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From the first article (second article is included because it lead me to the first.)
“In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.
“Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.
“But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
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“The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic. Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s “Liebestod” aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal’s victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball Diaries.”
“Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.”
Colombine changed everything. The biggest factor with Columbine being such a gamechanger was timing. There were a lot of societal changes taking place in the late 90's in regards to media, information, and communication. Columbian is Columbine because it was the first of its kind in the information age.
Columbian was also far more sinister than most if these shootings. It made absolutely no sense. Why would two otherwise normal kids collude in a mass shooting for otherwise pretty reasons. When it first happened 20 years ago we were led to believe that these kids were bullied, but that was later found and not really be true. The truth is that both these kids were crazy on another level. What were the odds of 2 kids being capable of such a heinous act going to the same school? What were the odds of them being best friends? The more you look into the details regarding Columbine, the more unbelievable the sscenario becomes.
Colombine changed everything. The biggest factor with Columbine being such a gamechanger was timing. There were a lot of societal changes taking place in the late 90's in regards to media, information, and communication. Columbian is Columbine because it was the first of its kind in the information age.
I agree, dawn of the World Wide Web. I know it existed for a while before that, but that was the time when it really exploded into people’s homes. It seemed like 1998 was the year computers became cheaper and everyone bought one. It must have felt that way for televisions in 1955. It had been around for a while, but suddenly you didn’t know a single home that didn’t have one.
Colombine changed everything. The biggest factor with Columbine being such a gamechanger was timing. There were a lot of societal changes taking place in the late 90's in regards to media, information, and communication. Columbian is Columbine because it was the first of its kind in the information age.
Columbian was also far more sinister than most if these shootings. It made absolutely no sense. Why would two otherwise normal kids collude in a mass shooting for otherwise pretty reasons. When it first happened 20 years ago we were led to believe that these kids were bullied, but that was later found and not really be true. The truth is that both these kids were crazy on another level. What were the odds of 2 kids being capable of such a heinous act going to the same school? What were the odds of them being best friends? The more you look into the details regarding Columbine, the more unbelievable the sscenario becomes.
Apparently the real spark was Harris. He was a classic psychopath. The other guy may have been miserable, and one day he may have ended up taking his own life, but I don’t think he would have ever considered taking out as many people as possible with him without the influence of Harris.
So the odds are if Harris had attended a different school, he would have found another kid like Kleibold and done the same thing.
I agree, dawn of the World Wide Web. I know it existed for a while before that, but that was the time when it really exploded into people’s homes. It seemed like 1998 was the year computers became cheaper and everyone bought one. It must have felt that way for televisions in 1955. It had been a round for a while, but suddenly you didn’t know a single home that didn’t have one.
Cable news was a big one too. It had been around awhile, but that was the first time I ever remember watching coverage of an incident for hours on end. I literally couldn't believe what I was watching. It was like Hollywood.
Cable news was a big one too. It had been around awhile, but that was the first time I ever remember watching coverage of an incident for hours on end. I literally couldn't believe what I was watching. It was like Hollywood.
Apparently the real spark was Harris. He was a classic psychopath. The other guy may have been miserable, and one day he may have ended up taking his own life, but I don’t think he would have ever considered taking out as many people as possible with him without the influence of Harris.
Harris was the mastermind for sure. He was a classic sociopath. It's possible he could have brainwashed Klebold. Almost like a Charles Manson type thing. Both kids were reportedly on psychotropic drugs. Harris was on a drug similar to Paxil, and friends of Klebold reported that klebold had been on Zoloft and Paxil
Previous to the shooting despite the notion that neither drug was in Klebold's system at the time of the massacre. His medical records have been kept sealed to this day because his parents don't want them released. I can't really blame them.
The media needs to stop making the shooters famous by broadcasting their names, faces, motives etc etc..
We might actually be seeing a type of copycat scenario going on. Terrorists do the same thing.
Teens all over the world have angst and problems fitting in with their peers. Teens all over the world have issues figuring out their place in the world and what their future might hold.
The difference with America V. the rest of the world is that we have done a lousy job of raising our kids. For many years we have hoisted the kids up in an artificial bubble that they are special and will always win. Kids have been fed this false narrative by feel good parents and school administrators that don't want kids to get upset so they made everyone a winner. What a crazy notion to not keep score in a sporting game. My niece goes to a school that doesn't have grades on report cards. They dropped the A-F letters in favor of a Satisfactory scale. Where is the incentive when trying to study to raise a C to a B when the report card will read Satisfactory?
We have too many kids that have been mollycoddled, told they are winners and or drugged up to keep them in line.
Well when they get old enough to realize that they are not unique, special and actually that in real life there are winners and losers their entire inflated self worth collapses. Some can handle this big let down and some cannot. Some cry, some turn to drugs or hurting themselves while some turn to hurting others and some pick up guns to murder.
They could take away the guns but we are still going to have terrible scenes where bombs, knives, and trucks are used to kill.
Stop glorifying the terrible carnage from these scenes.
The media needs to stop making the shooters famous by broadcasting their names, faces, motives etc etc..
We might actually be seeing a type of copycat scenario going on. Terrorists do the same thing.
Teens all over the world have angst and problems fitting in with their peers. Teens all over the world have issues figuring out their place in the world and what their future might hold.
The difference with America V. the rest of the world is that we have done a lousy job of raising our kids. For many years we have hoisted the kids up in an artificial bubble that they are special and will always win. Kids have been fed this false narrative by feel good parents and school administrators that don't want kids to get upset so they made everyone a winner. What a crazy notion to not keep score in a sporting game. My niece goes to a school that doesn't have grades on report cards. They dropped the A-F letters in favor of a Satisfactory scale. Where is the incentive when trying to study to raise a C to a B when the report card will read Satisfactory?
We have too many kids that have been mollycoddled, told they are winners and or drugged up to keep them in line.
Well when they get old enough to realize that they are not unique, special and actually that in real life there are winners and losers their entire inflated self worth collapses. Some can handle this big let down and some cannot. Some cry, some turn to drugs or hurting themselves while some turn to hurting others and some pick up guns to murder.
They could take away the guns but we are still going to have terrible scenes where bombs, knives, and trucks are used to kill.
Stop glorifying the terrible carnage from these scenes.
Right, give the shooter no publicity whatsoever and announce this policy to the public. Maybe even a declare a total news blackout. I don't know if this would work or not, but they need to try something.
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