School Shootings.....

[canon docre]

if a kid who likes black metal kills his family it'll come down on goth bands since so many confuse the two.

True. I have even seen Ozzy f**king Osbourne described as Goth Rocker Ozzy Osbourne (OK, it was in that bastion of journalistic excellence The National Enquirer, but still...)

Exactly! Which Goth would bite of the head of a beloved bat???

[Black Biscuit]

Just heard on Talk Sport, they are blaming it on a 17 year old "Fat Goth" (and that is quoted directly!!!!)

he was "picked on at school for being large, and dressing in goth clothes..."

Fat goth? Aren't all of them fat, pasty-faced and shy? Especially the girls. That's why they're goths. If I hear/see another frigid fatso-goth wannabe-exhibitionist (read: poser) indulging in yet another fake 'whip me, bite me, f**k me' masquarade, I'll throw up into my Scotch.

[Deviancy]

If I hear/see another frigid fatso-goth wannabe-exhibitionist (read: poser) indulging in yet another fake 'whip me, bite me, f**k me' masquarade, I'll throw up into my Scotch.

This will make you feel better..

http://www.drunkrockers.com/FETISH_BAR_ ... 058_P_.JPG

[Black Biscuit]

Uh, thanks, I guess.

So that's what the singer from Twisted Sister is up to these days....

[andymackem]

I did read somewhere (which I can't now immediately source) quite an interesting piece highlighting the fact that in US states where gun control was tightened and restricted there were more shootings than in liberal states.

I'll see if I can dig it out. It certainly challenged my instinctive view of the merits of restricting access to firearms.

On the other point about 'dark' music, violent films, video games etc, we run into difficulties.

Does someone decide they want to shoot people because of what they listen to? Doubt it.

That doesn't mean that playing violent video games might not ease someone down a path that they were already starting along.

I recall seeing one of the Chucky films not long after it had been blamed for the Jamie Bulger killing in the UK. It didn't make me want to kill anyone, but it did genuinely sicken and depress me. It just seemed so utterly empty and devoid of humanity. I could certainly be persuaded that it should be banned, despite being generally opposed to censorship.

[Deviancy]

I thought it was brett michaels from poison..

But whichever.. best they're doing that releasing cd's.. I guess..

[Black Biscuit]

I don't know who Chucky or Jamie Bulger are, but I recall Mel Gibson defending violence in films by saying "violence is a fact of life, occurs in the real world, so there's nothing wrong with it being in films, either" sort of thing.

[Deviancy]

That doesn't mean that playing violent video games might not ease someone down a path that they were already starting along.

I don't think anyone has ever said wait a minute I take that back.. a few have said what I was going to say was never said..

I personally have never said games don't give kids ideas. I'm just saying they're not to blame. Because once again it comes down to the parents keeping an eye on their kids and allowing them to have these games. Their excuse that they don't have enough time to keep an eye on their kid at all of the time doesn't cut it.

I saw Terminator 1 when i was a wee lil lad. The next day I was saying f**k you asshole to everyone I walked by. Of course my parents eventually heard me say that and well.. yeah.. wasn't fun. But I should have never seen that movie in the first place. That's why it had a rating on it. But my dad thought it would be ok for a small child to watch it. So thats on him not a movie.

Much like these school shootings. The parents let those kids play doom.. let them listen to rammstein or manson or venus on mars or whoever. This isn't on the bands or the games.. this is on those responsible for the children.

I'd be interested to see this article on states with tightened control. I'd also be curious as to the source of the article.

[canon docre]

I don't know who Chucky or Jamie Bulger are, but I recall Mel Gibson defending violence in films by saying "violence is a fact of life, occurs in the real world, so there's nothing wrong with it being in films, either" sort of thing.

And that HE is into that, was proved by his bloodthirsty Jesus flick.

[andymackem]

I don't know who Chucky or Jamie Bulger are, but I recall Mel Gibson defending violence in films by saying "violence is a fact of life, occurs in the real world, so there's nothing wrong with it being in films, either" sort of thing.

