ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING PLOT

SHOOTING

Last week it was Kansas, this week it's Alaska. The problem with these school shootings is that some kids treat them like a video game, "who can kill the most." They treat body counts like scores of a video game, each trying to out do the other. Now I'm not blaming those video games. I've played several shooting video games and I have no desire to go out and kill people. Those who do that already have something mentally wrong with them in the first place, where they can't separate fantasy from reality.

There was a Psychologist in the 1950s, Albert Bandura, who said that children exposed to violence, either in person or on tv and movies, become desensitized by it and will sometimes model that behavior.

VIOLENCE

I have a problem with Bandura though. See, I was born into an Air Force family. I've seen just about every war movie ever made. I watch cop shows, I've watched the news covering the wars, from Vietnam to the latest in Iraq. But there have been 3 events I've seen on tv that really upset me. One was the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding, the 2nd was the attack on the World Trade Center, and the last was the last shuttle that broke apart on entry. See, I can distinguish reality from make believe. In those incidents, real people died. In the movies it was just actors.

So, these kids that get it in their heads to go out and shoot teachers and other students have to have something seriously going on inside their heads. At Least that's my opinion.