Cumbria Fall-Out: Day 1...
There will be no "LJ Cut". Get comfortable, and pay attention...
How long will it be before some idiot starts the call for banning Movie X or Video-Game Y, because of a supposed, and hardly scientific, link to the terrible events in Cumbria yesterday? It WILL come, sooner or later, and my reaction to it will be heavy sighs of utter disbelief, laced with the resignation to the fact that this scape-goating will always happen.
No. Video-games do not cause these kinds of events. Nor do movies. Set those all-too comfy assumptions aside at the start, and it quickly becomes clear - the problem stems from the inability to properly manage personal anger, be it out-and-out rage, or simply frustration. If a person cannot deal with that anger internally, it obviously leads on from that that an external outlet becomes necessary - and that's usually a good dose of swearing... or perhaps even a cathartic experience like watching a violent movie, or playing a violent video-game. Most of the time, these outlets work - fiction, interactive or not, becomes an adequate escape...
But what if that person isn't comfortable with this kind of venting, or has been given negative reinforcement about it throughout their lives - such as being punished for natural, healthy attempts at "getting it all out"? This is where you get "the quiet ones", as in "he was a quiet man", or "such a quiet boy" - the usual suspects in cases like these, alternatively known as "the loner". Unfortunately, this clouds the issue - a person comfortable with their own company isn't necessarily "quiet" - and that's when I start to grind my teeth in annoyance... and I possibly start losing my thread...
Back to the anger management idea: an inability to handle personal anger can lead to unexpected outbursts of a possibly devastating kind, such as we have just seen. The means employed, i.e. the tools at hand, are not the cause - just because they're there, you don't have to use them; I have a portable sewing machine, and it's only been out of the box once, and never powered up. - they are simply tools, the best fit for the task. Sadly, in this instance, the tools were firearms, and the task was murder.
Methods can be derived from outside sources - the Columbine tragedy springs to mind at once - but do these sources cause the outrage? Again, the murderers at Columbine clearly experienced an inability to properly, for want of a better term, "metabolise" their anger, which appears to be mainly a hefty dose of teenage frustration. If movies and video-games really "caused" these types of violence, why aren't the streets full of bodies? Why don't people go ploughing through bus-queues on a daily basis, because of things like Death Race 2000, or its video-game equivalent Carmageddon?
The victims in Death Race 2000 were stuntmen, the victims in Carmageddon clumps of pixels no better than cardboard cut-outs - I know, because I've seen the former, and played the latter. I have never learned to drive, nor even been in control of a car - I'm terrified of what might happen, yet according to "the experts", I should be racing through the streets, splattering the innocent all over the road. There is simply no comparison between the on-screen world and "IRL" - any sense of "power" vanishes the moment the movie ends, or you switch the computer off. In the end, that's all the power you ever had; the power to switch off.
At present, it appears that there may have been a family dispute in Derrick Bird's life, possibly involving a will. There is our source of frustration, our potential source of unmetabolised anger - yet the perpetrator does not sound like "your typical loner". He was apparently "quiet", yet sociable with work colleagues; he recently become a grandfather, and was a good neighbour - someone with restrained emotions, it seems, and with several significant changes happening in quick succession in his life. I know I "freaked out" a bit when I became an uncle - that makes you look back on your life, and think about how things could have been different, perhaps better - and if you lose someone close to you, that can be the iceberg to your Titanic.
Unmanaged anger led this man to strike out at those he felt were responsible, I think we'll find, and the following deaths the result of the subsequent loss of rationality. This won't help anyone come to terms with what happened - it's not meant to. You can lie to someone to dry their tears, but the truth remains, and it still needs to be faced.
And meanwhile, families all over the country are sitting their children down in front of "the telly", trusting their impressionable young to "the electronic nanny", when they should be interacting with their children, listening to them, calming their fears - showing them how to handle emotions. They can never know how and when the world will come crashing down on them, but it will - and will they be ready for it? "Oh look, it's 'blame the parents time' again", some might say, but that's not what I'm trying to say - it's just that we risk setting ourselves up for a whole heap of trouble in the future, and blaming Grand Theft Auto XIV for a massacre in 2022 just won't cut it...
Update... I barely get in the door, and the news is awash with the same old "tighter gun controls" talk - this in the country with the toughest gun laws in Europe, and the second toughest in the developed world, behind Japan. I am not a gun enthusiast, but messing with the law entirely misses the point.
