Feeding The Fish

As the Virginia Tech massacre was clearly the result of both too much and too little gun control, people are understandably desperate to find ways to prevent future attacks short of arming everyone or taking all the guns away. The fact that there is a common physiological profile raises hopes that if such people were identified sooner, it could all be avoided. The trouble with this is it simply isn’t true. A Safe School Initiative study concluded that “There is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence”, whilst a number of characteristics were common (’loners’ make up a third of all attackers), there is no overall pattern, making a desire to try and identify all those who fit the obsolete ‘bullied, loner with violent tendencies and a motive for revenge’ even more folly than if it was true in all cases, because surely there are many more people that fit the profile than are going to become shooters.

Let’s crack down on the mythical school-shooter profile! Let’s treat every lonely, depressed, teenager as if they’re going to walk down the corridor with a gun tomorrow. Take the case of this student in Illinois, as part of a creative writing project he wrote a piece that ’so disturbed’ his teacher that he was arrested. ARRESTED after writing an essay! Apparently you can be arrested for ‘disorderly conduct’ as a result of writing an essay for a class assignment. The essay was described as ‘violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location’, grounds for perhaps shifting a student towards a counsellor maybe, but arrest? (Another unsettling sign of increasing overlap between schools and the US justice system).

The worrying thing is that whilst fellow students seem to understand that this is a gross error, they seem to acknowledge that people who write violently should be viewed with heavy suspicion. The 2002 US Secret Service study revealed that “The largest group of [school shooters] exhibited an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems, essays or journal entries (37 percent)” but we must remember that it is only 37%, violent writings are no indications of a future massacre. In a world where Lewis “Scooter” Libby (VP Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff), author of “The Apprentice”, a book described as “an everyday tale of bestiality and paedophilia in 1903 Japan…[and] packed with sexual perversion, dwelling on prepubescent girls and their training as prostitutes” can have security clearance and films at least as violent as anything Seung Cho’s wrote gross millions worldwide, treating every lonely teenager who writes something violent as a murderer-in-waiting just serves to further isolate people who probably already have enough issues to deal with without being treated with this suspicion.

Naturally at times like this people look out for something to blame and the hope that it can all be easily explained, but the fact remains that there is no standard school shooter and there is as of yet no intelligent way to go about preventing the psychology that creates them. An FBI report stated that:

“One response to the pressure for action may be an effort to identify the next shooter by developing a `profile’ of the typical school shooter. This may sound like a reasonable preventive measure, but in practice, trying to draw up a catalogue or `checklist’ of warning signs to detect a potential school can be shortsighted, even dangerous.”

Sooner or later America has to examine not only the issues of ‘why’, but address the gun proliferation that that makes these individuals so much more dangerous.

The title of this post is the immortal response by Martin Durkin, director of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ to some criticism of the science of his programme. As Channel Four later revealed, the program was commissioned as part of a series of polemic films, in other words, films that were one-sided, anti-educational, and misleading.

The goal was to produce controversy, which it achieved very well. Was it an accurate and scientific presentation? Less so. I’m not qualified to question the facts presented, but those that are have done, in depth. It’s quite clear that most of the ‘evidence’ presented is nothing new and has almost entirely been discredited. What’s more, one of the interviewees Carl Wunsch felt that their position had been utterly misrepresented and that their professional credibility had been damaged as a result. It can’t be that Channel 4 wasn’t aware that this was a possibility; Durkin has a history of it. ‘Against Nature’ – a series Durkin had previously made for Channel Four was attacked for similar reasons resulting in the Independent Television Commission reporting that the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part”. Channel Four had to make an on-air apology for broadcasting the series. Either the institutional memory is extremely short, or a honest documentary wasn’t the point.

Do we gain from having a series of biased films as opposed to a few well-researched and balanced films? Having two extremes is not the same as ‘fair and balanced’. On the other extreme we get the Durkins of the world, content to ignore and dismiss the issue. On the other we get the fringe-environmentalists who advocate a return to a stone-age lifestyle to live ‘in harmony’ with nature and think that keeping people impoverished as long as they preserve their native culture is for the best. Both sides are equally wacko and all sensible debate gets lost by the wayside. Whilst Durkin is content to attack this extreme fringe of the environmental movement as ‘anti-human’, the sad truth is that to lie and mislead people about the danger of global warming to billions of the world’s poor he is advocating the most ‘anti-human’ position possible in this debate.

Whilst we must always question the status quo, there’s a difference between questioning and outright lies. Channel Four should not be in the business of commissioning shows where the object is not truth, but controversy. They didn’t want education, they wanted entertainment. They should have advertised it as such.

It turns out my site is blocked in China. Obviously deeply subversive.

Give sites a go at:

http://greatfirewallofchina.org/test/