he was stuck out in the sticks. i know a little of what he felt. he probably felt no way out.
I agree. Bullies would never understand that.
The news stated that his dad killed himself about 6-7 years ago. His mom was injuried in a car accident about 5 years ago. The cousin that was w/ the mom died shortly after that. Grandma from mom’s side also passed away shortly after mom was injured (brain damange, at a nursing home).
All these death in his family also have impact on his behavior.
He also visited Nazi’s website and posted a few comments on there… Wowow, I mean for a 10 years old to be reading stuff like that!!!
okay, the dike has burst. tears are coming to my eyes. time for my confession:
i came damn close to being this boy. but mine was closer to suicide than anything. i wanted to play baseball so bad when i was 7. i got on the yankees. we had 5 teams in my town. remember, this was back when black/white kids didn’t swim together or play ball together. what do you think the coaches were like?
this coach used to use me for laughs in public because i was the smallest. he would tell me to swing before the ball was thrown, after the ball the was thrown, tell me to put down the bat and run to 3rd base. i had just learned to tie my shoes properly so i didn’t know what to do. stuff he would have been sued for now got done to me in public. i remember looking at the crowd and saying to myself “this is america? fuck america”. i didn’t want to be the all american boy anymore. yeah i got the award for try hardest player at the end of the season but the goddamn damage was done.
then church was no better.i could answer all the sunday school questions in my sleep. they never, from the time i was dedicated til i went to high school added any depth. people came in on sunday morning talking about how much beer they drank. oops time for church. talk holy. then go home.i almsot got beat up one sunday morning before the teache came in.then they blamed me for my little stint into budhhism. hell, i hated america. i wanted out. do i have to say the rest of this? i almost ended up like this kid, okay? i know EXACTLY how he felt.
small town america is BIEN TAI!! that’s the goddamn truth!
Rantheman, I can understand. I remember some similar experiences leading to a dangerous pivotal point in my own adolescence. Luckily, I turned away from it. Maybe an overused phrase, but adolescence provides near “perfect storm” ingredients for this: intense emotions, lack of coping skills, and the misconception by the teen that he/she possesses adult-like capability.
[quote=“igorveni”]these drugs have troubling side effects and it would be a coincidence if it happened 1 out of 5, but 5 out of 5 isn’t a coincidence anymore, wouldn’t you agree?
http://www.newstarget.com/z002469.html
[/quote]
Sorry, in a rush and don’t have time to look up the right term (forgot it), but in research there’s a word for what this may be: A happens, B happens, and you conclude that A caused B, when in fact an unknown C caused them both. In this case, the drugs may not be causing anything, but are simply extant in all cases because the underlying emotional or neurological problems are the same, and the underlying problems are really the “coincidence” or common cause. Just a guess.
Seeker4
((Edit: Found the term or phrase I was thinking of earlier. It is known as the “correlation implies causation” fallacy. A reasonable explanation can be found under the header “Some Rules To Help Establish Causal Order” - edf5481-01.fa01.fsu.edu/Guide3.html#CAUSALITY ))
luckily i met a really nice music minister who got me on the right track. i have very little tolerence for bullying even now however. i can go my whole life without pushing someone around or making fun of someone. why can’t they? is it that hard?
[quote=“Durins Bane”]A couple of points.