Jamie Bulger was a toddler from Bootle, near Liverpool, England. He was killed by two teenagers who abducted him in a shopping centre. This would have been mid/late 1990s, IIRC.

Chucky was a character in the Childs Play horror movies (there are at least three, think I saw Bride of Chucky). The two killers were widely reported to have been big fans of the films and it was certainly implied that they were inspired by them.

Gibson's point is fair, but depends on context. Violence in the real world isn't really mass entertainment, or at least it shouldn't be. But this drags us down the argument of what can be justified as 'art' and where we draw lines about gratuitous violence, porn, etc.

[andymackem]

That gun control thing I mentioned earlier - I pulled this from KUMB.com (a football forum, bizarrely) but I think it originated in the Telegraph. It's quite long. The bold text is mine.

By Richard Munday
(Filed: 23/01/2005)

Today, 96 years ago, London was rocked by a terrorist outrage. Two Latvian anarchists, who had crossed the Channel after trying to blow up the president of France, attempted an armed wages robbery in Tottenham. Foiled at the outset when the intended victims fought back, the anarchists attempted to shoot their way out.

A dramatic pursuit ensued involving horses and carts, bicycles, cars and a hijacked tram. The fleeing anarchists fired some 400 shots, leaving a policeman and a child dead, and some two dozen other casualties, before they were ultimately brought to bay. They had been chased by an extraordinary posse of policemen and local people, armed and unarmed. Along the way, the police (whose gun cupboard had been locked, and the key mislaid) had borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by in the street, while other armed citizens joined the chase in person.

Today, when we are inured to the idea of armed robbery and drive-by shootings, the aspect of the "Tottenham Outrage" that is most likely to shock is the fact that so many ordinary members of the public at that time should have been carrying guns in the street. Bombarded with headlines about an emergent "gun culture" in Britain now, we are apt to forget that the real novelty is the notion that the general populace in this country should be disarmed.

In a material sense, Britain today has much less of a "gun culture" than at any time in its recent history. A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

We should not fool ourselves, however, that such things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland. It was in such a society that, as late as 1914, the right even of an Irishman to carry a loaded revolver in the streets was upheld in the courts (Rex v. Smith, KB 1914) as a manifestation simply of the guarantees provided by our Bill of Rights.

In such troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then, but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime. Such deterrent potential was indeed acknowledged in part in Britain's first Firearms Act, which was introduced as an emergency measure in response to fears of a Bolshevik upheaval in 1920. Home Office guidance on the implementation of the Act recognised "good reason for having a revolver if a person lives in a solitary house, where protection from thieves and burglars is essential". The Home Office issued more restrictive guidance in 1937, but it was only in 1946 that the new Labour Home Secretary announced that self-defence would no longer generally be accepted as a good reason for acquiring a pistol (and as late as 1951 this reason was still being proffered in three-quarters of all applications for pistol licences, and upheld in the courts). Between 1946 and 1951, we might note, armed robbery, the most significant index of serious armed crime, averaged under two dozen incidents a year in London; today, that number is exceeded every week.

The Sunday Telegraph's Right to Fight Back campaign is both welcome and a necessity. However, an abstract right that leaves the weaker members of society - particularly the elderly - without the means to defend themselves, has only a token value. As the 19th-century jurist James Paterson remarked in his Commentaries on the Liberty of the Subject and the Laws of England Relating to the Security of the Person: "In all countries where personal freedom is valued, however much each individual may rely on legal redress, the right of each to carry arms – and these the best and the sharpest – for his own protection in case of extremity, is a right of nature indelible and irrepressible, and the more it is sought to be repressed the more it will recur."

