Colorado Shooting

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What the hell is up? Who's to blame? Is it the guns? That seems to be the easy answer, although there are less guns around now than ten yeasr ago? Another popular target is entertainment (music, movies), but is Marlyn Manson really any more harmful than Black Sabbath or W.A.S.P.? If we are going to place blame (and if we're good at anything at all; it's placing blame) whose fault is this?

-- the brain (dkravetz@hotmail.com), May 19, 1999

Answers

colorado

dont get me wrong, the kids are (or i guess were) fucked up. i gotta say, though, that i dont believe that people are fucked up by nature. Something encourages them. I'm not saying it's KMFDMs' fault, but i think that something in a song could push unstable people as much as a glass of sour milk can.it's foolish to try to regulate "hramful" entertainment because even if we "suceed" something else will set them off. what i'm wondering is this ... overall entertainment isnt any more violent than it was 20 years ago. besides the obvious stuff like Black Sabath, Judas Priest, etc. we had Sam Pakinpah films, Vietnam on the nightly news,and so on. what is it about the world today that such a smaller percentage of "violent" content so easily pushes kids over the edge. When that guy shot up that schoolyard in california in the late 80's/early 90's that was all that was talked about for almost a whole year. School shootings and such happen so often now, that when i first found out about the Colorado shootings that morning it didn't even faze me. It wasn't until later in the afternoon/evening that i realized how bad it was. what has changed that has made it matter-of-fact that someone is shooting up a schoolyard?

-- the brain (dkravetz@hotmail.com), May 20, 1999.

Let's blame Harris and Klebold. They were nuts. No one else would try to kill that many random people. Marilyn Manson didn't make them do it. KMFDM didn't make them do it. Doom didn't make them do it. Black trenchcoats didn't make them do it. Not even their uncaring teachers or their hateful and shallow (but very cute and popular) classmates can be blamed for this. Harris and Klebold were nuts. That's why they did it.

-- The Scooter (scott.slemmons@enmu.edu), May 20, 1999.

::what i'm wondering is this ... overall entertainment isnt any more violent than it was 20 years ago. besides the obvious stuff like Black Sabath, Judas Priest, etc. we had Sam Pakinpah films, Vietnam on the nightly news,and so on. what is it about the world today that such a smaller percentage of "violent" content so easily pushes kids over the edge. ::

That's a good question, and I don't know. I suspect that there have been pointlessly violent kids in the past, either in America or elsewhere in the world, but I don't know for sure, and I can't think of where such a thing might have occurred. If we had some sort of empirical (Oooh, big word--*I'm* not blonde) evidence of that who the violent kids were and where they came from, then we could come up with a theory to explain it, but I don't know, and I'm at a loss to come up with an explanation. Sorry. I wasn't much help here...

-- The Scooter (scott.slemmons@enmu.edu), May 21, 1999.


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