Is it just me, or has the media gone completely insane?
Yes, it's time to talk about Littleton. As I've said before, my goal here at GOTC is to expose unpopular truths that other people won't even think about, so it's high time I started dismantling the Littleton propaganda machine.
By now, you've all heard the story. Two guys brought a ton of weaponry to school with them, shot several of their schoolmates, chucked a few bombs around, and then apparently committed a mutual suicide to cap the whole thing off. That much, everybody can agree on.
However, a few facts have gotten lost in the media frenzy. For one thing, violence in schools has actually been decreasing in recent years. Yes, you hear more about it now, but the only factor that's actually been increasing is the use of guns in school violence. The simple fact is that guns and bombs make the headlines across the country, but knives and other weapons are relegated to a short article in the local paper. Why is this? Frankly, I think it's because nobody's out to ban knives. The folks that want to enact sweeping gun control legislation have a strong interest in playing "kids with guns" for every last drop of pathos they can squeeze out of it.
Of course, the anti-gunners aren't the only people responsible for this huge amount of coverage. The Family Values crowd wants some of the action, too - and they get it by blaming Hollywood, violent videogames, and the Goth crowd that listens to Marilyn Manson. Meanwhile, let's not leave the rest of the left wing out; those who aren't anti-gun can latch onto the fact that the massacre took place on Hitler's birthday and call it a neo-Nazi hate crime. Naturally, not to be outdone, the right wing responds by talking about the victims who were reading their Bibles and praying, trying to dress them up as martyrs for the cause of School Prayer.
In other words, this incident has more than enough crap to go around, and nobody's exactly shy about waddling up to the trough. That's why it's up to GOTC to shut down the propaganda machine's ultra-spin cycle and show you what's really inside.
Let's start by taking a look at what isn't to blame - and there's a whole lot of false blame going around. Are gun laws too lax, like the anti-gunners are saying? No; Harris and Klebold were forbidden to have firearms due to the conditions of their probation. (Oh, did you miss that point in the official coverage? In January 1998, Harris and Klebold broke into a van and stole some electronics equipment - after which they were subjected to a plethora of reformist programs, ranging from anger-management workshops to community service. Perhaps it's not probation in name, but the idea is exactly the same - "Behave or we'll lock you up.") They broke the law in possessing firearms; obviously, the enforcement of the existing laws is lacking. If we can't enforce current law, why would anyone believe that new laws would get enforced any more effectively? The key point here is that the cops dropped the ball in not keeping a closer eye on their probation cases. Oh, excuse me - I meant to say "diversion" cases.
How about blaming movies? After all, they supposedly contribute to this "culture of violence" that surrounds us these days, right? Wrong. For one thing, violent movies like Pulp Fiction and The Matrix are rated R - as in "Restricted", nobody under 17 admitted without an adult. You don't suppose some ticket vendor might have dropped the ball here, do you? While we're at it, let's take a look at regular network television - and I'm not talking about prime time. No, I mean the nightly news. With NATO carpet-bombing Yugoslavia on a daily basis, who needs to see a movie to get a big dose of the "violence solves problems" message in action? If the anti-Hollywood crowd was really concerned about Violence In The Media, they'd at least talk about television news - but they're studiously not talking about it. Therefore, this attack is nothing but a smokescreen to advance the Family Values message.
Now we get to videogames. A lot of what I said about movies applies here, of course, but videogames have the additional mystique of being connected to computers - which, these days, leads straight to the Internet and its ubiquitous instructions on how to build pipe bombs. Watch the coverage on this facet of the event and you may notice that this line of reasoning looks rather familiar. Well, it should - it's the "gateway drug" argument in drag. Doom led to the Internet, which led to bombs - looks a lot like pot leading to coke and finally to heroin from where I sit. What both versions of the argument miss is that neither drugs nor videogames prowl the street in a continuous search for honor students to seduce. No, if you want drugs or videogames, you have to take steps to get them. The same even goes for bomb-making instructions on the Internet; you have to go looking for them. The way the news paints it, you'd almost think that there are pushers on every playground hawking free AOL CDs with bomb instructions included. It doesn't work that way. And while I'm at it, take a look at the huge numbers of people who play Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Duke Nukem, Postal, Carmageddon, and all the other such games, yet don't show the slightest tendency to slay their neighbors. Aspirin has a higher fatality rate, for cryin' out loud! Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality." Keep repeating it until you either understand it or find someone who will explain it to you.