Restrictive "gun control" in Britain is a recent experiment, in which the progressive "toughening" of the regulation of legal gun ownership has been followed by an increasingly dramatic rise in violent armed crime. Eighty-four years after the legal availability of pistols was restricted to Firearm Certificate holders, and seven years after their private possession was generally prohibited, they still figure in 58 per cent of armed crimes. Home Office evidence to the Dunblane Inquiry prior to the handgun ban indicated that there was an annual average of just two incidents in which licensed pistols appeared in crime. If, as the Home Office still asserts, "there are links between firearms licensing and armed crime", the past century of Britain's experience has shown the link to be a sharply negative one.

If Britain was a safer country without our present system of denying firearms to the law-abiding, is deregulation an option? That is precisely the course that has been pursued, with conspicuous success in combating violent crime, in the United States.

For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since 1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws, and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace, but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.

Issue of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was non-discretionary, and of course aroused a furore among gun control advocates, who predicted that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false; Florida's homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida's suit, and mandatory right-to-carry policies are now in place in 35 of the United States.

In a nationwide survey of the impact of the legislation, John Lott and David Mustard of the University of Chicago found that by 1992, right-to-carry states had already seen an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Extrapolating from the 10 states that had then implemented the policy, Lott and Mustard calculated that had right-to-carry legislation been nationwide, an annual average of some 1,400 murders, 4,200 rapes and more than 60,000 aggravated assaults might have been averted. The survey has lent further support to the research of Professor Kleck, of Florida State University, who found that firearms in America serve to deter crime at least three times as often as they appear in its commission.

Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached, the bureau states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While American "gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of media demonisation in Britain, the grim fact is that in this country we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States.

Today, on this anniversary of the "Tottenham Outrage", it is appropriate that we reflect upon how the objects of outrage in Britain have changed within a lifetime. If we now find the notion of an armed citizenry anathema, what might the Londoners of 1909 have made of our own violent, disarmed society?

* Richard Munday is the author of Most Armed & Most Free? and co-author of Guns & Violence: The Debate Before Lord Cullen

Thought-provoking? Though I'm not sure comparing crime levels in NY and Vermont is entirely sensible

[markfiend]

The two killers were widely reported to have been big fans of the films and it was certainly implied that they were inspired by them.

Except for the fact that, according to the police, although one of the killers' fathers owned a copy of one of the Chucky movies, there was no evidence either boy had ever seen it.

IIRC according to police reports, one of the boys reported that his favourite film was "The Goonies".

[Deviancy]

Well it's a good read but the numbers seem off. But it definatley will get me to go dig some stuff up and play the number game.

Thanks for sharing.

[blackberry]

I just dont understand how people can be overlooking the fct that its only goth bands that get targeted for this stuff. How can they use this as an argument without considering what all other murders etc listen to? Its like a purposeful blind spot.

[markfiend]

Thought provoking stuff indeed Andy.

The thing is, even if there are cogent arguments in favour of gun-control liberalisation, I would doubt the political possibility.

I invite a comparison with drug-law liberalisation...

[andymackem]

I just dont understand how people can be overlooking the fct that its only goth bands that get targeted for this stuff. How can they use this as an argument without considering what all other murders etc listen to? Its like a purposeful blind spot.

Because goth is largely white and therefore you can't be accused of racism?

Try blaming rap for increased crime and see what the PC lobby says.

Except for the fact that, according to the police, although one of the killers' fathers owned a copy of one of the Chucky movies, there was no evidence either boy had ever seen it.

IIRC according to police reports, one of the boys reported that his favourite film was "The Goonies".

Fair enough. Hence used of 'widely reported' and 'implied'.

[Black Biscuit]

Conspiracy theorist, David Icke, seems to promote the theory that England secretly still runs the US, using the US as a massive money-making venture with the UK's privileged elite taking the profits while remaining safely free of America's gun-toting 'Wild West' ways - "not in my backyard", as they say...

[Deviancy]

I need to remind myself not to look up stats prior to going to sleep. I never realized there were so many sites on the gun control subject.

One of my favorite lines though had to be..

1. They say guns kill children. Well guns do kill children but water kills more children.

Ok, so what they're saying is more kids drown then get shot but how does that make those who are shot accidentally irrelevant?