The weapon of choice doesn’t matter. There have been knife attacks in Japanese and Mainland Chinese schools that have been just as deadly. [/quote]
nonsense…
the weapon of choice matters a great deal… for the reasons I pointed out in my previous post on this thread… to kill with a knife requires physical strength, not only to get within arm’s reach of a victim, but to actually be able to overpower their attempts to stave off the attack (knife attack victims often manage to prevent bodily stab wounds, but get cuts on the arms/hands doing so) a knife attack requires close quarters, overpowering physical strength and the attacker runs the risk of being overpowered or disarmed with every attack…
attacks with guns however require no physical strength whatsoever from the attacker, can be fatal from long range (which also means it’s harder for anyone to tackle and overpower the attacker) and unlike puncture wounds from knife attacks, in gunshot wounds the bullet is often deflected after penetrating the body, bouncing off bones etc and doing massive internal damage, even though the entry point is in a non critical part of the body…
For this reason in almost every example of fatal knife attacks in Japan / China that you mentioned the attacker was a full grown, adult male, and the victims were either small children, or were sleeping at the time of the attack…
[i]Man kills six in knife attack in Xinjiang
Local police said the suspect, Yusufu Ismail, 40, was a farmer from Pizhan Township
Not only is it easier to kill lots of people with a gun than a knife, but I suspect it is much more sexy and glamorous in the mind of a severely emotionally disturbed and suicidal child. The average kid has seen countless scenes in movies, tv shows and video games glorifying some Rambo character, in army fatigues, muscles bulging, bandana keeping the sweat from his brow, toting an uzi in each hand, blowing away scores of dehumanized figures, who spurt blood and squeal as they are hit. COOL!!! Recall how Scarface and Butch Casidy and countless other “heros” go out. There is far less romantification of knife slashers in our culture – guns are more macho – so the troubled kid (outside of Japan and China anyway) would be less attracted to the idea of going out in a bloody orgy of knife-slashing.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement.
[quote=“plasmatron”][quote=“Durins Bane”]A couple of points.
The weapon of choice doesn’t matter. There have been knife attacks in Japanese and Mainland Chinese schools that have been just as deadly. [/quote]
For this reason in almost every example of fatal knife attacks in Japan / China that you mentioned the attacker was a full grown, adult male, and the victims were either small children, or were sleeping at the time of the attack…
[i]Man kills six in knife attack in Xinjiang
Local police said the suspect, Yusufu Ismail, 40, was a farmer from Pizhan Township… stabbed at least 14 people on the spot, most of whom were teenagers.
Pupils die in Japan knife massacre
Media reports said the 37-year-old attacker…
the school, which caters for children up to the age of 12.
Japan knife attacks kill seven
The suspect, a 47-year-old unemployed man, is reported to be the nephew of the oldest victim….[/i]
.[/quote]
I see the amount of dead from the knife attacks to be the same as the gun attacks. Dead students are dead students…doesn’t really matter if they are little students or big students. It also doesn’t matter that they were sleeping at the time. Most people with the intent to kill usually pick a prime time to do their dirty work…that’s why the kid didn’t go to school on Sunday to kill people.
Of course guns are more dangerous than knives I never said that they weren’t, but the debate of this tragedy is not about guns and gun control and I wanted to make that very clear. If someone wants to kill, the weapon doesn’t matter…only the unfortunate results. A couple of molotovs thrown in the classroom would probably have been just as effective. Or a car gunning into a group of students waiting for the school bus. Take your pick…if someone didn’t have access to a gun and still wanted to kill 9 people I’m sure he or she would find a way.
There have been some who emphasize that guns were used in this crime and that is looking at this situation from a skewered point of view. The main problem is how this child slipped into his own personal Hell.
“The main problem is how this child slipped into his own personal Hell.”
Maybe life on a First Nations reservation had something to do with it.
I came from the sticks too. More so than that kid. If he wanted out, there were avenues for him to do so. Perhaps more than mine.
[quote=“Ilanian”]“The main problem is how this child slipped into his own personal Hell.”
Maybe life on a First Nations reservation had something to do with it.[/quote]
And whose fault is that?
The Europeans, namely Christopher Columbus, the British, the French and the Spanish. (I say this half jokingly, I don’t want to create controversy)
“If he wanted out, there were avenues for him to do so.”
On a reservation, I think the first things to come to mind, if one lives there, are drugs, inhalants, crime and alcohol. Sure free education should be a big draw but unfortunately it isn’t.
I see DB’s point that someone with serious enough intent will find a way. However, I still have to believe that having access to a gun would make any inclined person more willing to cross the line…for all of the reasons mentioned, and because it is less personal, in the way that in a war setting, dropping bombs is less personal than hand-to-hand combat and so easier to engage in psychologically.
I was all ready to say that no access to guns would drop the death toll per incident, and overall maybe it does, but based on the examples above, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. I’m surprised that the knife incidents resulted in so many deaths.