Now, what about those Goth kids in their black clothes (and matching trenchcoats!) who listen to Marilyn Manson and all that other weird music? To begin with, Goths don't listen to Manson...unless you count Shirley Manson, the lead singer of Garbage...and even that's pushing it. The Goth subculture can be summed up in one word: angst. If it's about angst, chances are the Goths will embrace it - just take a look at the Vampire role-playing game, chock full of angst and black clothes. By comparison, Marilyn Manson isn't about angst at all; he's just a pale imitation of Alice Cooper's shock rock glory days with a dose of David Bowie's androgyny thrown in. To call Harris and Klebold Goths because they wore black trenchcoats is about like saying Scotsmen are cheerleaders because they wear skirts. It just doesn't make sense...at least, not to people with brains.
Next up, the hate crime angle. To put it bluntly, this just doesn't work. A hate crime occurs when somebody goes after a person (or people) simply because of some external factor - such as the KKK killing black people just because they're black. This isn't what happened in Littleton. By all accounts, Harris and Klebold took lethal vengeance on people who had done something to them in the past - in other words, these weren't the faceless targets who are required for a "hate crime."
This leads me to the School Prayer argument, that if there had only been prayer in schools, these social misfits would have been little angels who never would have considered picking up a violent videogame, let along a real gun. Please, spare me. Listen closely to the school prayer rhetoric, and you'll realize that three points come across. First, that school prayer is a matter of freedom of religion. (Never mind that individual, private prayer is allowed in schools - and that's as far as "freedom of religion" can be pushed.) Secondly, that school prayer is a minor matter and doesn't hurt anyone. (Tell that to the Jewish kid or the atheist who has the choice of either participating in a prayer he doesn't believe or visibly painting himself as "different" and thus setting himself up to get ridiculed and/or beaten later.) Finally, we're told that this "minor matter" is a panacea to cure whatever ails the schools, from violence to poor grades. (Can someone tell me how devoting less time to academic work can improve grades?) The entire school prayer debate ultimately comes down to laziness on the part of parents; if they really care about instilling religious values in their kids, the parents should get their butts out of bed and take their kids to church...but instead, they'd rather fob the job off on the already-overworked teachers.
And ultimately, that's the problem in a nutshell. The media is so busy trying to find an external factor to blame that they haven't even considered any internal factors - and I believe that this is by design. After all, the modern media is a commercial product like any other, and thus it cannot afford to offend its audience. People don't tune in to the mass media to be told that they're idiots who need to get off their lazy butts and take some responsibility once in a while - no, Joe Git and friends want to be reassured that they're just fine, and these external forces are to blame for all their problems. Luckily, I'm not a corporate shill, so I have both the freedom and the motivation to tell you the truth.
The two nutcases who went amok in Littleton had clear motives and left a clear trail. They started down their destructive path over a year before they went nuts, and there's simply no way that either their school or their families could have been ignorant of all the warning signs. (You haven't forgotten that they were on probation, have you? That tends to get noticed by your principal and your folks, y'know?) This tragedy could have been averted...and if anyone at that school or in their homes had possessed even the slightest shred of personal responsibility, it would have been avoided. Even the armed guard turned tail and ran rather than do his job and stop a murderous rampage!
The problem is not that these kids were influenced by devious external forces, but rather that the people around them couldn't be bothered to notice the warning signs. Irresponsible parents will raise irresponsible kids; it's as simple as that. These idiots didn't kill because they played Doom; they played Doom because they were obsessed with killing people. Violent people are attracted to violent pastimes; the pastimes don't cause the violence! Here again, correlation and causality have been pureed into unrecognizability.
Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to put on my black T-shirt and black slacks, don my black hat and black trenchcoat, and listen to some Alice Cooper while I try to forget how utterly repulsive my fellow human beings are.