Another week, another school shooting. Of course. Where was it this time? New York? Wyoming? Illinois?
It’s predictable and endless. As usual, the headlines screamed the same old, boring stuff.
“Why?!” asks the Dad of a victim. “How could he/they do this?” asks a survivor. “I had no idea this would happen!” says someone. Who, I don’t know. The parent of the shooter? A teacher? A principal? All three?
It’s all so routine now, isn’t it?
And again, naturally, there is no sensible discussion as to why this keeps happening in the media or anywhere else. Of course.
It’s always the same damn thing after a school shooting. Every news show presents the same footage and commentary as every other news show. Every article in the mainstream media takes the same viewpoint and presents the same facts. Every survivor asks the same questions. Over and over and over again.
And as usual, those not directly effected tune it out and go about their daily lives after shaking their heads. Of course. Except for the conspiracy sites, who will present “proof” that all such killers are mind controlled patsies of an enormous global conspiracy. Of course.
My thoughts? Every school shooting reminds me now of Jeff Weise. It didn’t used to, but as I get older that’s what happens. Not sure why. Perhaps my contact with him influenced me more than I realized. Or maybe it’s just because people tend to look backwards more as they age.
It’s a coincidence that a couple weekends ago, I was sorting through some of my old archived web pages and found some of Jeff’s posts from a long gone rivethead/ extreme metal message board. After his massacre, the media sensationalized his membership on the old Nazi.org messageboard and his violent stories, but they didn’t report on his earlier stuff, perhaps because it wasn’t controversial enough. Or, I guess, because they didn’t know about it. He had a different handle back then. If my memory is correct, he started out with Einsatzcommando.
I’ll never forget the shock I felt when reading the headlines after the massacre. TodesEngel actually shot up his school and murdered his classmates. Wow. Holy fuck. I knew he was angry but I didn’t know… wow.
I read article after article about it. I listened to every news broadcast and followed the ensuing controversy on the Nazi.org messageboard itself, where Bill White and a few other White Nationalist leaders signed up specifically to field questions from mainstream reporters on the forum. It was nuts. I was just a lurker there, so nobody paid me any mind. Thank God.
The best write up on the shooting was done by the once great Salon.com, who delivered a deep article that actually tried to present the human side of Weise. To their credit, they made a sincere attempt to answer some questions that nobody else even wanted to ask. As far as their presentation of Weise as a person, I think they nailed him as best they could with what they had. Political pressures, though, won the day. The article’s finishing page could not of course follow the findings through to the logical conclusion. Of course. But they tried more than anyone else.
Looking back, I wonder why they bothered. Salon.com even then flirted with extreme multicultural insanity, and Weise was an unabashed racist. Perhaps they gave him a fairer showing because even though he was a National Socialist, he himself was racially mixed. As always, the biases are so important. Or maybe the early net was a better place.
The worst analysis of the situation came from the conspiracy websites, some of whom insisted that he was a CIA plant and that Nazi.org was created specifically to set up a “false flag” event. Uh, no, Weise was a real person, a real teenager, and was not a part of any conspiracy, and it was an insult to everyone effected by the shooting to even suggest it. And neither was Nazi.org a front for anything; I knew who built that website and why and where it came from. It really offended me to read all of that.
Of course, you don’t correct anyone in these situations. Nobody Must Know. The whole thing was scary and I did not want to get put on some list in the FBI headquarters.
So I kept my mouth shut, which I’ll do forever. Except here.
My opinion regarding these school shootings is this, if anyone cares: the kids are terrorists, not murderers. The school shootings are politics by other means.
The shooters are not merely angry at bullies. You can tell because it’s rarely if ever that the bullies die in these shootings. And this explanation doesn’t make sense anyhow- if you wanted to kill a bully, go to his house and do it where you could have a 90% chance of success. Why do it at a crowded school with armed security guards?
The school shootings are political acts. They’re a furious howl against an extremely corrupt system. The problem isn’t bullies, its corruption, ignorance, and dishonesty within the system. The spiritual siblings of the school shooters are the suicide bombers of the Middle East.
It’s for this reason that the Columbine killers were so idolized by the alienated back then. I remember the stream of posts and messages I saw on the early boards praising Harris and Klebold for bravery. Their actions garnered a lot of respect from some quarters, and it isn’t hard to see why. Note that I don’t agree with the killers’ methods, or even their ideas, but I also think that you must respect those two on some level. How could you not? To many on the fringes back then, they were heroes and icons in the same way that the disaffected in the Middle East idolize suicide bombers. To many, Harris and Klebold weren’t nuts. They had a cause, however extreme, and were willing to fight and die for it. They weren’t crazy. They were just braver than 99.9999% of everyone else that hates the system. They were warriors.
Well, they were terrorists, actually. The same as the rest of the school shooters.
To drive the point home, one of the people once involved tangentially with a website I used to visit did indeed become a traditional terrorist. He renounced his past life as a Satanist, converted to Wahhabi Islam, joined up with an Al-Qaeda cell, and landed on the FBI’s Terrorist Threat List. Yikes. I never knew that guy, but had he gone to grad school instead, he could have just as easily become a school shooter. The ethos of an Al-Qaeda member and a nihilistic mass murderer isn’t all that different.
As an aside, a google search just told me that Weise’s old Newsgrounds videos are still up! Wow!
The comments to them are interesting… it’s weird to read them; they give him a kind of respect that he never had when he was alive, not even from the members of the boards he frequented. Nobody, to my knowledge, even read his stories through to the end except for me and possibly one or two others. Frankly, I don’t remember seeing any comments to his stories at all, positive or not. To see that today respectful comments are left continuously on his Newgrounds videos is quite jarring.
To me, the comments are a faint echo of what I heard back then about the Columbine killers. There’s a lot of respect in those comments from some very lost and very angry people. Justifiably angry people. Of course.
The cycle continues.