And the first thing the media does is paint him with the headline “Teenage shooter was a neo-Nazi”. Sensationalism at its ugliest. From what I understood, he was despaired with his situation and probably looked at how his people were languishing on the reservation, losing their culture and drowning themselves in alcohol, drugs, poverty, etc. It seemed to me that he was going the way of early Malcolm X and thinking the only way to improve the way of life for his people was to segregate themselves from other races. Because of this and his interest in Nazi websites, he gets labelled as a “neo-Nazi” which makes you think skinhead racist. Maybe he was, but once I got beyond the headline, that’s not what I saw. I saw a kid who had a lot of tragedy happen and probably seeing his abysmal surroundings, saw no other way out of it.
Also, whoever cited “anti-depressants cause a higher frequency of suicides” obviously has no clue what they are talking about. Depression causes suicide. Depressed people take anti-depressants. The same illogical line of thinking would be like saying “school causes illiteracy”.
Easy access to guns is not just a factor, it is clearly half of the cause of these mass school slayings in the US. Wacko students are the other half.
Maybe there have been a few cases in Japan and China (where guns are hard to come by) of mass knife slayings, but I challenge you to find a single example of a deranged student in the US coming to school and stabbing a half dozen persons or more . . . or using any other weapon in a mass school killing for that matter.
As I said above, a big part of the issue is that TV, movies and video games glamorize guns and shooting people, so these screwed up kids choose to commit their heinous acts specifically with guns, not incidentally.
[quote=“Mother Theresa”]Easy access to guns is not just a factor, it is clearly half of the cause of these mass school slayings in the US. Wacko students are the other half.
Maybe there have been a few cases in Japan and China (where guns are hard to come by) of mass knife slayings, but I challenge you to find a single example of a deranged student in the US coming to school and stabbing a half dozen persons or more . . . or using any other weapon in a mass school killing for that matter.
As I said above, a big part of the issue is that TV, movies and video games glamorize guns and shooting people, so these screwed up kids choose to commit their heinous acts specifically with guns, not incidentally.[/quote]
I think you missed his point, availability of guns is a little more convenient, however,lack of guns is no deterrent as exemplified by stabbings, intentional driving of cars into crowds, poisonings etc.
I think the “he was a poor kid from a reservation/victim of his environment” tack is misguided, since similar shootings have occurred all over the country from kids from all kinds of backgrounds and socioeconomic status. After all, the kids in Columbine were upper-middle class living in one of the most well-off suburbs in America. This kid’s problems were more than likely the typical, if mundane adolescent unable to fit in socially kind of problems, which are universal. 14 is a very, very rough age for anyone, and the U.S. high school “jocks/nerds/dweebs/burnouts/etc” social heirarchy makes things 10x worse. If anything I’m surprised that more kids don’t snap more often.
Yes, Unfortunately his Nazi web postings are out and will be used by some to exploit that angle. It easier to catagorize him as a Nazi sympathizer, or some violence crazed kid than to look at the harsher realities of his life.
Now this is just a thought, and I may be way off base but I’m gonna throw it out anyway. His grandfather’s gun also could have symbolized his grandfather siding with “the enemy.” The tribal council choses its representatives, the guards etc. but you can bet your sweet life that if the BUI agent in charge does not approve, he/she will NOT get the job. BUI is not gonna approve someone carrying a gun that they do not trust to uphold their policy line. I understand his grandfather held this position for some years.
Anyway, the reservation is normally off limits to non-residents and this policy remains in effect now. No reporters are allowed to roam around and interview people, so this will prevent it from being played out in the media like Columbine or other mass killing tragedies in US. But on the other hand, it is in the best interests of the BUI to get it off the front pages. As of this writing, CNN does not have anything posted at its National or International site. Larry King is usually right on top of these stories and I don’t believe he has done anything yet.
This is not a story about getting on a baseball team. It is a story about a kid with a lot of complicated shit and his people who grew up stipped of identity. Red Lake residents and supporters held a pipe and drumming ceremony outside the hospital which is not on the reservation. And other pipe, drumming and cleansing ceremonies have been held on the reservations for the families. Traditional burial should be in two days, but autopsies are required… 
…death due to gunshot wound to the head…we already know that