Stop Teaching Our Children to Kill, a new book describing the dangers of video games by Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, a former Army Ranger who taught classes at West Point, is the intellectual equivalent of the computer game Doom. Grossman spends most of the book running around wildly shooting accusations at video games and the companies that make them, never stopping to examine the full ramifications of what he is saying and completely ignoring the facts when they get in his way.

List of school shootings, 15 cases from 1996 until May 1999

Let's stop isolating geek, Net culture, By Jon Katz, 30th April 1999

Of the thousands of e-mail messages I got this week (4,000 between Friday, April 23, and Wednesday, April 28, is my best guess), not one advocated violence or supported assault, murder or revenge.
But the stories of physical, verbal, emotional and administrative abuse that came pouring in were stunning, a scandal for an educational system that makes much noise about wholesomeness and safety, but has turned a blind eye for years to the persecution of individualistic and vulnerable students.

North-American School Looks Like a Prison; Safety first - know also Dutch teenagers; Translated from Wegener Dagbladen 11 december 1999

To the toilet during a class? This is only permitted with a special pass, signed by the teacher and a validity duration of merely some minutes. Schools in North-America are heavenly secured. It is not possible to take a bit of fresh air during the pauses, nor leaving your place in the canteen during the lunch.
Safety First, know Dutch teenagers who have been at a North-American high school.
[...] "In the US, people are far more treated as a mass, as a herd. If one of them might do something wrong, the whole group gets safety rules. Here, in the Netherlands, we base ourselves more on each ones individual responsibility. I hope this will remain as it is."

Some quotes from those 4000 e-mail messages

Violent Media May Be Helpful For Some Kids, June 28, 2000, source unknown

At 13 I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona. [...]
"Fear, greed, power-hunger, rage: these are aspects of our selves that we try not to experience in our lives but often want, even need, to experience vicariously through stories of others," writes Melanie Moore, Ph.D., a psychologist who works with urban teens. "Children need violent entertainment in order to explore the inescapable feelings that they've been taught to deny, and to reintegrate those feelings into a more whole, more complex, more resilient selfhood."

Into the wilderness, Homosexuality & the massacre, by Bill Andriette, From The Guide, June 1999

Nowhere else in the world do boys shoot up schools like in America - not in South Africa, Pakistan, or the former Soviet Union - places rife with social tension and awash in Kalishnikovs.
So far the school-shooters are all white boys. The mayhem they've wreaked has become a Rorschach for middle-class America's anxieties - about the young, the Internet, media violence, lax parents, teen culture. But with Littleton, that other perennial anxiety - homosexuality - came to the fore.

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