How about we disarm the criminals first. Taking away the police's weapons first is like saying "ok, here's a whiffle bat; randy johnson will be pitching to you"

Also, if people are determined to kill each other, taking their guns away isn't going to deter them too much. That pretty much leaves accidental deaths that you can really attribute solely to guns (//edit: now that i think about it, you can't blame guns for accidental deaths, you can blame the morons who caused the accidents. "Guns don't kill people, stupid motherfuckers with guns kill people.")

Why don't we try addressing the underlying issue, which is our obsession with violence, not guns.

Back to the point of the thread.

I figure the obsession with Columbine has to do with our absurd romantic obsession with the near-heroic status that disaffected youth have in our media-soaked society. There are so many instances where alienated and proto-violent young people are held up to be some sort of paragon of cool that many have a knee-jerk emotional affection for the stereotype. Many immature young people identify with this sociopathological pseudo-identity.

Of course it is to their detriment. And it is our loss.

As long as the purveyors of popular culture continue to profit from producing a constant stream of such figures for the consumption of young and impressionable minds, these obsessions will continue. And the pathetic pair of Columbine killers will be dredged up as something we should be paying attention to.

Personally, I have come to loathe this stereotype for what it is - a cheap and manipulative attempt to popularize losers and another example of how a corrupt cultural hegemony profits by appealing to the lowest common denominators of human behavior.

Damn...now I gotta go spend some time at dictionary.com

Are you suggesting that nothing be tried until we somehow know it will cure all ills? In my mind, this is the same logic that perpetuates the continual degradation of the global environment.


Now, this I can agree with. It's unfortunate also that the popularization of the event (or any like it) could have the reverse effect of providing strategy and impetus for others.

We have a lot of gun laws. They represent good-faith efforts at "trying" to cope with the sociopathologies of a hetrogenous post-modern society that is unique on this planet.

The discussion was a specific response to the shot-in-the-dark solution of taking a pivotal liberty away from law-abiding Americans in order to somehow stop violence-prone individuals from acting out their pathologies with guns.

Thanks for your final comment. I do believe it is more relevant to the actual significance of this thread.

*shrug* me too.

Thanks Art! Solid interpretation in my opinion.