Wednesday, March 11, 2009

What is it about testosterone, firearms, disillusionment, and stupidity?

Why do these young men feel the need to kill their families, neighbors, or former teachers, and then shoot it out with police? How stupid can they be? Even if you could outrun the police temporarily, you can't outrun Motorola, and using automatic weapons assures you'll be taken down with deadly force. In Alabama. In Winnenden Deutschland. The only bright spot in this, is that it's not all "just Americans" this time. Another country has the dishonor of having a disillusioned youth going on a violent rampage.

I just don't get it. Yes, I contemplated societal violence as a teenager - many young males who have seen Road Warrior, Red Dawn, Terminator, or a host of other cinematic influences likewise have as well - in a personal scenario as well as in a theoretical apocalyptic landscape, but I never made the psychotic break to think I could successfully actually get away with it. Nor was I desperate enough (or starved for attention enough) to execute such actions and wreck havoc on a community. I guess it is all in how the psychotic define "success" personally, and perhaps, as to how desperate they are with nothing else left to live for?

3 comments:

  1. Who knows. Some people are just unhinged, and are prone to things like this.

    There has to be some basic wiring issue when one decides that innocent people need to die. Of course, I imagine that some shooters are more contemplative than others. The shooter at a Knoxville church a couple of months ago seems to have been politically motivated. The kids at Columbine were picked on and had easy access to guns.

    Not sure if there are patterns, but it sure isn't Marilyn Manson's fault.

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  2. The bigger question for me: why is this news? Why exactly do you give a shit that a few people were murdered in Germany? What possible relevance is it to you or me? It's angst-inducing sensationalism that has no business occupying the n% of tv news coverage it was given.

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  3. I was just relieved to see it was not an exclusively US occurrence. Personally, I have a concern, as my teenage nephew who has Ausbergers, and who is picked on relentlessly, bought an AK-47 the week before Obama was elected. He fires it with his fundy church's ex-military mentors in da Region. We can discuss more offline.

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