Devil's Advocate: Tell Me Why |
Article is yet to be rated |
|
| Author:
| Thrawn
|
|
| Submitted: |
16-Sep-2006 03:51:05 |
| Imported From: |
zZine (original author: Makat)
|
| The more news-conscious amongst you will probably recognise the name Kimveer Gill. At 12:41 local time, armed with a Beretta X4 Storm semi-automatic rifle, he opened fire on a group of students of Dawson College in Montreal, Canada.
|
|
The more news-conscious amongst you will probably recognise the name Kimveer Gill. At 12:41 local time, armed with a Beretta X4 Storm semi-automatic rifle, he opened fire on a group of students of Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, before entering the school and continuing to shoot at the teenage pupils. Fortunately, there were two police officers on the college grounds for an unrelated matter, and they were able to stop him before he'd completed his macabre mission, though one student died and eight others were critically injured, along with eleven others who sustained less life-threatening wounds.
This is not the first time that young men or women have rampaged against their peers, leaving behind a trail of bloodshed, grief and shell casings. Everyone has heard of Columbine, and many people have their own theories as to the cause of it and other school shootings. Just what makes a person with a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them throw it away? What makes a young human being stalk the corridors of their place of education with a weapon, cutting down their peers? Rock music, video games, a culture of violence and fear - pick your poison. A thousand and one different attempts to rationalize a concept that most of us find so difficult to understand.
No, this is not a new phenomenon. What makes this tragic incident different from the others is the extent to which the internet is involved. Hours after the gunman's identity had been revealed, his profiles on various internet sites were uncovered. At one[1], a gallery of his photos showed him posing with his rifle and a knife, his profile saying he'd like to die "in a hail of gunfire". A hundred different 'about me' memes litter his page, all proudly claiming to be evil, to be destructive. It doesn't take a genius to see that this was a deeply troubled young man.
Yet, he was allowed to descend ever further into depravity by an internet society that denies all responsibility. Teenage boys overdosing on various drugs, broadcast live over IRC; a channel of users watching and not caring, believing they are not responsible. On sites like the one Gill was a member of, claims of being evil are rewarded with praise and acceptance; nobody cares about the consequences, nobody feels responsibility. The internet is morally void. It does not so much have poor moral standards so much as it claims morality does not apply to it at all.
What the internet needs is for strict moral controls to be put in place. Why safeguard the freedom of speech of the maniacs? What about the freedom to exist of their victims? The internet must acknowledge its own collective responsibility. Instead of accepting or ignoring deviant behaviour we must instead challenge it. In real life, a person could not expect to stand in a public place vocalizing their own desire to destroy things, to kill. Why is the internet different?
To some extent, it's a new medium of existence. It's possible to be anyone. From one website to another, one can be a middle-aged Belgian woman, a 25 year old student with worries over finance, a thirteen year old boy with brown hair who likes basketball - nobody can stop you, and nobody will even try. It's this detachment from reality that the internet offers which enables our own darkest sides to rise to the surface. The beliefs and urges we usually keep buried far down within our subconscious become more prominent as they are groomed by the anonymity and lack of reprisals that the internet guarantees. Through unconscious selection of the audience to which one reveals these urges, they are not challenged and therefore grow stronger and more deeply entrenched within one's mind.
Humanity has always struggled with its own dark side. The internet is a new way for that side of ourselves to blossom until it begins to overshadow our ideas of right and wrong. We must begin to take responsibility for ourselves and others; to hold them to account for the ideas they express and the way that they express them. A failure to do so will lead to more disturbed young people making very bad decisions. Isn't it about time the internet grew up?
[1]http://www.vampirefreaks.com/
This article was originally published by CyberArmy.net in the CyberArmy Library.
|
|
You must be logged in to vote on an article
|
About Us | Privacy Policy | Mission Statement | Help
|