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You took my post out of context. Re-read the post I was responding to: "the cops herded all the students into a locked room and left them there unguarded," which was false.
Your direct quote was "No cops herded anyone anywhere during Columbine." That is why I said I disagreed with what you said, but not necessarily with your intent.
Cops did herd people during Columbine, therefore, your statement was wrong. If you take into account what you were replying to(context), it was still wrong.
Blanket statements are understandable at times.. easy trap to fall into, but, that doesn't make them right.
Quote:
"Eric and Dylan had been considering a killing spree for at least a year and a half. They had settled on the approximate time and location a year out: April, in the commons. They finalized details as Judgment Day approached: Monday, April 19. The date appeared firm. The boys referred to it twice matter-of-factly in the recordings they made in the last ten days. They did not explain the choice, though Eric discussed topping Oklahoma City..." -Columbine by Dave Cullen.
*(Later, when they couldn't obtain enough ammunition in time, they delaed it a day.)
So, because I know how many people were killed in the OKC blast, i'm "studying" it? It might be proper to say that they were INFLUENCED by OKC with your quote. But studying?
We can't tell from that quote, of which only the last half of the last sentence has anything to do with OKC(outside of the date), what was meant by "topping" OKC.. Did they mean they wanted to top the death count? Did they mean they wanted the notoriety to be more than OKC? I feel it's the latter, but, I can't be sure of that from the quote you provided. if they wanted to do either of those, it would have to be considered that they were influenced by OKC.. I'd even think that you couldn't say that their crime was influenced by OKC, but that they were.. Is that splitting hairs? I don't believe so, I think it's being very specific, because to truly understand something, you can't deal in generalities.
Studying, or copycatting (another term I hate that seems to be thrown around too much here) would indicate that they looked in totality at what happened in OKC, and either directly copied it, or took the basic idea and improved upon it, or tried to improve upon it.
You have to weigh the facts that besides the day and that people died.. What's the similarities? From the way the crime was committed to the reasoning behind the crime.. Totally different.
If I sneak up behind you and give you a pie in the face on December 7th, i'm a student of Pearl Harbor, but if I do it on December 8th, it's just a pie in the face? Hell, there's more similarities there than there are between Columbine and OKC.
There is, somewhere, a limit to the ingenuity of crazy, though it's a lot higher limit than most sane people have. You shoot people, you blow people up, you mass poison people (Japan subway), you hijack a plane.. There's a limited number of basic themes here to choose from. That was one of the reasons 9/11 was shocking.. They came up with a new variant of bat**** crazy that noone had seen before, though the basic theme of hijacking a plane had been around for 30+ years. Even the totally new variants are pretty rare. Klebold and Harris didn't do anything really unique other than be very successful.
Cops did herd people during Columbine, therefore, your statement was wrong. If you take into account what you were replying to(context), it was still wrong.
Blanket statements are understandable at times.. easy trap to fall into, but, that doesn't make them right.
That's right.
Quote:
We can't tell from that quote, of which only the last half of the last sentence has anything to do with OKC, what was meant by "topping" OKC.. Did they mean they wanted to top the death count? Did they mean they wanted the notoriety to be more than OKC? I feel it's the latter, but, I can't be sure of that from the quote you provided.
No, we can't. You're free to conclude whatever you want from reading Harris's journals, where he made those references. The quote I referenced is from Cullen's book on the subject, which he spent a decade researching. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/colu...=9780446546928
Quote:
Studying, or copycatting (another term I hate that seems to be thrown around too much here) would indicate that they looked in totality at what happened in OKC, and either directly copied it, or took the basic idea and improved upon it, or tried to improve upon it.
Looked "in totality"? They appeared to look as far as their teenage abilities were capable. Thank God they didn't succeed with their bombs. The body count from their guns was bad enough.
Quote:
Klebold and Harris didn't do anything really unique other than be very successful.
That must be your opinion. Not sure what your point is.
This is the first one that I can remember when I was a teenager. I was 15 when this happened. Notice no guns were envolved. I was in high school in Houston when this happened.
I'm struck by the use of the words "success" and "improve" in Labonte's post. Sad to say, some of these kids do see it as a contest and a challenge to outdo each other in body count. Which is exactly why we need to treat these events differently in the press. If a teenager -- more socially sensitive than at any other stage of life development -- saw a headline or heard a news anchor describing Harris and Klebold as pathetic, zitty, weak in the head losers who proved nothing except that they couldn't cut it even in high school, let alone the real world -- that would leave a very different impression on viewers.
It's hard to put a lot of blame on "the media," since tabloid-style media outlets exist all over the place, including countries like Spain and Italy which do not have school-shootings. We'd have to look at each factor and see whether or not it also exists in countries without such violence.
There's a shade of difference between blaming the media -- they after all did not pull the triggers -- and challenging them to throw a true light on ugly, miserable crimes instead of treating them as the most exciting thing that ever happened.
Would our mass murder rate be even half what it is if Columbine hadn't happened?
In one word, no.
Incidents of mass killing appeared long before Columbine; remember Starkweather? Howard Unruh? Jim Jones? Koresh? and there were probably a few others in the days before the media went looking for them.
But the point remains that in a nation of 310 million individuals, saturated by the media as in few other places, it doesn't take as much effort for the few extreme cases to emerge as never before.
Three generations ago, the majority of suicides were female; according to some sources, males now predominate by about the same ratio.
So it would seem apparent to me that the emancipation of women -- a trend which is the single most prominent societal change of our time, which is unstoppable and against which no logical, empirical analysis would assess any direct blame -- still has to be identified as a major contributor to the burn-out of a small, but very frightening minority.
I cannot identify any remedy for this trend, and would be particularly skeptical of any attempt which involves strengthening the state's (meaning government at any level's) legal monopoly on coercion. Big Brother's / Sister's tentacles are already tightening and any do-gooder's claim that intensification of the effort (and both the cost and the encroachment upon the rights of the law-abiding majority), would strengthen our security is whistling in the dark; to this writer, it would seem far more likely to provoke and encourage a new, and possibly larger round of lone nuts. They have little or nothing to lose, might consider themselves already "walking around dead", and anyone who thinks that the means can be legislated away probably hasn't spent much time outside Urban America.
It is a relatively-small but very dangerous backwater, started by trends too powerful to undo, and one way or another, we're likely to have to live with it until it burns itself out.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 06-22-2014 at 03:01 PM..
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