towards certain things - I'm sure that I would be playing Quake a hell of a lot if I were that age right now. What is missed though is that these kids took their rebelliousness to an extreme new level - but one that has precedents. When I was a kid in the 70's I remember the girl who when asked why she had come into school with a shotgun and gunned down her class replied "I don't like Mondays", inspiring The Boomtown Rats song. I bet you anything that she too felt ostracised, was bullied and felt like the world was not somewhere she belonged.
OK, I'm gonna wrap this up, as typing something so long into a little textarea box is making me lose the thread of my argument.
Basically I feel that Goth music, dark clothing, a predisposition towards guns and violence, extreme political viewpoints, obsessively playing Quake - these things are symptoms of deeper problems. In our society, we are all looking for a panacea, a quick explanation for the irrational. Unfortunately, there just isn't one. These kids were complicated machines and somewhere along the line, they got their programming mixed up.
A little planning goes a long way...
I totally agree with your comment about school. I was verbally abused by my classmates for about two and a half years at school, for various reasons. My experiences of school lead me to believe that the only way to avoid such treatment is:
I heard news reports in which the reporters were saying things like "no-one has any idea why these kids did what they did". I have a suggestion. I suspect it's because they were psychologically unstable - for whatever reason - and years of verbal abuse at school pushed them over the edge.
I guess I'm kinda at the epicenter of all of this. Last year I graduated from Chatfield, a school thats about ten miles away from Columbine- we were the school that was built after Columbine got too crowded back in '85. I go to church locally there. There were forty people in the youth group that went to Columbine. Today, we're short one. The girl that was praying in the library was my friend- they came in, held up a gun to her head and asked her if she believed in God. She said yes, and was shot. Murdered for her beliefs. One of the nicest people I've ever met.
So people are throwing fingers in every which way, trying to find out what caused this. I don't know exactly what it was caused by, but I know that many of the things they point at are simply symptoms, not the problem itself. So the kids liked to dress darkly and write death poetry. Was this the cause? I doubt it. And to pointing at the jocks as the reason? Heh. I got teased as much as anyone while I was in school. That may have been a contributing factor, something that pushed them over the edge, but again I don't think it was the overlying cause.
There are many factors to this. Everyone seems to be trying to find something to point the finger at. That ain't the way. This is much too complex to have just one single cause. I wish people would stop trying to classify people by group and start looking at them as people. Listen to 'Unity' by Op Ivy sometime. Thats what I'm talkin about. We are all different, but we are all the same.
Still not dead.
Once again something bad has happened and the press is trying to blame everyone/everything except the killers themselves.
At first I heard the attack was racially motivated. Give me a break, only one of their victims was a minority. That is unless you think student atheletes are a minority?
Then they want to blame the internet, guns, porn, gothic clothing. It sounds to me like they are grasping at straws and attacking all the standard media scapegoats. Why can't they just report the kids where crazy. It was the kids fault. Maybe it was the parents fault. The police found bomb making supplies at the house of one of the kids. Either the kids were doing a good job of hiding this, or the parents where turning a blind eye to what was going on.
I say it is finally time for us to accept there are bad apples out there. And when we find them we should punish/eraticate them. Sure, some (but by all means not most) of them may have turned bad because of the internet, or porn, or Doom, or something. However, these are activities that 99.999 percent of the people in the country can enjoy without going crazy so why punish the majority of the public for fear of "saving" one?
The only good thing about this attack was the killers killed themselves. Sure, now we will never know why they did this. Who cares. We don't have to "protect" them for the next 20 years while we "enslave" them. We don't have to hear the arguments in 20 years that they have reformed and should be let go. We don't have to follow their media-frenzied trial for the next year. We don't have to pay for all this. Its over. The bad apples are gone. We can all go back to our glutenious lives of playing on the internet, watching porn, playing Doom, and cleaning our guns.
quack1701
those wepaons listed aren't strange I wasn't raised in a large town here in the US so they never used guns either. I did see more than one 'beat down' by people with knives, baseball bats (spiked ones are nasty), & various other 'low tech' solutions to try to hurt/kill someone. It's just those types of crimes don't get the attention ones involving guns do.
