Reasons behind Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s shooting rampage:
THE MEDIA
- the serious repercussions of being
continually immersed in a media culture that glorifies violence
- exposed to the dangerous propaganda and ways
of thinking of such totalitarians as Adolf Hitler who influenced them in their
anti-Semitic, purist and racist views and Nazism, the lurid imagery of Nazi
Germany
- violent computer games
- media idols who enjoy lots of publicity like
popular rapper Eminem who enthuse such ideals as killing his wife and parents,
infamous heavy metal rock star Marilyn Manson who’s known for self-mutilation
- movies such as ‘The Basketball Diaries’ which
starred Leonardo DiCaprio who dressed in a black trenchcoat and gunned down
victims such as what the teenagers eventually emulated
- the hotbed of vice, the worldwide web, where
the shooters frequented such websites that taught them how to make homemade
bombs
- books that they got their hands on such as
‘The Anarchist Cookbook’ which detailed the processes of building bombs
- the implications of all these media violence
which gelled together to make their impact on the susceptible impressionable
fertile young minds of Harris and Klebold
- research studies at the Indiana University
School of Medicine have yielded results to back this up- exposure to violent
media may affect the brains of youths with aggressive tendencies differently
than the brains of non-aggressive youths; this means that the latent violent
tendencies in the two may have been aggravated further and propelled to the
surface by all these factors above. They had a more profound impact on them
than on other ‘normal’ youths.
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Eric Harris was also confirmed to have been taking the psychiatric
drug Luvox, prescribed for obsessive compulsive disorder and depression, which
can actually produce manic psychoses, aggression, and other behavioral
abnormalities in children and young people
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Eric Harris came from a good family background, and this
heightens the probability that his medication anti-depressant drug induced a manic
reaction in him causing a lack of impulse control phenomenon
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temptingly lax gun laws in the state, for example, one could
open a bank account and get a gun, complete
with a license, for free.
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The two teenage shooters also belonged to a clique called ‘The Trenchcoat
Mafia’, and finding for themselves a solidarity group to further bring out
their violent urges and desires for death and gore and bloodbaths only served
to embolden them in their ambitious plans. The clique was also an avid follower
of Adolf Hitler.
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Their family never noticed anything amiss with their sons. There
were guns and homemade bombs lying all over their room, but their parents never
found anything suspicious with these. By the time they finally realized the
implications of their sons possessing these weapons, it was too late, as the
shootings had occurred.
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To summarize, the factors which influenced Harris and Klebold are
mainly the MEDIA, the drug
Luvox, their clique ‘The Trenchcoat Mafia’, the relaxed gun laws of