I dunno some of these sites seem to compare odd things to get their numbers the way they like them. Another site I found had an actual yearly comparison and showed the numbers of violent crimes did indeed drop due to certain newer restrictions. But they did the numbers right by doing a before and after on one specific state instead of comparing to another state.

Whee.. I get to read more later.

[andymackem]

Much like these school shootings. The parents let those kids play doom.. let them listen to rammstein or manson or venus on mars or whoever. This isn't on the bands or the games.. this is on those responsible for the children.

But (almost) every kid wants to do something that their parents don't approve of. It's part of growing up.

My parents didn't want me playing with toy guns. Don't for one moment assume I didn't have any means of 'shooting' at my friends. I still had pocket money, and the newsagent on the corner still sold them. Since toy guns are actually a bit crap, I'd have been less interested if I hadn't been told not to - kids are kids, don't forget.

If I'd been old enough to play Doom I'd have found a way of doing that, too. As it happens, by the time Doom was available I had better things to do with my time (not that my parents particularly approved of them either ) but the principle still stands.

[Mrs RicheyJames]

I remember working in a nursery in Northeren Ireland ten odd years ago. Toy guns were completely banned and if any child was caught making gun shapes with their hands (As kids do) they were made to go and stand in the naughty corner!!

And look at N.I. Not a scrap of gun crime goes on there

[Quiff Boy]

Much like these school shootings. The parents let those kids play doom.. let them listen to rammstein or manson or venus on mars or whoever. This isn't on the bands or the games.. this is on those responsible for the children.

But (almost) every kid wants to do something that their parents don't approve of. It's part of growing up.

My parents didn't want me playing with toy guns. Don't for one moment assume I didn't have any means of 'shooting' at my friends. I still had pocket money, and the newsagent on the corner still sold them. Since toy guns are actually a bit crap, I'd have been less interested if I hadn't been told not to - kids are kids, don't forget.

If I'd been old enough to play Doom I'd have found a way of doing that, too. As it happens, by the time Doom was available I had better things to do with my time (not that my parents particularly approved of them either ) but the principle still stands.

i'd agree with all of that.

[boudicca]

I just dont understand how people can be overlooking the fct that its only goth bands that get targeted for this stuff. How can they use this as an argument without considering what all other murders etc listen to? Its like a purposeful blind spot.

Because goth is largely white and therefore you can't be accused of racism?

Try blaming rap for increased crime and see what the PC lobby says.

This is something that never ceases to amaze me.
Out of all the murders committed in Britain and America annually, is the a percentage of "goths" involved (especially non-doom-cookie, non-actually-listening-to-black-metal ones) very high? I really doubt it.
It would be an interesting experiment to go through the record collections of a sample of convicted murderers (especially people who have shot someone), and see what's there.
If you ran into gangsta rap again and again, I wouldn't be at all surprised. If you ran into the goddamn Sisters, I would.

I think it is a case of the guilty white media not wanting to offend the "black people's music". Which is pretty patronising, I'd say.

Don't start Goldie Lookin' Chain on me now!

[Quiff Boy]

aren't Goldie Lookin' Chain just a younger version Renegade Soundwave though?

i'm thinking "probably a wobbery! a bit o' scullduggery!" here...

[boudicca]

aren't Goldie Lookin' Chain just a younger version Renegade Soundwave though?

i'm thinking "probably a wobbery! a bit o' scullduggery!" here...

I think I'm too young to remember, Quiff.

Not too young to remember dodgy Britpop bands though...

[Dave R]

Re Jamie Bulger.....

Lets not go there people, this was a whole different affair.

I had an email off Jamies' mom some two years ago regarding work we did for the Bulger Foundation, she enlightened me on the whole "Childs Play" link.

It was what the two kids did with the batteries that brought the connection to the Doll in the film. Enough Said.

Please, please, for the sake of all parents on this board, let Jamie Rest In Peace.

Back to abusing the americans......