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Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20070420151158758

"...It is is far more difficult to deal with the possibility that other factors may have led to the massacre, factors that are still too painful and close to us to consider. For example, how was this nerdy South Korean immigrant treated at his suburban high school and at Virginia Tech? What is the campus life like? What was it about Virginia Tech that made it the setting for the first student-on- student college massacre? And why were there copycat threats at campuses across Middle America over the following days?
...

In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions, however poorly expressed or thought through. Michael Carneal, who slaughtered three students in a high school prayer class in West Paducah, was found to have downloaded the Unabomber's manifesto as well as something called "The School Stopper's Textbook: A Guide to Disruptive Revolutionary Tactics; Revised Edition for Junior High/High School Dissidents," which calls on students to resist schools' attempts to mold students and enforce conformity. The preface starts off, "Liberate your life -- smash your school! The public schools are slowly killing every kid in them, stifling their creativity and individuality, making them into nonpersons. If you are a victim of this, one of the things you can do is fight back." Many of Carneal's school essays resembled the Unabomber manifesto. He had been bullied and brutalized, called "gay" and a "faggot." He hated the cruelty and moral hypocrisy of so-called normal society and the popular crowd. Rather than just complain about it all the time like the Goths he befriended, he decided to act.

And now that the media has started digging up the early life of Cho Seung-Hui, the same pattern emerges. Former classmates of Seung-Hui say he "was pushed around and laughed at as a schoolboy" because of his "shyness and the strange, mumbly way he talked":

Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech senior who graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va. [with Seung-Hui] ... recalled that the South Korean immigrant almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation. Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho's turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded "like he had something in his mouth," Davids said. "As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, 'Go back to China.'"

Luke Woodham, the high school killer in Pearl, Miss., whose murder spree preceded Carneal's by two months, was even more explicit in his rebellion. Minutes before starting his schoolyard rampage, Woodham handed his manifesto to a friend, along with a will. "I am not insane," he wrote. "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."

The Columbine killers openly declared that their planned massacre was intended to ignite a nationwide uprising. "We're going to kick-start a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed!" Eric Harris said in a video diary he made before the killings. "I want to leave a lasting impression on the world," he added in another entry. And they certainly did leave an impression, including on Cho Seung-Hui, who referred to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" in his "multimedia manifesto."

If the immediate goal of an armed uprising is to spark wider sympathy and a wider rebellion, then many of these rage uprisings have succeeded.

One of the most troubling and censored aspects of schoolyard massacres is how popular they are with a huge number of kids -- witness the threats issued the day after Cho Seung-Hui's Virginia Tech massacre to the campuses of University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, University of Texas at Austin and two high schools in southeastern Louisiana.

The popularity of the Columbine massacre helped spawn several more schoolyard shootings and untold numbers of school-massacre plots, many of which were uncovered, and many of which were the inventions of paranoid adults.

"They said specifically it would be bigger than Columbine," New Bedford Police Chief Arthur Kelly said." -- Associated Press, "New Bedford police say they foiled Columbine-like plot," Nov. 24, 2001

Across America, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris became anti-heroes in the aftermath of their school shooting. In a Rocky Mountain News article titled "Surfers Worship Heroes of Hate," dated Feb. 6, 2000, the journalist details the mass popularity of the Columbine killers: "They made hate-filled videotapes about the day the deed they were planning would make them cult heroes. Now, they appear to have gotten what they wanted -- at least online." The article goes on to quote some of the message boards devoted to Klebold and Harris:

In a Yahoo! club devoted to the killers, a 15-year-old Elizabeth, N.J., girl writes: "They are really my heroes. They are in a way gods ... since I don't believe in 'GOD' or any of that other crap that goes along with it. They are the closest thing we can get to it, and I think they are good at it. They stood up for what they believe in, and they actually did something about it."
A 14-year-old Toronto girl is also cited as belonging to 20 (!) online fan clubs devoted to Klebold and Harris. The point of the article is that the Internet shows just how sick our kids are. It does not consider the possibility that maybe the kids aren't simply evil but have valid reasons for making Klebold and Harris into heroes. Perhaps they are considered heroes for valid reasons, and the Net allows us easier access into the unofficial truth.

The reason Klebold and Harris's hero status is expressed online is obvious: It's the one place where you can exchange ideas with a reasonable hope of maintaining anonymity.

Initially it was thought that Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were drug-addled dropouts, Nazi-enthused homosexuals, children of broken homes, Goth-geeks, Trench Coat Mafiosi, Internet/video game freaks or Marilyn Manson goons. But the truth was far more commonplace, and that's what was so disturbing about their massacre. Both came from two-parent homes, both loved their parents and both were highly intelligent but erratic students. They weren't Nazis or drug addicts. They weren't Goths, Trench Coat Mafiosi, or Marilyn Manson fiends; they weren't even gay, as some had theorized.
...


And once again, I believe this at the very least suggests that the source of these rampages must be the environment that creates them, not the killers themselves. And by environment I don't mean something as vague as society but rather the schools and the people they shoot and bomb.

It isn't the schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled -- they can't be. It is the schools that need to be profiled.

A list should be drawn up of the characteristics and warning signs of a school ripe for massacre:

complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure; antiseptic corridors and overhead fluorescent lights reminiscent of mid-sized city airport; rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

Schoolyard shootings are too shocking and subversive to forget. They remind us that we were just as miserable as kids as we are as adult workers. In fact, the similarities between the two, the continuity of misery and entrapment from school to office, become depressingly clear when you study the two settings in the context of these murders. Even physically, they look alike and warp the mind in similar ways: the overhead fluorescent lights, the economies-of-scale industrial carpeting and linoleum floors, the stench of cleaning chemicals in the restrooms, the same stalls with the same latches and the same metal toilet paper holders ... Then, after work or school, you go home to your suburb, where no one talks to each other and no one looks at each other, and where everyone, even the whitest-bread cul-de-sac neighbor is a suspected pedophile, making child leashes a requirement and high-tech security systems a given.

If you consider it this way, it means our entire lives, except perhaps college -- and Cho Seung-Hui reminds us that college can be hell for some people as well -- and that one summer backpacking around Europe are unbearably awful. As if our entire wretched script was designed for someone else's benefit. This is too much to handle. So the inescapable suspicion that suburban schools cause murder rampages is rejected with unrestrained hysteria -- and so it will be with college campuses in the public discussion about how to prevent more "Virginia Techs."
...

When you use a word as inherently meaningless as "evil" to describe something as complex and resonant as Columbine or Virginia Tech, you are desperately trying to recover the amnesia that once protected you and told you how blissful and innocent your own school years were. The fact is that the schoolyard shooters were clear about their intentions: They wanted to "pry your eyes open." But sometimes we don't like what our eyes see; in fact, we refuse to believe what they see. You'd need to use "Clockwork Orange" eye-tweezers on someone like Joanne Jacobs to make her face this unpleasant fact. Blaming "evil" has worked wonders for President Bush in Iraq, and it's working wonders for Americans in understanding and stopping these massacres.

If you pull back and rethink how you view these rampage massacres -- if you can accept that the schools and offices are what provoke these massacres, just as poverty and racism create their own violent crimes, or slavery created slave violence and rebellions, then you have to accept that on some level the school and office shootings are logical outcomes and perhaps even justified responses to an intolerable condition that we can't yet put our fingers on.

Justified, that is, if you look at these crimes from a future historian's point of view. Imagine a historian 100 years from now, with no emotional investment in our contemporary culture, looking back on how we live today, and thinking to himself, "My god, how could those poor wretches cope with such hell?" It doesn't take a time machine to think this way. Unofficially, today a lot of people look at these murders as justified, as some kind of vindication. Sympathy is all over the Web. It's revealed in black humor, in "wage slave" T-shirts and in the success of movies like "Office Space" and "Fight Club." It's revealed anywhere it can safely be expressed."

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Mies ampui itsensä ja panttivankinsa Houstonissa

STT-IA, 21.4.2007

Aseistautunut mies on ampunut itsensä ja yhden panttivankinsa Yhdysvaltain avaruushallinnon NASA:n Houstonin avaruuskeskuksessa. Poliisi löysi toisen panttivangin vahingoittumattomana, mutta ilmastointiteipillä sidottuna.

NASA evakuoi yhden avaruuskeskuksen rakennuksen sen jälkeen kun mies oli linnoittautunut sinne.

Rakennuksesta kuului laukaus poliisin yrittäessä aloittaa neuvottelut 50-60-vuotiaan miehen kanssa. Poliisijoukkojen mentyä sisälle he löysivät asemiehen kuolleena.

Poliisi uskoo, että mies ampui toisen panttivankinsa pian rakennukseen linnoittautumisensa jälkeen.

Vierailijat eivät pääse avaruuskeskuksen alueelle vapaasti. Alueella työskentelee noin 3 000 henkilöä.

Kartta: CIA/WFB

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Ran Prieurin sivuilla kommentti aiheesta:

"Patricia comments that we shouldn't trust NBC to do a fair edit of Seung Cho's lengthy message. For that matter, we shouldn't trust Cho himself to honestly say or even know why he did it. There's a famous line in an old Marlon Brando movie where someone asks him what he's rebelling against, and Brando answers, "What have you got?" The truth is, the horrible wrongness of industrial civilization, especially the American variety, is very difficult to put into words. Even the people who suffer most from it are likely to misdiagnose it. Cho ranted against rich kids who had never felt pain, but he was covering up his own pain, which he shared with them but felt more strongly: the pain of isolation, of overwhelming social shallowness, of cutthroat status climbing, of biophobia in every sense, of never having anything real to fight for. I think he was angry because he wanted to make a prison break from this world of psychic pain to an easier world of physical pain, and none of the other prisoners wanted to join him... so he forced them. Patricia also sends this reddit comment:

A very close friend of mine from early childhood was brought to America from India and ended up killing himself at the age of 29. He didn't kill anyone else, but he threatened to. I wonder what America must seem like to people who aren't from here... I don't think it's an easy adjustment. I read an interview once with a girl who had survived African refugee camps, war, rape, and starvation to come to America, and she said of all her ordeals, being a student in an American high school was the worst."

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