I'd be far more worried about trained thugs with guns coming and shooting me in the head for my convictions than I'll ever be about nutcases who occasionally go off. Guns are evil, their sole use is the causation of death. But there is no way to un-invent the gun. It is here to stay and there will always be those who understand its power and who would seek to use it to enslave others. An armed citizen is the ultimate protection against tyrrany because as long as the common man can defend himself and his country, no domestic enemy can easily sieze power. We live in a very fragile democracy, one which is has decayed in many ways from the image envisioned by those who founded this country. The political process is mostly a sham. It matters little who you vote for because all of them to a greater or lesser degree are owned by those who paid to have them elected. But if the worst should ever happen and the government were to become an enemy of the people it was meant to serve, armed citizens will fight to protect their freedom and many will die for it. Political power doesn't come from the ballot box, it comes from the end of a gun.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
While reading (skimming) this discussion, I was disappointed to find no references about the key issue here: morality. I assume that most people would agree with me: killing anybody in this way, no matter who you are or what cause you represent, is wrong. Even in our postmodern American society where violence is glorified in all forms (movies, television, games like Doom, etc.) there are laws which forbid murder with very few exceptions. However, our laws seem increasingly to be in direct conflict with those violent influences. Somewhere along the way, the perpetrators in Littleton stopped believing that murder is wrong and learned to see it as a viable solution to their problems.
I have watched my brothers, my friends, and my husband play games like Quake and Doom for years now and while I dislike the games, I don't worry about violent repercussions in their lives because it hasn't seemed to jeopardize their moral character; their moral sense of right and wrong has remained stable. However, were they different men without a good sense of morality, I would be concerned.
I grieve for the deaths of these children, as I do for children in Kosovo or Uganda or anywhere else in the world, and the only comfort I have is that each person will have to answer to God for what he or she has done. Without my belief in divine justice, the world would seem to be a hopeless place to live.
While I don't doubt the ability of mass media to oversimplify any bad situation, I have noticed that many groups who feel they have been mentioned -- at least in passing -- after this tragedy are taking it as if they're the targets of some kind of blamefest.
Example: Just last night I was mystified by someone very wound up about this subject. It turned out that, to my amazement, he felt that as a gay man who wears a trenchcoat a lot (bear with me here, this is a real example), the world was accusing him and his social group of this crime.
Frankly, I haven't noticed any particular pattern to media descriptions except that they're flailing about trying to get a handle on these guys. Matt Drudge, of all people, had an article where he pointed out some dozen or so different attempts to categorize them (Marilyn Manson fans, Hitler enthusiasts, vampire game players, fingernail polish wearers, the works) and made a little light of the actual journalistic depth of these attempts. If internet chatheads (and I'm one, believe me) are one of these categorizations, I guess it's natural for us to jump a little when our turn comes up on the big random attempt-to-explain-it-all wheel, but my point is that being loudly offended and raising a new stink isn't going to help, and I hope we think twice before going down that road.
In short (too late), no, I don't think that the Internet made these guys do this. Neither do you, I expect. Anyone who sits and thinks about it will realize that the major players here are someone who didn't bother or didn't succeed to instill a sense of morality -- or at least respect for life -- in these guys, and ultimately, beyond even that, responsibility falls on the shooters themselves. We all know it. I hope we all realize it. I suspect strongly that, like usual, after a couple of weeks we'll all get past the attempts to find some element of their lifestyles onto which to shift the blame.
R. Francis Smith http://www.sturgeonslaw.com/
Be careful what you swollow when dealing with news media of any sort -- they make their living by convincing folks to consume their product and thus reply on all the same bs tactics used by business in general. In short, they'll say and do just about anything to get you to consume their product and have very little regard for truth, honesty or any sort of ethics.
Two wackos in Colorado go on a bang-binge and kill a bunch of people they don't like but, because they like to play Quake and they have web pages on AOL, the "internet" and violent computer games are a "contributing factor" in their decision to do shoot up their school.
I'm convinced that reporters and commentators for news businesses are hired only after they've been verified as being logic-free morons who are quite ready to voice opinions in the absence of knowledge and facts so deadlines can be met, ratings can be acquired and advertising can be sold.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Computer games are not the problem.
The problem is the social setting of high school. When I went to school, I was a nerd. I was, of course, tormented and teased, as no doubt all nerds are. I survived.
I've been watching. In the decade or so since I graduated from high school, it seems that he division betweenthe nerds and the jocks, the ins and the outs, has gotten worse. A lot worse.
More, since teachers tend to be afraid to interfere, the jocks get away with doing worse.
"He was such a quiet kid..." goes the common refrain.
Of course he was. That was how he survived in the jungle of high school. Maybe no one would notice he was intelligent if he kept his mouth shut.
These kids, it seems, banded together to defend themselves. I suspect this only got them ostracized further -- after all, they were a 'gang'. As if high school football teams are often less than a gang...
Folks, we've got a problem. We are driving our intelligent children out of society. Look at what we say -- "Intelligence is good!" -- and look at what we reward -- physical strength. Is it really any wonder that we hve kids going nuts when they have what we claim to value, and we punish them for it?
