Blog of many Trades is devoted to blogging about ASDs. I am for ideas, not groups. I throw in with no one. Harassment, libel, and threats of legal action have put the blog on hold. Currently, this blog has enacted comment moderation. There is no guarantee that your comments will get through, and I check whenever I'm on, which is infrequent.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Moral Kombat: A Documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIu3JMGxk3Q

This is the trailer for a documentary which has caused quite an uproar in the gaming community, and is casting gamers as killers, pyschos, and more. I, as a gamer, find this attitude offensive, disrespectful, and unwarranted. It looks to be simply another attempt by self-righteous opponents of games to try to laden the burdens of soceity on a scapegoat.

They don't seem to realize that there are reasons for peoples actions. They fail to realize that the things they blame for the moral decay of soceity are not causing the moral decay, that the moral decay itself is spawning said amorality, and that if they want to know why a student would want to slaughter his peers, they should find out if their peers had made their lives hell for them, hurt them, scarred them, shaped the person who walks into a school with a firearm to kill whoever he can find, and then take their own life.

In all seriousness, the issue seems cut clear enough. What do people do when they want to find links to behaviour? They examine the behaviour, and find commonality between the behaviour where it is repeated. So far, I think it'd be obvious that with so many of the shooters having had terrible childhoods, bullying, and other factors like sexual abuse, and overt sociopathic or psychotic behaviours, that these things may have an influence.

I don't see happy school shooters. Do you?

*update*
Fine then, for utter clarity.
Peopel who are abused, bullied, tormented, are more likely to commit a school shooting. They are the most likely to end their own lives once they have done what damage they can. The school shootings done by them happen to have the highest amounts of people killed. Killers are born exactly like the rest of us, innocent, not evil, not murderers. It's what happens after being born that creates the seeds, and when they grow to fruition, the field is reaped by innocents, and/or the ones to sow it(if they're still in the same school as them).

I have researched many cases of shootings. And lo and behold, what do you think I've found?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Loukaitis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Ramsey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Aftermath_and_the_search_for_rationale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Andrew_Williams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lake_High_School_massacre#Internet_activities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_High_School_shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre#The_perpetrator

And here's something I found. It's amazing wha\t you find when you actually do a bit of digging.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-fox17apr17,1,7688699.story?coll=la-news-comment&ctrack=1&cset=true

But still, even with LA times coverage, what are we as human beings doing to try to prevent this? Diddley squat.
We know Bullying is wrong. We know that people who were bullied killed people and left haunting messages, direct messages, that we all but ignore these in favour of comfortable ignorance, not having to do anything, no needto try to solve the problem,but relegate it to what we hear, or see, or read, or play. Here's the messages, the clearest, most straight out messages that they've given.
-------------------------------------------------

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=edK5tf5_bL4

Minutes before he started the shooting, he gave the following message to a friend:

"I am not insane, I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day. I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. ... All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do? Yes, you will. ... It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help. It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can't pry your eyes open, if I can't do it through pacifism, if I can't show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet."
----------------------------------------------------------

Here's a scrolling set of Lyrics, the song is Teenagers by My Chemical Romance. Sad really, when a band makes a better job of examining school shootings than boards of people assembled for that specific purpose. I wonder just how hard it is for those commitees to ignore the messages delivered by bullets?



- My Chemical Romance Lyrics