Agreed, its become common practice to ridicule anyone that is different.

It is very sad to see such things occurring much more often lately. Student life can be incredibly tough for people especially when they feel they can't "fit in" and then become ostracized. And it's difficult to tell what happens to someone's mental state after a period of time. And it breaks my heart to hear things like this. True, we don't know the killer's motives most times (especially if they take themselves as well), but if someone's going back to their school, it's plausible that something happened there that triggered the action.

I'm very against the right to owning firearms, it frightens me a lot. I feel safer living in Canada because of this. But for people that wouldn't question going out and doing such a thing, it's pretty easy to do. There should be a better way of controlling firearms to, at least, decrease the possibility of these things happening.

Actually, the most recent shooter was a 27 year-old former student who purchased two guns legally less than a week ago, and even had a valid Firearm Owner's Identification Card.

The notion that everyone has a responsibility to carry a gun around to shoot down troublemakers is a little scary, don't ya think? ><

This post was last modified: 02-16-2008 07:27 AM by Matt.

My thoughts exactly. I read an article I forget where, but it said that the way we raise kids and the environment they grow up in now a days, like you said with the media and things, is causing them to be desensitized and their brains closely resemble that of serial killers, where they feel no guilt for what they do. I think the blame doesn't lie in the kids but in the damn media, and rather the parents that don't stop their kids from being exposed to it. An example, I don't know if you remember, but there was a teen some years ago who went on a rampage based on what he did in grand theft auto, the video game, and when he got arrested, he said life's a video game, we all have to die eventually or something like that. But the point is he wasn't 18, he shouldn't have been allowed to play that kind of a game, his parents or someone should have stopped him in the first place...

Indigo Is Blue,



nice avatar, which flower is that?
I think flowers and butterflies and birds are cool

Very pretty isn't it? It's a tulip! Albeit a photoshoped tulip Was pink, now it's bleu! Yeah! Cute

Huggles

"flowers and butterflies and birds are cool" ~ i think i'll use that

Yes, something has changed. From an educator's prospective, I'd say it's partly due to the domino effect, so to speak. Adolescents often react to suicides and shootings by repeating those behaviors themselves. Suicidal kids see others dying and it gives validity to their cause. It also provides a sense of pressure to follow through. Suicide pacts are horrific, as some students teetering on the edge and possibly looking for a way out end up going through with it simply because they've agreed to do so. Shootings... another story altogether. Violent kids with these tendancies often mull these feelings about in their heads, and when shooting after shooting is successfully carried out, they gain confidence and eventually follow suit.

It's sad. The more it happens, the more it will happen in the future. Each success is a challenge to a would-be killer to step up to the plate themselves. When people feel they have nothing to lose, they don't fear consequences. That's the scariest part...

yea I love tulips. there are blue real ones too

No more frightening than any of the following ideas:

1) That the sole responsibility for my safety lies in the hand of authority figures(police) that are not necessarily accountable for my safety and who are as potentially corrupt as anyone else, but have far more power to utilize their corruption.

2) That said authority figures will then centralize and legalize their ownership of firearms, while depriving me of the same ability to utilize force, essentially forcing me to surrender either to their power and their intepretation of society or to criminals with guns.

3) That every single adult human being has the ability to potentially destroy the world, no matter how poorly educated, irrational, or even insane, by giving them one vote.

True democracy cannot coexist with gun control, especially if you understand the origins of modern democracy. I would be very happy if all guns vanished from the Earth immediately, because chances are my bloodline and the bloodlines of all other warrior nobility would immediately come to dominate again.

Guns made people equal by giving them all more or less the same killing power, whereas in the past, someone of the warrior caste such as a knight or a samurai was easily the equal fighter over eight or ten untrained men. There would have been no vote, and no mass enfranchisement as the hereditary nobility would simply suppress any movement toward equality by force. Only with the dawning of gunpowder did every single angry peasant become a real threat, and the playing field was levelled.

And soon after that, came modern democracy.

Its not a concidence.

Regards,
IO

ya, Columbine literally started a trend I was watching this pschye program on thescience channel and i think they called it the Werther effect, or copycat suicide. great name for a metal band by the way-I'm calling dibs. it was named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Where the pangs of unrequeted love drives the protagonists to commit suicide, which actually led to suicides of the readers.
Which is why someplaces don't ussally report suicides.

It's scary to think how much the world affects our own self thought pysche.

they identified the illinois killer, I guess he stopped taking some medication, and that they didn't see any kind of warning sign.

A few years ago two kids a local highschool commited suicide, one of them went to my church, though i didn't know them because i was younger at the time and i never really could make friends at church either. Last year at another highschool where i live someone wrote on a bathroom wall on that on a certain day like in a week, "we're all going to die" The school staff found it and had a ton of police on capmus that day so fortunatly nothing happened. Luckily i haven't had any incidents at my school, though there are a fair amounts of fights that occur, we've got some security guards. but in big cities they have metal detecters, and that stuff, but sometimes it doesn't prevent violence