Grancey

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/27/stu....ap/index.html


As a college graduate with a degree in English, and after having sat through and participated in many creative writing classes in college and high school in which I produced my own bunch of junk during stream of consciousness assignments I find this ridiculous. Of course, after V.Tech, you now have to consider the whole situation and look for the signs...... This kid showed no signs of mental instability. He merely followed the assignment of not judging or censoring what you write. Now we are being persecuted for what goes on in our minds??? What's next?

How many of you out there get off on reading stuff exactly like what this kid wrote....or viewing the blood and gore films? What's the difference between this and Grindhouse?

I read quite a bit. I go to movies every weekend. I don't like the blood and gore films. I don't see them. However, I defend the right of every individual to read and view the books and films that they prefer.

Preventing another V.Tech incident is a priority. But this is not the way to start.

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hulk

Misleading title. He didn't dream about it - he thought it would be funny if he did. Let's see what the court says about it.

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ngdawg

Seven years ago, as a teacher's assistant in an 8th grade English class,one of my duties was to read and grade the daily journaling, which was based on prompts on the board. One kid wrote that he wanted to place bombs in the walls of the school and watch it blow up.(I forget what the prompt was-probably something to the effect of 'what would you wish for?') Now, the boy was a bit odd to begin with; he had a lot of heavy issues-mother died, dad supposedly drank heavily-so I knew not to take it lightly and talked to the teacher about it.
He was suspended pending psychiatric clearance to come back(he was back in 3 weeks).
Regardless of how someone 'seems', when something like that is 'announced', be it in a creative writing class or on a bathroom wall, it must be taken seriously.
That kid in the article was wanting the attention. Guess he got it.

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1010011010

The Daily Herald has the full story for "context". I think the kid's picture provides far more "context" for why he's getting attention than the essay.

He could have written about how he thinks kittens and bunnies are the greatest thing since sliced bread and how he loves them to death and they'd pull him in for having a story with a lot of knife imagery about killing animals and how this is a sign of future serial murderers.

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Manic_Skafe

This situation seems to be nothing more than high-profile posturing to give off the illusion that this and all cases like this are under control while the statistics scream the very opposite.

I'd be willing enough to agree that any situation in which a student threatens the safety of anyone - especially in exceptionally tragic ways like we've witnessed in Columbine and the VT shootings - they should be pulled from society until a proper psychological examination and threat assessment is done and they are determined to be fit for normal schooling.

But there's no denying the fact that most high school and college students go though points of depression - some of which even consider suicide. Between the stories of hazing, rapes, alcohol/substance abuse, STD transmission...the educational system simply does not work towards producing healthy and balanced individuals. The school system can't be solely to blame for all of these problems but adjusting it to equip students with good and proper coping mechanisms would be a good start.

I think most would agree that it's not the art that creates the culture but the opposite and there simply is nothing wrong with forms of art that seem to justify or even glorify the loss of human life when it's very obviously not the art itself that causes one to lose the distinction between fantasy and reality.

It'll always be easier to tear it down than to build it up but that's just my $.2

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analog

Kid with asian-sounding last name... check. Creative writing assignment with violence... check. Looming paranoia... double check.

I'm not saying he shouldn't have been taken from class and evaluated... obviously that's the first course of action. My issue, though, is the knee-jerk cries of "put him in jail!" He doesn't need jail, he needs a psychiatric evaluation and a kick in the ass for being such a moron.

If jail was the punishment for all people with a severe lack of tact and common sense, the jails would be tenfold more full than they are now. Someone should slap him for being such a tactless moron as to write THAT just a week or two after the VA Tech thing. I mean come on... he needs to grow a brain.

Blaming "art" for violence in society is a cop-out. The people on this planet have suffered the violence of humanity for much, much longer than violent video games, films, and anything else you could point your fingers at, have existed. People who have been coddled and sheltered their whole life still do things that leave us scratching our heads in the aftermath.

What's the most amazing to me is that so many people readily accept most all personal traits/feelings/compulsions as being innate, but violence must have an outside causality. We don't say someone is depressed because they were once perfectly fine and started listening to some shitty emo music and it MADE them that way.... and no one has ever killed themselves because they were otherwise perfectly healthy and thought it looked cool in a movie they watched.

...so why, of all the choices a person can make in their daily lives... of all the personality traits a person can possess, all the feelings and driving forces that could possibly make up the inner-workings of a person's psyche... why is VIOLENCE the only one that we insist comes from the outside? Because no one wants to admit that violence can be as innate as any other emotion. They want to believe that something GAVE them violent impulses and thoughts. Well ya know what... that's just not the case.

dksuddeth

just one more step towards indoctrinating the young ones towards passivity. Punish all thoughts of violence with public humiliation, psych drugs, counseling, and possible jail terms.

this is one of our major problems today. we look to black robed tyrants to tell us what we have as rights and what we can and cannot do.

should we have a federal agency established to produce a new social contract on what is and what isn't 'normal' societal behavior? would that make everyone feel safe?

I realize that not everyone has common sense, or at least enough of it, but do we suspend the first amendment for 2 weeks after a VT tragedy? If so, how long should we suspend other rights in the face of things like 9/11?

Bottom line folks is how much further does society want to walk down the path of making government make our society safer by forcing limits on our behavior and conduct? Limits that will not work anyway.

