Taking Responsibility
Uploaded by Adrieweth on Oct 24, 1999
1999 must be a great year to be alive if you are a criminal! Nobody takes responsibility for his or her own actions anymore. Someone commits a heinous crime, and anything but the criminal gets blamed. It was a harsh childhood, abusive parents, violent movies and video games, the availability of guns and bomb making materials, the Internet, pornography, peer pressure, etc.
In my mind, if you commit a crime, then you are a criminal. I am the only one that makes the decisions I make in life. Others may influence my decisions, but ultimately, I am the one that makes that final choice. No matter how hard and pathetic you think your life is, or how badly society treats you, or what you watch on TV, or what you can buy from the store or read on the Internet, you made the decision to break the law-nobody made the decision for you. Oliver Stone didn't tell you to watch Natural Born Killers and then go mimic the crimes. The NRA did not make you illegally purchase guns. The Internet did not force you to download recipes for bombs.
The massacre at Columbine High School was a tragedy. Instead of looking at these kids that committed the crime and putting blame where it belongs, everyone was more than willing to point a quick finger of blame so they could feel better somehow. Unfortunately, some have used this tragedy as nothing more than an event to be exploited for their own political gains. People that are afraid of the Internet were quick to point out that Nazi and hate propaganda and bomb-making recipes are easily accessed on the Internet, and that "alternative" ideas seem to flourish on the Internet. Immediately everyone wants to censor the hell out of the Internet and keep their kids away from it. They fail to mention the business and education values of the Internet, and dwell on the negative. Antigun people quickly "forget" about the 60+ bombs that were found and focused merely on the fact that firearms were used by these psychos. They immediately want more gun laws and bans (but fail to mention that dozens of existing gun laws were broken by these boys as it is, and that the laws now being proposed in the aftermath would not have prevented this sort of thing). Others quickly point out that these kids played violent arcade...