We have a problem.
I don't have a workable solution.
Does anyone?
Come on guys, the internet has nothing to do with this. These are things (murder, sex, pornography, satanism, etc.) that have existed before the internet. The only thing that changes with the advent of the internet, is that these things are more accessible since you can search with the click of a button.
...
... then again, maybe these kids would have used knives or razor blades instead ...
If being exposed to these things can turn you into a violent axe- (or in this case gun-)murderer, there's something wrong with you in the first place. If you have been drowned in such excessive doses of violent TV/Internet images that you actually feel the urge to act these things out in real life, there's something wrong with your social surroundings
I realize that our US friends (I live in Europe) treasure their right to carry arms, but the simple availablilty of these guns makes things like this much more easier to happen. I have always found the prevalence of guns in US society somewhat puzzeling (yes, I lived in the US for a few years and know what I'm talking about). Maybe if guns were not so easlily available, these things wouldn't happen so often
We are genetically programmed and chemically driven to feed and to breed, beyond that the question arises as to why a mad, upright ape, living outside the laws of nature has gained to the position of representing the universe having become aware of it's existence. The miracle is that we don't kill ourselves off in greater numbers.
No more than a thousand years ago, (the flicker of an eye lid in terms of the evolution of our species), the viking who would go on to to be the first european to land on North America impressed his gathered clan and made his attendant parents proud, when at the age of six, or thereabouts, he buried a war axe in the head of one of his playmates, killing the other child instantly. It seems the other child had beat him at a game and he didn't like that. This violent act by a child was noted in the Norse sagas and was said to presage great things for the boy. My point is that we are violent creatures by nature and the herculean effort we have made to lift ourselves free of gratuitous violence needs to be noted. Geeks, like me, consider how far we have come, how far we have to go, and how to get to where we're going. Don't let the bad press get you down, one of the reactions of all people when such things happen is to find someone or something convenient to blame and in doing so to distance themselves from having to ask what in their lives propagates such violenc.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
This is what happens when you treat humans like animals. The cause of this is not video games, or guns, or the internet. The problem is sticking developing young in a cage together and encouraging them to abuse each other.
This is not a crime perpetrated by abnormal people. These were very rational individuals who simply felt like they had nothing to live for. When people abuse you to the point where you hate yourself almost as much as you hate the abusers, the cultural values of kindness and care that we rely on to organize our society fail.
The thing about them being geeks, is that they were successful. They committed themselves to a violent course of action, carefully prepared it, and flawlessly executed it.
The only solution to this problem is to create a society where all people are accepted and diversity is encouraged. But of course the media and the government won't realize this. They're having a fun time blaming it on Hitler.
We are all children of Kod.
It's been interesting watching the media try to link this to the Internet. Even when there's no information, they seem to think these kids must have been "on the Internet". It has become a mandatory angle on every story about every delinquent in our society, even if it isn't relevant.
These kids sound like they had relatively little to do with the 'net, yet everybody is looking for the connection. Matt Drudge fell for AOL hoaxes. CNN reported how you can learn to make a bomb on the 'net (then later explained how pipe bombs are made).
After two days, all they've found is one personal web page of dubious origin. "How could this have been overlooked?" they ask. Well, pretty easily, as anybody who has ever published a personal page will tell you. It's the modern equivalent of putting posters on your dorm room door, except fewer people are likely to see it.
That said, the 'net is a wonderful complement to real life, not a substitute for it. People whose social interactions consist primarily of online chats with strangers can easily lose touch with reality. Friendships that exist entirely on-line rarely have any depth. So, there's some value to keeping an eye on this angle, as more and more people fall off the edge of reality. But the lesson is not that the 'net is bad, it's that real-life human interaction is good.
Apology in advance: This is a) long, b) I can't spell worht a damn, so forgive me, and c) I am basing some items on being in the USA, so forgive me if I make certain assumptions on laws and customs that you might not be familiar with. Thanks!
Well, now that we've debated up one end over the other about media, games, parents, cheerleaders who lead them on, teasing, and everything else, I'm going to make a try to see if I can figure out why, and what the solution is.
You see, this is very important to me. My daughter was born April 1. I want to see her graduate from High School, go to college, and be happy and successful some day. I want to sit down at the table each night and hear about her day when she's going to school.
I don't want to hear about how little Bobby shot up little Stevie because they didn't like each other.
So, here's my own opinion:
Why they did it:
1. No emotional connection to other students
I watched the news the morning after on the Today show, as they interviewed different teenagers about the killings. Almost all of them said "No, I really didn't know them. Well, I knew their name and face, but that was it." Only one student said "I was friends with one guy- and he told me to leave that morning. I left."
