OK, time has passed and now I'm ready to talk political and social implications.
First: Even discussing Jack Thomson is pointless. The man has no credibility. He shouldn't even be on the table unless you're the kind of person who enjoys laughing at those on a lesser playing field than yourself. There's not a single person on this board who has any sympathy for him whatsoever, and there are not enough such people outside this board for him to have any sort of significant impact on policy or public attitudes.
Second: Gun control is getting way, way too much attention from this. Listen: Gun control or lack thereof had nothing to do with this situation. Having stricter gun laws would not have prevented this nutbag from getting ahold of them. Having folks carrying guns on campus may have led to him getting taken down earlier, but it's really not overly relevant. The issue is that SOMETHING made this dude snap. Talking about gun control is a straw man. We ought to be focusing on what made him snap, and what measures we can take to reduce the number of people who snap. Gun control is something that deserves discussion (for the record, I'm largely in the anti-gun control crowd, on Kilmoll's side, although I don't own a gun, have never fired one, and probably never will), but it is simply not the primary issue raised by this incident.
Midnyte wrote:People have just as much a right to own firearms as they should have to play ultra violent video games....listen to ultra violent rap music....watch ultra violent movies. It's not the products that kill people, it is the people. Banning products is not what we want. You cannot selectively decide which products it is okay to ban.
Midnyte's right: It's PEOPLE that we need to focus on.
So what was it that made this guy snap? Even before the shooter had been identified, I would have said: Isolation. I can't imagine someone doing this without being completely removed from general society. When you are in society, regardless of what perspective you're coming from, you experience certain fundamental experiences that generally have, and ought to, characterize all of us. These experiences are simple interactions with other people and groups of people. In order for people to act like decent human beings, we need empathy for others. Empathy is fostered by interaction. Interacting with others teaches us very basic and fundamental values of empathy, compassion, respect, and decency. This of course doesn't mean that people don't exploit one another, treat one another like shit, and so on-- it just means that we learn some measure of respect for the fact than we as people are fundamentally linked by the importance that we each place in our own existence. Interacting with others breaks down the barrier between "I" and "the other" and allows us to project ourselves onto others, which doesn't make us saints but can do an awful lot to prevent us from being devils.
The lesson that I draw from this is that it is of fundamental importance to engage loners in society. This doesn't mean that everyone needs to be a bubbly, exuberant extrovert-- I'm a pretty introverted guy, myself. It simply means that people can't give in to the temptation to take the easy way out and reject society altogether, and it's a fundamental human duty to help others resist that temptation when it becomes strong. There are lots of kids who feel (or are) rejected by their peers, cut off from social groups and so on-- and most of these kids eventually recover because they find a group that accepts them, they find a mentor to help them, they change their attitude to embrace who they are, whatever. I'm sure that most of us can identify with this kind of situation, simply because most people experience something like it at some point-- and let's face it, this message board is built on EverQuest, I'm sure most of us have overcome some kind of angst-with-society at one point or another in our lives.
When we see people who haven't yet gotten over their angst and learned to embrace being a human and being part of a society, it's inappropriate to simply react with disdain. We need to prove to them, by example, that society IS worth being a part of. They need to interact with other people. It doesn't matter what that interaction is, as long as they can learn to identify themselves as part of the society they're participating in.
The sort of person that we need to fear (and thus avoid the creation of) is the crazed loner who does not identify with anything outside himself, who feels that the rest of the world is fundamentally hostile and opposed to him. This is where the internet comes in: The internet makes it much, much easier for people to become the crazed loner. It's damn hard to sit in your house alone every day, rejecting the everyday hustle and bustle of society that goes on outside your walls, when you have nothing to do but watch TV and whack off all day. Given that situation, most people will eventually choose to go outside, make some friends, and learn to identify with the world at large a bit. The internet changes the equation. With the internet, the loner is suddenly far more stimulated. He has pornography to occupy his sex drive (and yes, I know you can whack it without porno, but internet porn makes it a hell of a lot easier, and the unlimited variety and quantity makes it much easier to turn your sexuality inward, quashing your desire to experience a healthy sexuality with others, and it's easy for your view of sexuality to turn into something based more on power, humiliation, and degradation than mutual pleasure and/or emotion). He has a constant and unlimited dose of the rampant cynicism and hate that the internet seems to produce so abundantly. He can even find communities of like-minded individuals who can reinforce his hatred and rejection of everybody and everything that is not him, without sparking the empathy and respect for others that tends to develop when one interacts with real people. And yes: He can play videogames to distract him during those long hours of avoiding society.
Do violent video games, music, and media have an effect? In my opinion: Yes, absolutely. They are part of the false, electronic identity that now constitutes an alternative to the society-based, humanistic identity that most people have. They provide an option to the person who is struggling with joining or rejecting society: "Come here," they whisper, "it's easier here." The crazed loner already is without sufficient empathy and respect for others, and it is more than possible to take messages of hatred and violence from such hateful and violent media. For those of us who actually go out and talk to people in real life, playing counterstrike isn't going to make us think that shooting people is appropriate. For most of us who don't go out and talk to people, playing counterstrike still isn't going to make us think that shooting people is appropriate. However, it seems to me to be totally plausible that for a very small minority of isolated and alienated people, playing counterstrike can be one among a number of factors that lead such people to embrace violence.
Consuming violent media does not cause you to become a violent person. Violent media can, however, enable some people in allowing their neurosis and alienation to transform into violent hatred.
Of course, the internet nerd is not the only type of crazed loner in the world. Ted Kaczynski was certainly quite different. I think a similar dynamic is also at work in the projects and ghettos of America-- many young people who grow up in a project never have an opportunity to experience society or community outside the walls of the project, consume plenty of violent imagery and speech, and so on. These people can also become isolated and alienated from general society, hateful of the world outside their project, inundated with violence, and can eventually lash out. This, like the internet nerd paradigm, is another mode of life that people can easily slip into in order to avoid having to confront being part of a greater society. We, as humans, need to do our best to reduce or eliminate the existence of such escapes, and, when people do slip into such modes of existence, we need to do our best to involve them in general society.
