The Minnesota School Shooting

[Maniac]

Standing up and saying the pledge to me is not a big deal. I have no problem doing it, but religion is school is something i have to disagree with. If you want that go to a private school. The last thing i want is someone telling me what to believe. Yes i am a christian and i am glad to be one and i would rather worship god on Sunday and at home. School is there to learn not to force things on you.

[BTs_Mysterio]

We have no religion in Canadian schools, nor does anyone have to sing with the anthem in which the word God is used once. Yet I see fights about as often as someone has two birthdays in a year. I really don't think religion has anything to do with the ethics and morality of the students at a school. If you need such visible false absolutes to make up for the terrible parenting apparently so many receive, then take them to all your school across you land. Offend as many as possible, alienating them from their peers, and guess what will happen... suicide attacks, religious wars in America, and even more problems than now.

[seth]

Well, here's how I look at this.  Quite a few years ago some idiot thought that Separation of Church and State means that we should stop having prayer in school, should stop saying the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and should stop displaying any kind of moral integrity in the school system.  Since that day, all this shit started happening.  School shootings, rampant drug abuse, teenage pregnancy rates going through the roof, etc.

See what happens when you take the morality of Jesus out of children's lives?

Hey, you might not agree with me, but the numbers don't lie.

thats BS. You say the church was some kind of good example for the kids because when they were praying, they wouldnt think about getting on a killing spree. I say the church has its own shit to take care of, does Boston ring a bell ?

No, the problem is about gun control. It looks like every godam freak has a gun in this country !

[Maniac]

Seth give me a break not everyone has a gun and is going to shoot someone. Personally i don't think there is anything wrong with owning a gun and they have good uses. The only problem is people have easy access to them and it's not just the United States it a lot of places. I love to hunt and go to shooting ranges i think you are just scared for some reason.

[crypt]

I'm a junior in high-school in Houston Texas and we say the Pledge including the part; "one nation under God". the whole state has always done it.

Which is one of the reasons why I think Texas is such a great place. 

We say the entire thing here in SC and I stand up and say it proudly every morning.

[Civrock]

here's the LiveJournal of that guy:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/weise

hint: after reading his entries, take a look at the 700+ comments to the last one.

[seth]

Seth give me a break not everyone has a gun and is going to shoot someone.

dood,litteraly, every freak that shot and killed someone had a gun.

[BTs_GhostSniper]

I'm a junior in high-school in Houston Texas and we say the Pledge including the part; "one nation under God". the whole state has always done it.

Which is one of the reasons why I think Texas is such a great place. 

We say the entire thing here in SC and I stand up and say it proudly every morning.

Crypt is just trying to get back on my good side so I'll give him my G5 when I upgrade.  Brown-noser![/size]

["Sixhits"]

How did we go from mourning the death of ten kids to demanding prayer in school? How did we go from wondering why this kid killed them to deciding that if only he'd found Jesus he'd have done nothing?

Ghost, thought processes like yours are one of the things that's breaking this county apart: the blind insistance that your way is right, knowledgable, and moral. More American.

Truth be told we cannot understand what motivations drive murders like this. And none of us can just whip out a solution; be it, say, banning the sale of guns or hammering god into our children. Ultimately, there is no answer. Because such actions are irrational -- they defy explaination and defy solutions. They will always occur, have always occured in one form or another, and will always occur.

Besides, Ghost is just lying to us when he says these sorts of things started to happen after some schools removed the pledge. That's bullshit. He knows it too, which damns him. It's just more revisionist history from the sort of person who insists that his way is and has always been right, and will always be right for every, single occurance of anything. Ghost's way of life isn't called extremist for nothing.

Here's a fresh thought: Ghost can never be right because he refuses to consider the facts of a situation and instead insists that he knows the solution because his extremist faith demands a certain solution. Some would call that intelectually dishonesty. I'd call willful ignorance.

Lotta that going around these days.

[Brutha]

Seth give me a break not everyone has a gun and is going to shoot someone.

dood,litteraly, every freak that shot and killed someone had a gun.

I have to agree, it's sort of hard to shoot someone without a gun. Perhaps restricting guns would be a good idea? But there are a few things that worry me.

1. The kid got guns. How did he get them, and how could these guns have been kept safer?

2. This kid was obviously someone that had been noticed, since he had been described as a loner. What went wrong? Why wasn't the society around him there when he needed them? Why was he allowed to go this far.

No "normal" kid would do this thing. I'm sure we will hear every excuse from video games to music. However, the simple truth is this. They failed. This kid was a perfect example of how wrong things can go, and someone failed. I'm not saying that someone is to blame, but rather a comunity. To me it seems that America is much about individualism, and if this is so, then I fear we will see tragedies like this again. I feel pain for the losses of this community, but I will be so coldhearted that I'll say this: Look at all these shootings and learn. Please, the future of your children is at stake.

One more thing, the  National Rifle Association will probably go around saying "Guns don't kill ppl, ppl kill ppl" to which I have just one reply. True, but the guns make it so damn easier to kill. To quote Eddi Izzard, "it's pretty hard to kill a person by just saying BANG".