These two teenagers had no reference to the other students. Forget the Neo-Nazi stuff or whatever- it wouldn't have mattered. They had no emotional connection to these kids.
2. Parents didn't get a clue
The day after, their was a web page viewed on the news that was suppose to have been made by one of the students. Now, maybe that's been debunked by now- if it has, let me know. But the web page was basically "We hate them all, we wish they would die."
How the hell didn't the parents notice this? Or the pipe bombs in the basement, or at least the supplies to make them, or all of the ammo?
3. Not just disconnected, but disliked
An interview with a local student who had just moved from that area talked about how these two teenagers were into computers and, while he never used the word "geek", let's face it, they probably were. They lived in a culture that society rewards with money later in life, but punishes because they dare to be different in high school. Day after day, they probably heard the comments from other people, or perhaps just ignored.
4. Faulty wiring.
Something inside their heads just didn't connect right, and they decided that killing people was OK.
All right. Now, the solutions. Again, these are just my opinions, so work with me here. If you have a better idea, let me know- I've got to find out before my daughter get's too old.
1. Parental involvement.
Above all else, I believe in my heart that this is the most important thing. I know, people say "Teenagers hide stuff, they don't tell parents anything". I know this- I was a teen, I certainly didn't tell my parents everything I did. But my mother at least made the effort. There always had to be a parent or adult at someplace I was going to- and let me tell you, it's hard to try and put the moves on a girl when Dad's in the other room. I had a curfew- perhaps too strict of one, but it was there. I plan on having one for my daughter, but I'll give her slack as long as she calls to tell me first.
My father used to read my journal and my mail- jerk action for sure. I've sworn that I'll never do this to my child, and I mean it. But I will know what's she's doing. Who she hangs out with. If this means that I have to give up some of my time to come home some afternoon, make cookies or bring in video games for them to play (yes, those evil video games.) Check out where they go on the Internet, or their web page. Sure, they can make up something on geocities where you'll never find it. But make some sort of effort- odds are, you'll find out something before it gets to be a problem.
2. Some gun control for teens.
Before you get your panties in a not, just finish reading. Personally, I don't like guns. Too loud. But I have no problem with people who own them- I have a former co-worker who had a concealed weapons permit, and kept one in her purse. Great- I'm happy for her.
But there's no need for teenagers to have a gun except for the a) firing range and b) hunting range. A fellow at my last job was taught by his father when he turned 11 how to handle a gun. The number one lesson? How to put it away, lock it up, and never ever use it except for where it is supposed to be used. He was told over and over again, no guns on people. Don't shoot the birds. Respect this- or else your privilage to use the gun will be taken away for a long time. He was taught to respect the power and responsibility that comes with it- and when to use it, and when not too.
A law out in my place in the world came up about restricting concealed weapons in schools and churches, and was shot down. Seems that would infringe on little Johnny's rights to carry a rifle into school.
Teens don't needs guns- if you can't drink alcohol until you're 21, smoke until you're 19, and drive until you're 16, there's no way I want to give you the power to kill somebody just because you're big enough to wrap your finger around the trigger.
3. Death penalty for teens.
Yes, I'm saying death penalty- or at least hard laws. I don't give a flying leap if you're just 16, 14, or even 11. You kill somebody, I want it plain and simple that you are going to the chair, and nobody can save you. I admit, this won't stop some kids, especially these two who committed suicide after their rampage. But you know what- I bet that if every teen knew that if they shot somebody and killed them, they would be guarenteed a trip down death row, shootings would slow down. If they knew that Amy would be in jail until she was 70 for shooting Carla, she might think twice about it. As it is, some laws have them until they turn 21, or even 18, clear their record, and send them back out. I'll be honest- kill them. First felony, some jail time and therapy. Second felony, some more jail time, better therapy, job training, and then move them far away from where they commit crimes so they don't keep going back to the "bad crowd". Third felony- kill them. They obviously can't learn, and are therefore genetically defective, and must be culled from the herd. And those who think that I would spare my own child- think twice. Looking into my heart, and honestly feel that if my daughter did these things, I would cry, I would wonder what I did wrong- and then I would tell the DA to send her to the chair, and then spend the rest of my life feeling terrible about it. But I'd do it for the rest of society.
So, there's my rant, my opinions, and my views. Help me out- let's find a solution, write to our congresspeople, and fix these students. I figure I've got about 11 years to have this fixed before my daughter is old enough to worry about it, and want to get started now.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel