IUBio

School Shootings & Psychoactive Drugs

ken collins kenpc at banet.net
Mon May 3 18:11:21 EST 1999


i tend to agree with you, as far as the inducement to copycat
stuff goes, but it's a sticky wicket, isn't it... the only way
the general population can acquire the will to choose to change
the status quo that led to the killing rampage is if they are
informed of the events that have transpired. that failing,
there's no reason for folks to choose to do anything, is there.

it's also clear, though, that the media coverage had an
overly-theatrical bent to it... it's the way of our "modern"
times... everything tends to be cast in the "model" of what's
become the merely-familiar thing... a TV drama.

more of the former, less of the latter, would be welcome... the
collective sticky wicket is, however, that folks long-familiar
with the TV drama "model" would tend to "move away from" "just"
hard News... so the media go for "profit$", and even the
most-savage tragedies become "attractive"... everyone beoming a
"bit-player"... "Oh, how grand it is, to be so involved."

and so, things that oughtn't, augment.

ken collins

terrell gibbs wrote:
> 
> In article <372223e3.1949252 at news.demon.co.uk>, malcolm at pigsty.demon.co.uk
> (Malcolm McMahon) wrote:
> 
> :What seems to be absolutely constant over time is the way adults are
> :astonished by the bad behaviour of children and blame it on whatever the
> :latest trend in childrens' entertainment happens to be at the time.
> :Socrates, I gather, wrote a piece on how the children of today have no
> :respect.
> :
> :I'm affraid these school shooting are simply a particularly serious
> :"fad". The first got so much publicity it's put the idea into a lot of
> :minds.
> 
> I find it remarkable that in the search for scapegoats, this has received
> so little attention--perhaps because the scapegoat search is being managed
> by the news media, who have an obvious self-interest in directing the
> public's attention elsewhere. Each of the modern school shootings has been
> followed by an escalation of the media attention paid to every aspect of
> the perpetrator's lives.
> 
> In a country of millions of people, just about any imaginable pathology or
> psychotic behavior is going to occur occasionally. But with modern
> communications media, the level of commentary and discussion over such
> events has increased by orders of magnitude, so that the potential for
> such events to shape behavior of other troubled individuals is enormously
> increased. Indeed, we've already seen a number of fortunately clumsy
> copycat attempts. In the two weeks following the shooting, you could find
> some sort of feature on the shooting on some cable TV channel just about
> any time of day. And of course, it's all over the internet.
> 
> Of course, it's a lot easier to point the finger at popular culture. A lot
> of people are always looking for excuses to suppress movies, games, or
> music that they find troubling. If the problem is in fact the level of
> attention given to such crimes by the news media, a solution is much
> harder to come by. Restrictions on media coverage run up against
> Constitutional protections, and the financial incentive for feeding the
> public's morbid curiousity is so great that voluntary restraint is
> unlikely. And while one can reasonably put age restrictions on
> entertainment media, it is hard to imagine such restrictions being imposed
> on the news media, even if the internet did not make it so easy to
> circumvent any such restrictions. Perhaps if the President called for a
> 6-week moritorium on all news reports about the perpetrators, it would
> have some beneficial effect, but the President is also haring off after
> videogames with violent-sounding names.
> 
> My worry is that we are just seeing the beginning.  I can't help wondering
> how many other depressed teenagers are sitting glued to their TV screens,
> thinking "Nobody really cares about me. But they sure do care about those
> guys in the trenchcoats..."



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