amphibian;259780 said:
Over the last fifteen years, gun legislation has become increasingly restrictive and it is actually a good deal harder than it used to be to get firearms. Licenses, waiting periods and background checks are now pretty much the norm. Some states are adopting training class requirements.
If the easy availability of guns was the determining factor, why weren't there numerous school and mall shootings in the '60s and '70s? It is straight-up copy-catting. The Columbine massacre burst out into the national media and somehow, it resonated.
That's what I thought about when yet another school shooting was talked about in the news as LEAD story for 2 straight weeks. They show the victims, the families, the analysis, the families, the victims, the victim's friends, the testimonials, the survivors, the families, the victims, the killer's psych profile.....blah blah blah ad nauseum
...until its firmly engrained in every viewer's mind that killing people in a school causes extreme grief for victims and survivors, sick infamy and a kind of glory for the suicidal killer.
Pair that with a damaged or deranged psyche, maybe a person in need of dealing out terminal revenge on some people he/she hates, relatively easy access to guns and possibly a distortion of reality from healthy doses of violent TV and poor parental guidance. Now you have somebody that can flip out and kill a lot of people without anybody really seeing it coming.
==========Response to the problem ===========
I seriously don't think that saying "its too many guns" or "its video games" or "its bad parenting" is correct. Any one may be part of the cause, but removing any one won't completely fix the problem.
1-The deranged psyche point is the hardest one to identify and the hardest to treat in a lot of cases. If you have inattentive parents or a shool loner that doesn't stand out to peers and teachers, there is a really good chance that a "snappable" individual won't be noticed. As a part-solution, it would be extremely helpful if teachers were given (as part of their education) extensive training in identifying psychological problems. It would allow problems to be caught and brought to parents' attention earler and help keep every problem child from being identified as ADD and given medication that doesn't help their true problem.
2- Easy access to guns is definitely a problem as many have pointed out. A gun in a school shooting is useless without a crazy to operate it of course, but the easy access doesn't help. Also, countries with more restrictive firearm laws (japan, uk) with identical or greater population densities and crime levels to the US don't seem to have as frequent mass murder events because the guns just aren't as available. I'm not saying banning or restricting guns will stop the problem, because the black market operates outside the law. It would effectively reduce the
number in circulation, require folks to register existing ones and in general make it more difficult to obtain firearms without a black market "hookup".
3-The video games is a tough one to deal with. I mean, I've played violent video games for YEARS, have a very active imagination, and have had absolutely no negative effects from them. I'm sure most of you are the same. There was a really interesting article I read once by a psychologist who specializes in researching the video-game-violence to real-violence transition in children. He studies kids that have violent outbreaks (fights) in school from a scientific point of view, and tries to identify the underlying psychological and physiological causes. He found some really really interesting stuff about how some of the kids had underdeveloped brain activity in decision making centers of the brain, and how these kids just seemed to lack that "reality-check" mechanism that most people have. The check that says what you're seeing or hearing should be compared to your internal database of known "real" things and evaluated before storing it in your memory. Anyway, the point of his reasearch and initial findings was that the statement "violence in the media causes violence in real life" is 100% bullshit
in normal people. In people that have chemical imbalances that hamper the "reality check" circuit, violent media can really change the way they view and interact with the world.
4- Probably the hardest thing to deal with of all is the way that school shootings are reported on and represented in the news media. If you've ever watched CNN after one of these events you know just how badly they saturate their airtime with information on the shooting. I know it's a big event and a tragedy and all, and it should be reported on for documentation and just to let everybody know. Showing the grief and victims and parents and shooter on a nationally broadcast station as your lead story for weeks after the event is excessive and supremely sensationalist. The only other people in the world that get that kind of airtime are TV stars and politicians. Combined with a misunderstanding of the line between infamy and fame in a deranged mind, I can see how a reclusive "nobody" loner type might hope to become "somebody" by perpetrating a school shooting on the scale of Columbine, Vtech or Iowa State. My primary source of news is CBC radio. Granted it's not a 24hr news network needing to fill airtime with news all the time, but they seriously reported on the Iowa state shooting for 2 days. That's it. It took 1 more day for me to not remember the story at all. When columbine happened, my primary news source was CNN and CBCnewsworld, both 24 hour networks. The event got so much airtime, I bet if I sat down and thought a bit I could still rattle off the victims' names...even years later. My point is, if the story isn't sensationalized, the perpetrator doesn't become infamous and the memory fades. If a news network devotes entire weeks to telling a story like this, the major players can't help but become stamped in our (and future killers') memories.
Anyways, that's my thoughts.
Rambled a bit, but whatever.
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