#1 2007-10-11 17:42:21
Why does it seem that everyone they interview is black?
Fellow students say they and school authorities didn't take Asa Coon's threats of violence seriously before the 14-year-old's shooting rampage at his Cleveland high school on Wednesday.
Coon killed himself after wounding two teachers and two other students at SuccessTech Academy. The youth had a history of violent confrontations and had been suspended after a fistfight on Monday... (CNN et al., it's fuckin' unavoidable)
What few images I've seen of the "goth/shooter" would probably have made him an outcast at any high school in the country (Trent Reznor Mates with Chris Crocker, see the horrifying offspring!). Yet, these are the sort of obvious pleas for attention--and the occasional emo-beatdown--that everyone claims to have Ignored Until It Was Too Late.
Instead, they suspend/arrest kids for making doodles in their notebooks or posting on teh Intarwebz. Like, "Look, this guy's wearing all dark clothes and telling everyone to die, but let's question the lacrosse player with an old game of 'Hangman' in his binder."
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#2 2007-10-11 18:08:21
Fuckitall, if you're a white kid going to an 80% black school and your name is Asa Coon, you'd want to kill somebody too. Your parents first, but I imagine highschool sucked for the guy.
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#3 2007-10-11 20:24:25
orangeplus wrote:
Fuckitall, if you're a white kid going to an 80% black school and your name is Asa Coon, you'd want to kill somebody too. Your parents first, but I imagine highschool sucked for the guy.
Nah, he would have shot up any school he was in. A misfit is a misfit.
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#4 2007-10-11 20:31:55
headkicker_girl wrote:
Nah, he would have shot up any school he was in. A misfit is a misfit.
Perhaps, but he would have been just an average forgettable loser without the hassle of being a white named Coon going to a majority black school.
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#5 2007-10-11 20:42:21
fnord wrote:
headkicker_girl wrote:
Nah, he would have shot up any school he was in. A misfit is a misfit.
Perhaps, but he would have been just an average forgettable loser without the hassle of being a white named Coon going to a majority black school.
Life isn't fair. Why don't we all just go around shooting everyone who hurts our feelings?
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#6 2007-10-11 20:56:16
Life isn’t fair
I’m aware of that. I’ve experienced both the awesome and fucked sides of life not being fair.
Why don't we all just go around shooting everyone who hurts our feelings?
You and I both had the benefit of adult guidance to know why not to do this. This kid had shitty parents, teachers who didn’t get involved, a principle who ignored warnings and apparently no responsible adult in his life to teach him about life.
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#7 2007-10-12 01:54:48
headkicker_girl wrote:
Why don't we all just go around shooting everyone who hurts our feelings?
Wasn't that what Cruel was for?
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#8 2007-10-12 08:10:14
fnord wrote:
You and I both had the benefit of adult guidance to know why not to do this. This kid had shitty parents, teachers who didn’t get involved, a principle who ignored warnings and apparently no responsible adult in his life to teach him about life.
I'm still not feeling the love. There were weird loner freaks when we were growing up, but they didn't kill people who made fun of them, and I'm not going to make the leap that parents were better 25 years ago because I knew plenty of kids who basically raised themselves while the parents were out pursuing their own career ambitions. Don't make excuses for this asshole just because he's white. Even as a racist, you're better than that.
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#9 2007-10-12 12:55:57
headkicker_girl wrote:
There were weird loner freaks when we were growing up, but they didn't kill people who made fun of them... Don't make excuses for this asshole just because he's white.
I sense I'm going to regret this immediately, but I don't think he was making an 'excuse' for the boy because of his color. When we attended high school, as today, each and every child began to discover/confront what makes him or her feel as if they are different from everybody else. Even here and now, we form loose associations based on the most superficial of similarities, and there will always be those among us who elect to represent the Outsider to other Outsiders (no need to name names). Remember "You're an individual, just like all your friends"?
Many of us had the opportunity to explore these distinctions throughout college. Asa Coon obviously couldn't see past the end of next May. That sense of hopelessness was clearly curdling for a while, and tends to produce a foul admixture of anger and despair. His parents and teachers are most certainly to blame, if a finger must be pointed, but as at VA Tech, the most culpable are usually the last to experience the consequences of letting the walking wounded fester.
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#10 2007-10-14 05:56:26
The very next day, they intercepted and arrested another kid whose DIY killing spree was theoretically to have included an assortment of BB guns, katanas, and godknows what else. But that's not the real kicker. His mommy bought it all for him.