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pig

i think i read this story a bit differently than most of y'all. what i see is a kid who is a straight-a student, writing in creative/freestyle mode a week after the vt thing. he probably is well aware of the vt thing. i interpreted it more as the kid fucking with the teachers a little. maybe not, i could be projecting because i know its the kind of thing i would have done back in highschool. i never ever once considered shooting up my school...but i'd be damned if i would fuck around about it in the weeks following something like the vtm '07 (tm) and see what the teachers would do.

i can see the assignment pulling a red flag, but unless this dude is fucked up in other ways than looking like vt-boy's stunt double, i don't see how the move offschool and pending legal matters make much sense. wouldn't the kid get off on a freedom of speech argument?

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Sultana

So what's with
That doesn't sound like a dream passage, or "it would be funny if I dreamed this" kind of a thing.

This, I agree with.

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1010011010

For some reason this makes me think of the kid that was recently arrested for computer intrusion because he pointed out some vulnerabilities in the authentication scheme the school (note: it does not appear he did any practical work on production systems. He downloaded his own copy of the gateway program and broke the system in simulation.)

So, if you're a Straight-A student thinking about how fucking stupid the administration is in its over-reaction and how the policies they're putting in place to "prevent" future incidents just exacerbate the very conditions that lead to this sort of mayhem (e.g. "zero tolerance" policies)... how do you tell them this?
"Hey, teach, the way you're doing this just makes us want to shoot up the school even more." And then you're off for psychological evaluation!

I don't think he's joking about his belief that his twat of a teacher could be a contributing factor to some other kid being pushed over the edge... that doesn't mean he's considering it.

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pig

yeah, but its a creative writing assignment; no one said he had to use tact. its not like he scrawled it on a locker. regardless, without more knowledge of the particular situation and kid, i can't really say anything conclusively. maybe they just prevented the next school day shoot 'em up...i'm just saying there is more than one interpretation of the event. without more facts, i tend to err on the side of freedom of expression.

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Sue

You'd think that with all the scares going on and how seriously people take these kinds of things, that perhaps this kid would have thought twice before writing something about that. Since that thought apparently didn't float through his mind, he obviously didn't think of the consequences of writing such a thing.

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flat5

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Pip

If the kid was normal and well-behaved otherwise he shouldn't get more than a stern talking-to and some sensitivity training at the most. I think all my classmates went through phases of writing or drawing gory or gloomy stuff and as far as I know nobody has flipped out and killed people.

hulk

Not quite what I meant. Criminal charges being filed doesn't mean shit, much like a company suing someone doesn't mean shit, not until it goes to court and a judgement is passed. Charges and lawsuits can be started for anything.

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"'There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,' says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."
-- From an IGN game review.

snowy

A middle-schooler in my dad's school district was arrested this last week for having a "death list." I guess the local news media jumped on it so hard that one station sent out their helicopter.

Personally, I think a lot of the ideas for this sort of thing comes from overexposure to a sensationalist media--as illustrated by Seattle media's response to the "death list." We really don't need to be exposing kids to these kinds of things--we're encouraging copycat behavior.

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Willravel

He should be required to see a psychologist, not arrested. He's broken no law. That's it.

Vincentt

I had a writing assignment recently. We were to choose one of several plots.

One of the plots was "A person who was involved in a hit and run accident."

The driver ended up liking the excitement of the cover up and the attention he got in the news. So he wanted to keep doing it.

No doubt if the media choose to put a negative spin on my assignment.. they could easily.

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stevie667

10 points said if he wrote that 2 months ago no-one would have blinked, possibly the teacher may have been a bit non-plused by it maybe.

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ironman

In this day and age, Chuck Palahniuk would surely get his ass suspended for writing passages of some of his books if he was still at school.

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Bill O'Rights

It ain't too often that I see eye to eye with Analog. This is one of those times. I'm sure that the further on that I read, the greater the likelyhood that I will see posts on the "violation of his first amendment rights", and how he was within the instructional parameters. Don't give me that. If you're gonna push the boundaries, don't be surprised if the boundaries collapse, and you fall flat on your face. If you're out to grab attention...don't act insulted and hurt when you actualy get it.

You live in a far scarier world than I do.

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shakran

Come on man, let's call this what it really is. Thought crimes are now a fact of life in the "land of the free."


Look I think we can all agree that this kid is a moron, a jackass, or a nut. Or all three. But the fact is, it is an individual's right to be a moron, a jackass, and a nut.

To criminalize writing about killing people would mean we'd have to jail pretty much all of the top authors on the planet, including Stephen King and J.K. Rowling.

I don't agree with dksuddeth very often but he has a point here. The terrorists have won gang - since 9/11 we've been throwing our rights to the wolves in the name of "safety" (even though we're a lot less safe now than we ever were) and few seem to give a damn.

Now that one nut shot up a college we assume that anyone who writes about stuff like that should be arrested. That's a thought crime, and we should rise up against such an idea.


However, while it is an individual in our society's right to write about crap like this, it is also society's right to ostracize him, treat him like the dick he is, and keep a VERY close eye on him to make sure he doesn't feel the need to do more than write about this crap. To display this kind of insensitivity is and should be inexcusable, but it should also not be illegal.

Xazy

The kid will get bounced out and won't be convicted of anything except being stupid. However after all these shootings peoplen are just afraid if they don't report or respond to any threat.

Not saying I agree, but if that kid 2 weeks later come back and goes nuts then they would blame the teacher.

Ourcrazymodern?

Never "fine" the student for doing his assignment.

Give him an "F" and name your reasons in a manner that allows understanding.

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