To top it off, our kids are imbued with victimology, which today has become the American way of blame. It is too routine for adults and their kids to explain all their problems as victimization. When a boy in trouble sees himself as a victim, this festers into seething anger. With easy availability of guns, it can explode as murder. The tabloid reporting of mass murder feeds into this state of the child s mind and so is contagious.
Murder is reported on the front page and leads the nightly news in gory color and audible sobbing.
The airing of the shattered emotions of the victims families and friends is only marginally newsworthy, yet it goes on for days, and has a galvanizing effect on the potential copycat. All this occurs against a background of kids watching several hours of TV daily with about one murder per hour. When killing becomes routine entertainment, the inhibitions against killing melt. For the child who feels victimized by other kids and his parents and his schoolteachers, being able to fantasize so concretely about wreaking this vengeance is empowering and delicious. Every secondary school should consider installing metal detectors right away.