: What's going to be the result of all of this media publicity surrounding the kids who killed fifteen people (incl. themselves) at Columbine High School in Littleton Colorado? More authoritarian legislation aimed at kids? Anti-gun legislation? Pro-gun legislation? Better attempts to integrate high school kids into "mainstream society"? I hope the latter...Or will we just see endless attempts to divert the blame onto the mass media, Gothic music, computer games, "The Internet" and knee-jerk condemnation of the "alternative" lifestyle?
(Coupled with various respectable beacons of the community standing up for Truth, Justice and the American Way Of Life; which (of course) includes the right to bear arms.)
This puzzles me - if, as some of the pro-American-capitalism devotees here maintain, advertising does not influence people's decisions, why should the other forms of mass communication.
The last few days have been moderately depressing for me; granted, what those kids did was not good in any way. However, the fact that they felt alienated by society, listened to Goth music, used the 'net and played Doom doesn't in itself make them killers; it disturbs me to see the mass media sieze upon these snippets of information and start a witchhunt from it.
Mind you, speaking as a Goth (New Romantic and "classic" Goth, rather than industrial), player of Half-Life, I.T. professional and dresser in black, my opinion is probably highly suspect anyway. Hell, I'm probably even a secret devotee of Hitler and a closet psychopath to boot...not that that's stereotyping of any sort...oh no.
Gideon.
(Wondering when "The Crow" will become a banned subversive film - as distinct from a pretentious action-flick...)
