[bloodrayne]

Oh...They also mention the influences of the evil INTERNET...and the dangerous 'goth culture':rolleyes:


De: Have you seen these online expressions in other school shootings?

Newman: The Internet played a role in many of them. I have the contents of the hard drives of some of the shooters in the other cases, and often they were frequently accessing Web sites, often of a deviant nature. You know it's not always Nazi-oriented. They’re seeking their own cyber community because they don't feel like they can find one locally. Goth culture often appeals to them because it seems oppositional and alluring for this reason, and they see the charismatic characters in the goth community as alluring, and they'd like to be a part of that too. That may be the closest they feel they can get in real life, but the Web opens up another universe, which kids access all the time, by the millions every day, there's nothing unusual about that, but it is a tragic record of his depression that we see on the Web sites.

De: In the other school shootings you've studied, not only is there the immediate trauma, there is lingering guilt. There were warning signs, there were threats and nothing was done.

Newman: I think one of the most tragic aspects of school shootings is that so many kids hear the shooter talking in advance, sometimes months in advance, about their intentions, very often in ways that are veiled or vague, difficult to interpret. Immediately after Columbine when kids heard these kinds of threats, they had a framework to put it in, to let them know this could be something real, this could be something serious. They started to come forward in large numbers. So we had an ever-increasing number of plots after Columbine that were stopped by the police because kids came forward.

But it’s been six years since Columbine; the teenagers in the Red Lake School District today were 8, 9 years old at the time of Columbine. It's faded as a reality for today's young teenagers. So when the Red Lake kids heard Jeff talk about his intentions, they thought it was a joke, they thought he wasn't serious, just like the kids I studied in Paducah or Jonesboro thought it's another one of those crazy things that Mitchell Johnson was saying, and they didn't come forward because they didn't realize how serious it was.

And many of them feel for years afterwards as though they are responsible, because they didn't come forward. But they're not. We can't blame them for not recognizing how troubled he was. They weren't following his scripts on the Web, either. None of us were.