Update! VTech Killer Read Lovecraft!

[isacked]

Now they’re investigating the books he read...

Tech gunman bought ammo clips on eBay - Yahoo! News

I’m terribly disturbed by this. I read Lovecraft too (but not chainsaw horror). I’ve read like 20 Stephen Kings. I would really hate to have the government start profiling people who read horror. And you know nowadays they take library records without your knowledge. (I borrow from libraries)

Anyone else feel strongly about this?

[j. d. worthington]

Not that strongly on that particular connection (the books he read), no. On the gathering of the information... well, once a crime is committed, that's a different thing. It's the gathering of such information when there's no indication of a crime having been committed or even considered that has me seeing red.

However, the connection between his having read Lovecraft -- who nowhere ever indulges in or encourages acts of violence to a higher level than, say, Hawthorne, or Margaret Mitchell -- and his actions here, are nil ... barring an extremely strained connection via his already distorted cognition. But newspapers have a tendency to jump on any horror connection, if it's there, for sensationalist reporting worthy of the worst of the "yellow journalists" of yore. Joyce Carol Oates? Oh, give me a break! Again, one may as well look for a connection with Dr. Seuss -- or Mark Twain! (Or James Joyce, or Geoffrey Chaucer, or Dante Alighieri.....) These sorts of things are easy shots, and are worth about the amount of effort taken to cobble them up -- nada. Like the fellow who blamed Tod Browning's silent film London After Midnight, with Lon Chaney, Sr., as the cause of his having strangled his girlfriend. Etc.,etc., etc. Such a "connection" collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

[ghyle]

I agree: any such link is tenuous to the extreme. I've seen such kneejerk reactions before, and they are uniformly ludicrous.

[HardScienceFan]

Extra,extra read all about it:
axe murderer read Chaucer

[Dave]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

On the gathering of the information... well, once a crime is committed, that's a different thing. It's the gathering of such information when there's no indication of a crime having been committed or even considered that has me seeing red.

What if you could have prevented the deaths of 34 people by gathering this information beforehand, does that not make any difference?

I'm not saying that I agree either, only that there is a debate to be had here that debate is not happening.

In the UK a woman who killed her husband was just charged with Murder because they could prove a history of Google searches into ways to poison and shoot someone more effectively. She poisoned and shot her husband.

In the UK there are plans to lock up people who are determined by psychiatrists to be likely to be a danger to the public but have not yet committed any crime. Can this ever be right? Or is it just common sense?

The UK has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. We are videoed everywhere we go except in our own homes, otherwise I'd be Winston Smith and this would be 1984. There are also plans for biometric identity cards and many other things, all in the name of counter-terrorism.

There were recent questions in the House of Commons about the UK becoming a Police State which were just dismissed outright. Maybe our present government is not a totalitarian regime, but once all the necessary tools are in place, it is much harder to dis-assemble them. Then we will all be asking ourselves, how did we ever let it happen?

There should be a much wider discussion on the pros and cons such as those I've read in other threads here. Civil liberties vs societies greater good. Someone said here that now our population is so high, we have to forgo some things if we are to live together in peace.

As for profiling people based on the books they read and music they listen too, I'm not an expert, but I would think it isn't a very exact science and I'd be very skeptical about how useful that information really was anyhow.

[j. d. worthington]

Dave:

Originally Posted by Dave

What if you could have prevented the deaths of 34 people by gathering this information beforehand, does that not make any difference?

No. Until a crime has been committed, what we're getting into is the thought-police idea and, as horrific as the alternative may seem (and be) to do so is to give up the last bastion of our freedoms. At that point, we may as well simply walk to the prisons -- all of us -- and go on "work-release" programs. The certainly of horrendous abuses is appalling, and history teaches us far too many lessons about regimes with that sort of power.

In the UK a woman who killed her husband was just charged with Murder because they could prove a history of Google searches into ways to poison and shoot someone more effectively. She poisoned and shot her husband.

In the UK there are plans to lock up people who are determined by psychiatrists to be likely to be a danger to the public but have not yet committed any crime. Can this ever be right? Or is it just common sense?

No. Again, it is not common sense. It can never be right. Not if they have not yet committed any crime. Until then, it is in the realm of speculation, of possibility. But everyone is capable of committing a crime, under the right (wrong) circumstances -- apply the right pressures, hit them in the right weak spots, and it'll happen. And -- much as I respect the idea of psychiatry, and much of the ways in which it has benefited modern society -- psychiatry itself is still in its infancy, and prone to egregious mistakes. Can we afford to sacrifice our civil liberties to something that is still this nebulous and faulty? Again, if we do, we'd best prepare to all be in prison soon; for as long as the societal trends we've been seeing for some time continue unaddressed, the growth of violent crime will continue. This is at best treating the aches and pains, not the cancer itself... and at the cost of further degrading the quality of life and the (justified) tendency of paranoia and distrust for all.

The UK has more CCTV cameras than any other country in the world. We are videoed everywhere we go except in our own homes, otherwise I'd be Winston Smith and this would be 1984. There are also plans for biometric identity cards and many other things, all in the name of counter-terrorism.

These are measures that I am adamantly against, I'll admit. Such things put us too damned close to the Big Brother scenario in Orwell's novel; and need to be dismantled -- now, not later. They are not solutions to the problem; they are simple-minded attempts to contain the problem, but -- as with what I addressed above -- they tend to increase distrust and paranoia, to place on a constant, subliminal level the idea of the societies we have built not being safe and being completely out of control so that police action is the only solution -- which is further abrogating our own responsibilities to find workable solutions and improve conditions. Once again, the quality of life drops drastically with each such "innovation" put into place; and in the end, the society degenerates beyond any possibility of repair.

