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Campus killings may restart
gun violence debate
Matthew Bigg
Reuters
Monday April 16, 2007
The killings at Virginia Tech university on Monday will stir fresh
U.S. debate over gun control and what drives people to go on shooting
rampages through schools and colleges.
The killer's identity and motive were not immediately known, but
as the death toll rose, it became the deadliest campus shooting
in U.S. history, the latest in a string of spree killings.
It was the worst since Charles Whitman went to the top of a tower
at the University of Texas on August 1, 1966, and opened fire. He
killed 15 people, including his mother and wife the night before,
and wounded 31 others.
Last October, a gunman shot 10 Amish girls at a one-room schoolhouse
in Pennsylvania, killing five before turning the gun on himself.
In April 1999, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, armed with
guns and homemade bombs, killed 12 fellow students and a teacher
at Columbine High School in Colorado in a long-planned spree.
School shootings have prompted changes to school safety rules and
sparked debate over the availability of guns.
They also have prompted an outpouring of academic studies on the
causes of stress, depression and violence in young people and novels
such as the award-winning "We Need to Talk About Kevin"
by Lionel Shriver, about a school massacre.
People who commit killings in schools and colleges are sometimes
motivated by a specific grievance against that institution or people
within it, said Nadine Kaslow, a professor and chief psychologist
at Emory School of Medicine.
They are sometimes mentally ill and may equally be reacting to
a trauma, either real or imagined, that they have suffered, and
decide to take that trauma out on everyone else, Kaslow said in
an interview.
"Some of these people -- I don't want to use the word 'snap'
-- but they just go over the edge. All the rest of us have a conscience
that says: 'don't do this,'" she said stressing she was new
to the Virginia Tech case.
The way in which the media play up cases such as Columbine may
make the idea of committing such a crime to achieve notoriety attractive
to certain individuals, she said to explain why such killings appear
more prevalent in the United States than in other Western countries.
GUN CONTROL?
Advocates of wider gun controls said the availability of guns in
the United States had made it easier for people to commit murder
everywhere, including in schools and colleges.
"What have we done as a nation in the 8 years since Columbine
about this problem? We compound the trade of the day by our failure
to deal with the proliferation of guns in our country," said
Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Helmke said that since Columbine, which happened eight years ago
this week, there had been no new legislation on control of guns
and he said a ban on assault weapons was allowed to expire in September
2004.
Advocates of gun freedom such as the National Rifle Association
argue that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the U.S. constitution
and dispute efforts to link the incidence of gun crime with access
to firearms.
Many recent studies have looked at student-on-student violence
and its causes and after Columbine intense scrutiny focused on the
lives and backgrounds of the two gunmen, who committed suicide.
It also focused on school bullying, social cliques and the potential
effects of the music they listened to and the video games they played.
Experts also looked for ways to spot warning signs of violence.
Kaslow said that violence in U.S. schools was a bigger problem
than was reported because of the high incidence of bullying, hitting
and sexual offenses. Shootings were just an extreme form of that
violence, she said.
"We are bombarded with violent images in our culture. We have
a culture of violence here (in the United States). Kids will go
home and watch this on TV," she said.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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