And now the stupid cow will be going to jail while he gets counseling and someone else thankfully takes over his "home schooling."
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#11 2007-10-14 07:23:40
pALEPHx wrote:
Asa Coon obviously couldn't see past the end of next May. That sense of hopelessness was clearly curdling for a while, and tends to produce a foul admixture of anger and despair. His parents and teachers are most certainly to blame, if a finger must be pointed, but as at VA Tech, the most culpable are usually the last to experience the consequences of letting the walking wounded fester.
I'm sorry, but I'm with HKG on this one. Nobody felt that way when you went to high school? Hell I almost flushed my own life down the toilet in High School because I had no future, and there were plenty who had it worse than me, but none of us decided to go on a killing spree. Don't think we didn't joke about it, and plenty of people's deaths were wished really hard, but there's a huge leap between that and gunning people down.
Bottom line: I can empathize, but life provides a smorgasbord of release options, and those people are dead not because of how he felt, but because of what he chose to do.
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#12 2007-10-14 07:25:03
pALEPHx wrote:
The very next day, they intercepted and arrested another kid whose DIY killing spree was theoretically to have included an assortment of BB guns, katanas, and godknows what else.
Well, you've gotta hand it to him, if he actually succeeds in killing anyone it's really going to hurt.
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#13 2007-10-14 11:03:49
tojo2000 wrote:
Bottom line: I can empathize, but life provides a smorgasbord of release options, and those people are dead not because of how he felt, but because of what he chose to do.
Exactly. Drop out and get a job. Take the GED. Transfer to a different high school. Join a support group. Run away.
But don't shoot up innocent people because you're a socially maladjusted fucktard. Who didn't get teased for some reason?
I don't blame the parents or the teachers. I put the blame solely where it belongs...on the little shits who think killing is cool.
Personal responsibilty seems to go out the window when it's some white kid who snaps. When it's gang violence in an all black school, you never hear code words like, "we missed the warning signs," or "in hindsight it seemed like a cry or help," or "where did society fail this kid." Minority kids are inherently bad, and white kids are "troubled."
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#14 2007-10-14 13:48:55
pALEPHx wrote:
The very next day, they intercepted and arrested another kid whose DIY killing spree was theoretically to have included an assortment of BB guns, katanas, and godknows what else. But that's not the real kicker. His mommy bought it all for him.
And now the stupid cow will be going to jail while he gets counseling and someone else thankfully takes over his "home schooling."
well, take a look at 'em.....the boy is definitely mentally deranged. 
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#15 2007-10-14 14:11:30
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#16 2007-10-14 16:30:19
headkicker_girl wrote:
Exactly. Drop out and get a job. Take the GED. Transfer to a different high school. Join a support group. Run away.
But don't shoot up innocent people because you're a socially maladjusted fucktard. Who didn't get teased for some reason?
I don't blame the parents or the teachers. I put the blame solely where it belongs...on the little shits who think killing is cool.
I didn't actually disagree with you (and now Tojo), but was expanding somewhat on your premise. Yes, of course there were kids like that when we were their age. Even children who seem to have the greatest privileges of status and peer acceptance can commit suicide, cause harm to themselves or schoolmates, and may develop violent/destructive fantasies. Their decisions to act on them, however, usually stem from perceptions of powerlessness and victimization by some perceived Other. I will still remind that Heathers was not a documentary.
The psychology of adolescents is something of a fait accompli. At various times--or all at once--they can seem addictive, narcissistic, antisocial, histrionic...the list goes on. 'Maladjusted' fits, but that's not the norm, and when we say "Who's fault is it anyway?" we cannot willfully omit the parents' contributions to the kids' mental imbalances. The idiotic bitch who furnished her own boy with a fantasy arsenal was far more responsible for establishing the foundation of his turd-flavored psyche. Children, by definition, do not make themselves. They are predominantly what we put into them, mimicking their parents' values, a complilation of attitudes and behaviors that come first from the family system; second, from society and their peers. If a child is removed from the social network--either deliberately or passively, by being "unpopular"--then there are no peers, only adult asshats like her.
These little balls of clay may have their own dispositions and temperaments, but we don't always fashion them into ceramic guns, replete with bullet points on how to respond to stress. Children who drop out or run away are more likely to use drugs, become sexually irresponsible, and die younger. Perhaps this a form of social darwinism we could all get on board with, but one must examine the situation that laid the groundwork for such behavior, and it seldom lies with culture. Our society makes a lot of options available, just as you describe, but a child's inability to make informed decisions like that is exactly what makes him or her a child.
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