Now watch the wild speculation-mongers get in a foaming frenzy, proving and solving nothing...
How long will it be before some idiot starts the call for banning Movie X or Video-Game Y, because of a supposed, and hardly scientific, link to the terrible events in Cumbria yesterday? It WILL come, sooner or later, and my reaction to it will be heavy sighs of utter disbelief, laced with the resignation to the fact that this scape-goating will always happen.
No. Video-games do not cause these kinds of events. Nor do movies. Set those all-too comfy assumptions aside at the start, and it quickly becomes clear - the problem stems from the inability to properly manage personal anger, be it out-and-out rage, or simply frustration. If a person cannot deal with that anger internally, it obviously leads on from that that an external outlet becomes necessary - and that's usually a good dose of swearing... or perhaps even a cathartic experience like watching a violent movie, or playing a violent video-game. Most of the time, these outlets work - fiction, interactive or not, becomes an adequate escape...
But what if that person isn't comfortable with this kind of venting, or has been given negative reinforcement about it throughout their lives - such as being punished for natural, healthy attempts at "getting it all out"? This is where you get "the quiet ones", as in "he was a quiet man", or "such a quiet boy" - the usual suspects in cases like these, alternatively known as "the loner". Unfortunately, this clouds the issue - a person comfortable with their own company isn't necessarily "quiet" - and that's when I start to grind my teeth in annoyance... and I possibly start losing my thread...
Back to the anger management idea: an inability to handle personal anger can lead to unexpected outbursts of a possibly devastating kind, such as we have just seen. The means employed, i.e. the tools at hand, are not the cause - just because they're there, you don't have to use them; I have a portable sewing machine, and it's only been out of the box once, and never powered up. - they are simply tools, the best fit for the task. Sadly, in this instance, the tools were firearms, and the task was murder.
Methods can be derived from outside sources - the Columbine tragedy springs to mind at once - but do these sources cause the outrage? Again, the murderers at Columbine clearly experienced an inability to properly, for want of a better term, "metabolise" their anger, which appears to be mainly a hefty dose of teenage frustration. If movies and video-games really "caused" these types of violence, why aren't the streets full of bodies? Why don't people go ploughing through bus-queues on a daily basis, because of things like Death Race 2000, or its video-game equivalent Carmageddon?
The victims in Death Race 2000 were stuntmen, the victims in Carmageddon clumps of pixels no better than cardboard cut-outs - I know, because I've seen the former, and played the latter. I have never learned to drive, nor even been in control of a car - I'm terrified of what might happen, yet according to "the experts", I should be racing through the streets, splattering the innocent all over the road. There is simply no comparison between the on-screen world and "IRL" - any sense of "power" vanishes the moment the movie ends, or you switch the computer off. In the end, that's all the power you ever had; the power to switch off.
At present, it appears that there may have been a family dispute in Derrick Bird's life, possibly involving a will. There is our source of frustration, our potential source of unmetabolised anger - yet the perpetrator does not sound like "your typical loner". He was apparently "quiet", yet sociable with work colleagues; he recently become a grandfather, and was a good neighbour - someone with restrained emotions, it seems, and with several significant changes happening in quick succession in his life. I know I "freaked out" a bit when I became an uncle - that makes you look back on your life, and think about how things could have been different, perhaps better - and if you lose someone close to you, that can be the iceberg to your Titanic.
Unmanaged anger led this man to strike out at those he felt were responsible, I think we'll find, and the following deaths the result of the subsequent loss of rationality. This won't help anyone come to terms with what happened - it's not meant to. You can lie to someone to dry their tears, but the truth remains, and it still needs to be faced.
And meanwhile, families all over the country are sitting their children down in front of "the telly", trusting their impressionable young to "the electronic nanny", when they should be interacting with their children, listening to them, calming their fears - showing them how to handle emotions. They can never know how and when the world will come crashing down on them, but it will - and will they be ready for it? "Oh look, it's 'blame the parents time' again", some might say, but that's not what I'm trying to say - it's just that we risk setting ourselves up for a whole heap of trouble in the future, and blaming Grand Theft Auto XIV for a massacre in 2022 just won't cut it...
Update... I barely get in the door, and the news is awash with the same old "tighter gun controls" talk - this in the country with the toughest gun laws in Europe, and the second toughest in the developed world, behind Japan. I am not a gun enthusiast, but messing with the law entirely misses the point.
Now watch the wild speculation-mongers get in a foaming frenzy, proving and solving nothing...