As for the woman in the case mentioned... there we are prosecuting someone who has committed a crime. Had she not got the information on the internet, she still could have found it in books, or by making contacts otherwise. Yes, it would have taken more effort but, if she was determined, that would hardly have held her back.

As for profiling people based on the books they read and music they listen too, I'm not an expert, but I would think it isn't a very exact science and I'd be very skeptical about how useful that information really was anyhow.

Precisely. It is complete nonsense. People may read all sorts of things for differing reasons. A lot of the books on my shelves are connected to literary research I'm doing -- yet if one saw those titles, and took them out of that context, they might think I was either heavily into philosophy and antiquated science, or had racist tendencies, or was completely out of touch with the world around me. The same with the fiction titles in my library. Plenty of people on this forum read things to gather information in connection with writers they are interested in, or for an understanding of history, or simply to look at alternative viewpoints -- yet any number of those books could be on a modern, secular Index Librorum Prohibitorum. In this way, psychology and psychiatry are the modern superstition, I'm afraid, and theory, doctrine, and dogma all too often are given more weight than factual evidence (which is simply another aspect of what we're seeing with the modern approach to science in general, I'm afraid). Such is by no means to be encouraged.

Looking for simple answers to complex problems inevitably and invariably fouls things up grand royally, to where it takes decades (if not centuries) to clean up the mess... and requires, as has been said before, plenty of "the blood of patriots" to do so.....

[Dave]

Well, I did say "I'm not saying I agree either", but you have certainly made up your own mind! Unfortunately, I don't see any popular debates on these important issues, voices like yours are not being listened too, and are even dismissed, and we seem to be sleepwalking towards this.

And agree that no one can be sure what someone will do in the future. If they did we would have the situation described in Minority Report which was itself flawed and open to abuse.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Dave

Well, I did say "I'm not saying I agree either", but you have certainly made up your own mind! Unfortunately, I don't see any popular debates on these important issues, voices like yours are not being listened too, and are even dismissed, and we seem to be sleepwalking towards this.

And agree that no one can be sure what someone will do in the future. If they did we would have the situation described in Minority Report which was itself flawed and open to abuse.

Ummm.... sorry. I suppose I tend to come off rather strongly because I've put a lot of thought into these things over the last 30+ years (since I became aware of such possible scenarios through my reading of sf -- especially the strong socially-conscious sf of the 1960s as well as of such writers as Kornbluth, Kuttner & Moore, Bester, Pohl, and even -- in several cases -- Asimov), so I have rather strong opinions on them. I think this is especially so because I see all those "cautionary tales" being a bit too damned accurate in their predictions of where society is headed, and the outcome is all too grim....

[BookStop]

Stephen King addressed this very issue.

On Predicting Violence | Violence in the Media | Essays | News + Notes | Entertainment Weekly

[TTBRAHWTMG]

JD...what if it can be shown that there is a greater causal link between reading Lovecraft and committing this kind of act than there is between owning a gun and committing this kind of act? Would your position on gun control modify, or should we curtail access to horror as aggressively, or more aggressively as we do guns? If they came out with the fact that he was a kid that was raised in poverty, or that he was in danger of losing his job to someone overseas, or that he didn't have access to sufficient resources, would you still be commenting on the infancy of psychiatry and the media's tendency to sensationalize? We all have our bias, including the reporter.

[The Ace]

Never mind that, I hear he took a dump every morning and had his hair cut on a regular basis. Investigations are continuing into his shaving behaviour. Nobody seems to have given any credence to the theory that he was a nut with a gun.

[TTBRAHWTMG]

Originally Posted by The Ace

Never mind that, I hear he took a dump every morning and had his hair cut on a regular basis. Investigations are continuing into his shaving behaviour. Nobody seems to have given any credence to the theory that he was a nut with a gun.

That much is already obvious...but what made him different? There was another kid in the same dorm that was accused of being the shooter by fellow students prior to release of Cho's name. The media had at that point released that the shooter was a student of Asian descent, lived in that dorm, took some writing classes, and had a fascination with guns...bang on description of this other poor guy. What made the difference between Cho and him? How do we define and recognize these differences and help protect others from being victims of this kind of behaviour? Do we just resign ourselves to accepting that this type of behaviour is going to happen, and there is nothing we can do about it?

[The Ace]

We can take their guns away.

[TTBRAHWTMG]

Originally Posted by The Ace

We can take their guns away.

I should save this for a gun control thread, but...simply blaming access to guns is completely ignoring the facts. Why does Washington D.C. have one of the highest gun related crime rates in the U.S. when the district has the strictest gun control laws in the union? Why does Switzerland enjoy a relatively small gun related crime rate while also insisting that EVERY household possess a military style gun? Why does Canada have 7 million guns (that is registered guns...the estimates are often double or even triple that) in the hands of 30 million people and still enjoy relative small rates of gun related crime? Blaming guns and ignoring all the other factors is expressing bias and completely simplifying the situation, ignoring the root cause that is driving this type of behaviour.

[The Ace]

I wasn't trying to oversimplify. There will always be nutters out there, but a nutter with fists or an improvised weapon is fairly easy to deal with. A nutter with a gun is an entirely different matter. Gun control isn't a complete solution but limiting access to firearms (as in the UK) is certainly a factor. I was simply trying to say, in my earlier post, that until he pulled the trigger, you wouldn't have looked at this guy twice on the street.