2-27-12 Another high school shooting.

According to the kid's Facebook page, he was pretty big into David Icke.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Are you suggesting that people who have been pushed over the edge by misery should seek to end it all by watching Christian Slater on television or Winona Ryder in a movie (if you can find one with her in it, lately, I mean)? That's pretty harsh. I mean, suicide is a personal choice, but there are some methods just too horrible to contemplate.
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No, I'm talking' Heathers. Pure, smooth, Heathers.
 
Maybe this is better for the CT sub-forum, but am I the only one noticing a clear trend developing with violent shootings perpetrated by isolated individuals completely steeped in crackpot conspiracy websites and literature?
 
As Halfcentaur said. I did a bit of research and found there were a couple of "mass killings"
in the US back earlier in history, in both cases no reporting to speak of outside of local papers.
When Charles Whitman did his Texas Tower thing in '66, it was not only covered live by local news, but became a huge cultural sensation. Songs were written ( Harry Chapin's "Sniper" for one) and the incident became a cultural "meme" which lives on today.
Now, it seems to resonate with all manner of desperate people.
 
In the comment-section below an article about this recent shooting, I was surprised by the stand some took. The comments had to do with the shooter being the true "victim", not the kids who were shot.

Oh yeah, because the shooter had been bullied by the group he shot.

WTH?
 
The shooter in point of fact did not even go to the same school. He went to Lake Academy, but he shot up Chardon High School; he only ever went to the latter because that is where the bus for the former departed from. There's quite frankly no evidence at this point that the specific kids he murdered and wounded even knew him, much less bullied him.
 
Googled it. Tens of millions of students in over 120,000 schools yields...2-3 shootings a year on average. And that includes events w/o deaths.

Let the innumeracy-derived panics escalate!
 
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Halfcentaur said:
It seems in many societies there is a sort of meta idea floating around for people concerning how a person behaves when they just "can't take it anymore", and these often involve indiscriminate killing. The term "running amok" is a good example, based on a behavior in Malaysia where people would attack others in public, often with a machete, without provocation.

"Going postal" is another example. What seems to have changed recently is, whether due to the severity of the situation or other factors, after Columbine, the media reports on these incidents with a fervor that was not seen seemingly prior to that school shooting.

People as a result seem to think this is an epidemic that is somehow once again indicative of the decline in moral values or something. Meanwhile, violent crime is at record lows in the past 50 years.

Blame Christian Slater and Winona Ryder.
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If they actually happened a lot, we would not hear about them nearly so much. Or if there was only real news on the news. 24 hour news stations are a total waste as they run currently.
 
jj said:
I recall something like this happening up in Scotland, too, Dunblane or something like that.

It's ugly no matter where.
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I think the big difference is that this incident was not carried out by a school child, but by an adult. And that is the only school shooting in Britain that I'm aware of. It was much more similar to the Michael Ryan and Derrick Bird incidents, where adult gunmen went on the rampage, than a classic "school shooting" in the US mould.

These three incidents are the only gun rampages I know about, ever. The first one was over 25 years ago.

The phenomenon of a school pupil taking a firearm to their own school and opening fire does seem to me to be a particularly US thing.

Rolfe.
 
There does seem to be a bit of a contagion effect (as has been observed wrt suicide - the Werther effect).

If this does turn out to be the case, it would be wise for media outlets to follow similar guidelines for the reporting of these events as they are supposed to for suicide. Unfortunately this is very unlikely to happen, especially since they seem to ignore the guidelines on suicide reporting whenever they feel like it.

Suicide media guidelines:
http://publications.cpa-apc.org/media.php?mid=733&xwm=true
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/resource_media.pdf
http://www.sprc.org/sites/sprc.org/files/library/sreporting.pdf
 
megaresp said:
I think most of us foreigners have sympathy for the kids and families involved, and feel dismay to see another of these.
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^^^ this.

As jj said, we had a terrible incident here 16 years ago with a man killing 16 wee kids aged 5 or 6 and a teacher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_school_massacre

While it may seem more frequent over there it could be the same per capita but I haven't done any research, we only have 5m people in Scotland.


ETA And as Rolfe said, this is a school shooting done by an adult, not a schoolkid.
 
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