[c| Lone-Wolf]

I have said it before and I will say it again, religion has been around longer than standardized, required K-12 education.  People were, from almost the dawn of humanity, much more religious than we, as a whole, are today (In particular in Europe from the 1100's to late 1700's).  As far as I have read, just about everybody back then believed in, and was to some degree schooled in (through going to church, for example) the ways and edicts of their religion.  Going from GS's point of view, this would mean that everybody was an upstanding citizen, who had good morals and never did anything unkind to anybody, right?  

-  Have you ever heard of the Borges?  In particular, Alexander VI?  Let me fill you in, he was the Pope from 1492-1503, and took specific pleasure in breaking each of the ten commandments, he murdered rivals, was involved in orgies, he fathered seven children and married off his daughter three times,  to name a few of the wonderful things he did.  This was the -POPE- we are talking about, the most religiously educated man in the land.  So shouldnt he have been the most pious, as well?  (and dont worry, he wasnt the only bad apple, I have found quite a list of them)

-  How about the Conquistadors?  Conquiring a large part of south and central America in the 1500's to 1700's, they were anything but good Christian men.  I do not believe anybody needs to be reminded of what kind of people they really were, and what really happend in the new world when they 'converted' the local peoples to christianity, and how they did it.

-  And last but certainly not least, there was the Spanish Inquisition, which is quite possibly the most sick and twisted spot in human history.  Of course there are quite a few runners up (like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and the rest) but the special trait to this one, is, as I am sure you all guessed, it was -religiously- grounded.  Because of religion we got to learn fun new words like 'Thumb-Screw' among others.  I could research the subject more, but I dont think anybody will disagree with me when i say the Spanish Inquisition was more than a little FUBAR.

The point I'm getting at, is that people say we need to go back to classical christian (or whatever religion's) values, and that will solve the problem.  Well, the fact of the matter is, just because you tell people to believe in those values does not mean they are going to follow them.  And as I have just illustrated, it is quite possible people may not stop at just ignoring what you tell them, but try to pervert that in every way possible.  

In addition to this, saying that the second they took religion out of schools things started to go bad is like saying that because you put something in the microwave a tree fell on your house.  Those are two totally un-related things that just happened to occur at the same time, and trying to draw some causation from that is totally illogical.  

Is it even a remote possibility that something else could be the cause of this?  Could those thousands and thousands of studies that point fingers at increasingly violent TV and video games contribute to or cause this rise in school violence?  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, my point is that there are an untold number of things that could cause or contribute to these kinds of incidents.  Or is there some, all-knowing study that nobody but the religious-right knows about that says, undeniably, factually and logically, why the single sole reason for rising violence in schools is a lack of religion?  If there is, I would be most interested to see it, since the high school I went to had not one incident of violence in my four year tenure there, any worse than the ocassional tussel in the hall between wannabe thugs.  

Regardless of my argument, what has happened in Minnesota is irreversible, and tragic.  That a child feels the need to end their life in such a way is such a loss that one cannot put it into words.  It saddens me greatly that this kind of thing is becoming a more frequent occurance all across the nation, and that more and more hurting school children see this as the only option left open to them, causing such suffering on innocents that just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  There is no way any of us can ever comprehend the suffering that each family is going through, that has lost a child, and I wish that none of you with children, or those of you who will have children in the future, have to experience a loss so terrible as that.

-Lone

[*DAMN Bondo]

The pledge is a distinctly fascist device...trumpeting the importance of the state over the individual.

Anyway, the United States is the most religious developed country by a good amount. Yet we have the most shootings, teen pregnancy, etc of the developed world. How does that work with your claim GS?

[seth]

it doesn't

[crypt]

Crypt is just trying to get back on my good side so I'll give him my G5 when I upgrade.  Brown-noser![/size]

lol, not exactly, but you're on the right track.

[BTs_Mysterio]

Bondo is exactly correct. A shame this will simply get a reply like: The USA is the richest most powerful country because of our strong religion.

P.S. I believe the US has the most developed religion, not the most. This is accomplished by melting pot model which Canada and others don't prefer over the salad model.

[Toxic::Joka]

A flash movie made by Jeff Weise. 

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/195194

[Maniac]

Jeff Wise was 16 and had a hobby of making flash cartoons and he submitted one to Newgrounds before he did what he did. Read the text in the read before you watch it. The is just a sad indicator of what he was really going to do. http://newgrounds.com/portal/view/195194 (yes Joka beat me too it damn)

[KoS.Rebel]

Aint that a bitch....no surpise here.

[BTs_Mysterio]

That's slightly disturbing. I don't know why people decide to hurt others when they end up wanting to, and usually taking their own lives.

[bronto]

look at his fucking live journal. see what being too emo does to people? i mean, there's nothing that a person can't get through in life, and what this kid went through was nothing compared to what others have. what a fucking loser, waaa can't stand being alive, waaa emo waa kill.